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Posts Tagged ‘Education’

Why Are You Spending More Time With Your Kids?

An exceptionally neat new working paper
points out that parents’ time spent with kids has increased hugely since the early 1990’s, particularly among highly educated parents. This is a remarkable fact, and surprising; these are the same parents whose value of time (their wage rate) has increased relative to that of all parents, as, unsurprisingly, have their hours working for pay (since we know that labor supply responds to wage rates). They thus have less non-work time available and are spending even more of it with their kids. Why the surprising result?


The College Bubble

For years, colleges have treated their students as consumers, building ever more elaborate facilities and hiring ever more dazzling star scholars to lure applicants. They did this regardless of how high these investments drove tuition, since easy credit meant families could stretch to cover the costs. But with the credit crisis comes signs that the college bubble is bursting, as “consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college,” the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests.


The Self-Serving Policy Proposal Prize

We need a prize for the most self-serving proposal. A lawyer with large student loans has assembled a large group of friends on Facebook with the proposal “Cancel Student Debt to Stimulate the Economy.” Ignoring the fact that this might reduce rather than increase the fiscal stimulus, it would reduce the burden on people who, if they attended public universities, . . .


Your Brain on Facebook

If surfing the web increases workplace productivity, what does spending time on Facebook do to college students? According to a study by Aryn Karpinski and Adam Duberstein, college students who use Facebook have lower GPA’s and devote less time to studying than other students. While the study didn’t prove causality — do low-GPA, anti-study students self-select into Facebook? — could . . .


Experiments in Business

Here’s an article in today’s Financial Times about a class on business experimentation that John List and I taught at the Booth School of Business. It does a nice job of laying out our philosophy regarding data and experiments. Thankfully, the reporter did not mention that most of the students hated the class.


Practicing Your Way to a Higher I.Q.

We’ve written earlier about Anders Ericsson‘s research on talent, and we’ve blogged on the subject repeatedly. Ericsson’s thesis is that raw talent is overrated, and that experts in a given field (be it hockey or music) accomplish excellence primarily through “deliberate practice.” Nicholas Kristof wrote yesterday about a new book about I.Q., also reviewed here, by Richard Nisbett. He argues . . .


The Economic Value of Popularity

It probably seems obvious to most people that being likeable and having good friends could be valuable in life. Since most economists are neither likeable nor have good friends, it is an idea that hasn’t been studied by economists until now. My friend Gabriella Conti and a host of co-authors try to quantitatively measure the association between high-school popularity and . . .


"This Is No Picnic for Me Either, Buster": Obama and Outliers

My favorite Obama quotation is not one of his most poetic: My mother [would] … wake me up at 4:30 in the morning, and we’d sit there and go through my lessons. And I used to complain and grumble. And she’d say, “Well this is no picnic for me either, buster.” He had me at “buster.” I love these words . . .


Our Daily Bleg: A Way to Show Employers What You Can Do Before You Get the Job

Here’s an interesting concept from blog reader Todd Palmer, who wants reader opinions as to whether his concept can work in the marketplace; and he also needs a good domain name. Todd’s idea: The site would function as a recruiting network, giving students and corporations an entirely new dimension of access to one another. Corporations would post tasks, real or . . .


The FREAK-est Links

Are business schools good for their graduates? (HT: Theodore Pappas) Calling all data crunchers: a grant opportunity. (HT: Brian Kelsey) Police stop two German children attempting to elope to Africa. (Earlier) Are fire sprinklers really necessary? (Earlier)


Our Daily Bleg: Did Your Kids' School Broadcast Obama's Speech?

My kids’ schools never stopped class to listen to President Bush‘s inauguration speech; but my sense in Connecticut is that many public and private schools stopped normally scheduled classes to listen to Obama‘s inauguration speech. News articles suggested that many schools considered his inauguration address a teachable moment. The empiricist in me wonders whether this phenomenon is more pronounced in . . .


Nobody Better Than Arne Duncan

Arne Duncan is expected to be announced as the next secretary of education later today. Freakonomics readers will remember Arne as the hero of our chapter on teacher cheating. He was head of the Chicago Public Schools when Brian Jacob and I were investigating how teachers and administrators were doctoring standardized test sheets. With seemingly nothing to gain and much . . .


A Policy Screwup?

Some Italian professors told me about one of the most bizarre incentive systems in the world. The amount of fees that an Italian university can charge to students is linked to the amount of support the university receives from the national government. Sounds sensible, right? After all, public universities in the U.S. typically try to make up lost state revenue . . .


Do Good Grades Predict Success?

Photo: freeparking Paul Kimelman lives in Alamo, Calif., and is C.T.O. of the Texas-based microcontroller company Luminary Micro. He is the sort of blog reader we are very fortunate to have. He writes to us now and again with such interesting queries that they’re worth putting up on the blog in their entirety. Here’s his latest: I was speaking with . . .


Are We a Nation of Financial Illiterates?

Let’s begin with two questions: 1. Do you consider yourself financially literate? 2. If so, how did you get that way? And now, a third question: 3. How important is widespread financial literacy to the health of a modern society? Before you answer the first question, take this little quiz, borrowed from the website of Annamaria Lusardi, a professor of . . .


Which Majors Make the Most?

When we choose a major in college we are to some extent choosing a series of future wage rates. The amount of human capital in which we invest is to some extent linked to our college major — different college majors generate different wages. Many of my students, and often unfortunately too their parents, believe that unless they major in . . .


FREAK Shots: Outs de Temp

Minnesota Representatives Michele Bachmann and John Kline are pushing to make English the official language of the United States (and reduce multilingualism). But would this put the U.S. behind other countries in global awareness and education? One of our readers, Andy Little, noticed his own language ignorance by his initial interpretation of this sign: When I saw this sign in . . .


Why Is College Tuition Subsidized, While K-12 Is Not?

If you are a parent who’s trying to save for your kids’ college education, you should check out Jane Kim‘s article in the Wall Street Journal about 529 college-savings plans. If you don’t know what a 529 plan is, you should; and if you do, Kim’s article is helpful in assessing whether you’re optimizing your participation. In a nutshell: a . . .


Escaping the Average

Imperial College, the science-oriented school in London, recently pulled out from the umbrella organization, the University of London. Imperial graduates will no longer have University of London diplomas, but will now have diplomas issued by Imperial. The reason for the pull-out is that the college administration apparently felt that the Imperial cachet was more valuable than the broader London label. . . .


Exotic Dancer, M.B.A.

That is the name of a new program being offered by Starlight Ministries, the stripper outreach program in Virginia I recently blogged about. Here’s how Lia Scholl of Starlight describes the program: Our newest venture is called Exotic Dancer, M.B.A. It’s a one-day seminar for women who are exotic dancers (and there will be some private dancers/women in prostitution there, . . .


Ask a College Student: A Freakonomics Quorum

This is the time of year when high-school seniors receive letters, thick or thin, from college admissions departments. (I have two nieces who both just got some thick letters from great schools: way to go, H. and L.!) Those seniors will soon start a new life. What’s in store for them? Freakonomics contributor Nicole Tourtelot put a few questions — . . .


How Can the Achievement Gap Be Closed? A Freakonomics Quorum

The black-white gap in U.S. education is an issue that continues to occupy the efforts of a great many scholars. Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt have poked at the issue repeatedly; a recent study by Spyros Konstantopoulos looked at class size as a possible culprit, to little avail. We gathered a group of people with wisdom and experience in this . . .


The FREAK-est Links

Online education increases in popularity. (Earlier) Is jealousy linked to height? Microsoft turns down Blu-ray for Xbox 360. (Earlier) Want to stop junk mail? Sign this petition. (Earlier)


What’s Behind the Gender Gap in Education?

Girls have a built-in neurological advantage over boys when it comes to language skills, according to new research from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa. The researchers found that while girls can easily process language in the abstract, boys depend more on their senses. The upshot is that boys may need to be taught both visually and verbally, while . . .


The FREAK-est Links

Can learning about the arts make you smarter? Are animals next in the sports doping craze? (Second item) (Earlier) Is economics “played out”? The rise of “freeconomics.”


The FREAK-est Links

Treasury Secretary in favor of axing the penny. (Earlier) Free books online: the debate continues. (Earlier) Are lawsuits the next phase in the fight against global warming? (Earlier) Reducing class sizes isn’t enough to fight achievement gap.


The FREAK-est Links

Who will win in Texas? The MySpace poll. (Earlier) Do fewer ad-clicks really matter for Google? (Earlier) Can everyone learn from online classes? (Earlier) Company charges for “privilege” of stopping junk mail-outs to customers. (Earlier)


R U Studying?

Roland Fryer and Joel Klein are back at it again, trying innovative approaches to help students in the New York City schools learn. Fryer, who is a tenured professor at Harvard, a frequent co-author of mine, and Chief Equality Officer in the New York City school system, was the driving force behind a pilot program now ongoing in New York . . .


The FREAK-est Links

Is nuclear energy seeing a resurgence worldwide? (HT: Daniel Lippman) How much does it cost to raise kids in the U.S.? (Earlier) What factors lower the dropout rate the most? (Earlier) Investing firm tries their luck with celebrity memorabilia (HT: Amit Ghosh)