bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • A few postsecondary education links to tide you over.

    Man, I've been using up all my energy in the comments here and at Darwin's and Jennifer's.  No post yet.  So here are some links that are rolling around.

    Here is a paper with an interesting premise:

    Many students in four-year-degree institutions do not graduate within the stipulated time period. In this paper, we address a growing student explanation for this phenomenon: A “conspiracy” by university administrators to deliberately delay graduation by implementing poor academic advising in order to profiteer from student haplessness. It draws upon findings from a larger study exploring undergraduates’ usage and perceptions of as well as satisfaction with academic advising. The study was conducted in 2011 at a rapidly expanding mid-size public university in the Northeast. 

     

    Here's a different educational system:

    Who Needs College?  The Swiss Opt for Vocational School

    As young Americans contemplate the immense cost (and considerable indebtedness) involved in a college education, it may be worthwhile to consider the options available to the Swiss—and whether they are worth importing into the U.S. In Switzerland, even though university education is free, the vast majority of students opt for a vocational training instead.

     

    And here's an article about parents taking out student loans for their kids' education which they can't afford, encouraged by the colleges, bien sûr:

    [Aurora] Almendral had been accepted to New York University in 1998, but even after adding up scholarships, grants, and the max she could take out in federal student loans, the private university—among nation’s costliest—still seemed out of reach.

    One program filled the gap: Aurora’s mother, Gemma Nemenzo, was eligible for a different federal loan meant to help parents finance their children’s college costs. Despite her mother’s modest income at the time—about $25,000 a year as a freelance writer, she estimates—the government quickly approved her for the loan. There was a simple credit check, but no check of income or whether Ms. Nemenzo, a single mom, could afford to repay the loans.

    Ms. Nemenzo took out $17,000 in federal parent loans for the first two years her daughter attended NYU. But the burden soon became too much….Today, a dozen years on, Ms. Nemenzo’s debt not only remains, it’s also nearly doubled, with fees and interest, to $33,000. Though Ms. Almendral is repaying the loans herself, her mother continues to pay the price for loans she couldn’t afford: Falling into delinquency on the loans had damaged her credit, making her ineligible to borrow more when it came time for Ms. Almendral’s sister to go to college.

     

    Maybe I'll catch up this weekend…

     

    —

    |

    3 comments on A few postsecondary education links to tide you over.

  • Darwin writes about college debt.

    Darwin, sparked by a discussion in the comments at Jennifer Fitz’s blog, uses some debt data as a jumping off point.

    Suffice it to say: A lot of people borrow a lot of money to go to college. More and more people are doing so, and they’re borrowing more and more. Should we advise people not to do this?

    On the one hand, it is clearly possible to get yourself into a lot of trouble with college debt….So if you’re contemplating taking out debt to pay for college, you need to think about what the payments are going to add up to. Look at the financial offer letter you get from your college, see how much borrowing they expect you to do in your first year, then multiply that by 5 (to hedge and deal with the possibility they may change your grant to loan ratio in later years) and run that number through a loan calculator.

    For the last 11 years, MrsDarwin and I have been paying ~$250/mo towards paying off her college loans…I certainly would not consider it too high a price to pay for the education we got. Even though MrsDarwin hasn’t worked for the last 10 years, I would not remotely consider that money a bad investment. That said, if your situation is such that you’re looking at very high monthly loan payments to service your student debt, you need to do some serious thinking.

    …Another important thing to consider in this regard is why you’re going to college. If, like me and MrsDarwin, you’re going to college for the purpose of deepening and broadening your education, you need to think about how much getting that education is worth to you.

    If you are going in order to get some kind of professional degree or certification, it becomes a much more straightforward and monetary task: You need to … decide whether this professional education represents a good return on investment. Since you’re not pursing a professional degree or certification simply for the joy of learning or for the experience, it makes sense to be very hard nosed about the analysis involved and determine whether the risks and costs involved are worth it.

    Handily, he compares average debt at my and Mark’s alma mater with his and MrsD’s.

    (Mark and I didn’t have to take on any student loans at all, so our distaste for nondischargeable debt is in part borne of not experiencing it much).

    I can’t argue with what Darwin has to say, except to add that I wonder — if you surveyed people who went to college hoping for a broadened, deepened education — how many of them would agree 15-20 years later that they were still happy to be paying it off at hundreds of dollars a month. I suppose it depends on what they think they got for their money.

    Because the other side of the value question is — do people who go into debt for their education usually get the quality education they were expecting?

     

     

    —

    |

    7 comments on Darwin writes about college debt.

  • Serial numbers.

    This is a moving piece about young people, the descendants of Holocaust survivors, having themselves tattooed with their grandparents’ concentration camp numbers.

    When Eli Sagir showed her grandfather, Yosef Diamant, the new tattoo on her left forearm, he bent his head to kiss it.

    Mr. Diamant had the same tattoo, the number 157622, permanently inked on his own arm by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Nearly 70 years later, Ms. Sagir got hers at a hip tattoo parlor downtown after a high school trip to Poland. The next week, her mother and brother also had the six digits inscribed onto their forearms. This month, her uncle followed suit.

    “All my generation knows nothing about the Holocaust,” said Ms. Sagir, 21, who has had the tattoo for four years. “You talk with people and they think it’s like the Exodus from Egypt, ancient history. I decided to do it to remind my generation: I want to tell them my grandfather’s story and the Holocaust story.”

    This may sound like a strange association, but the first thing I thought on reading this was: it’s like they’re retweeting the tattoos, into the future.

     

    —

    |

    3 comments on Serial numbers.

  • Postsecondary education questions: Merit for the moneyed?

    (This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)

    + + +

     

    I spent a number of previous posts in this series discussing the purpose and scope of postsecondary education, the responsibilities that parents and their young-adult children have toward each other, and alternatives to going the “traditional” route.

    Now I want to turn to exploring the price, value, and cost of an education.

    They aren’t the same, of course.

    • “Price” is a measure of dollars paid to an institution — either a total, or a per-year or per-credit-hour rate.
    • “Value” is a measure of benefits gained.
    • “Cost” includes price as well as expenditures of time and effort, and other benefits that are foregone in order to obtain the education.

    I am particularly interested in the distribution of the cost among all the people who have an interest in a student’s education. So that begins today.

    + + +

    I first thought I would consider the case of families who are wealthy enough that they could easily pay for just about any education that a student could want — so stinkin’ rich that all the kids could languish in private schools for years and still never come close to making a dent in the retirement nest egg or affecting anyone’s lifestyle.

    Of course, these folks are rare, and I doubt any of my readers are among them. So why start there? Simple — it lets me remove one constraint, a very constraining one. Removing constraints by fiat (or at least by “what if?” is a fun way to see a new side of a problem. And even if what results is a Very Special Problem, you still might find a principle in there that can be generalized. It is sort of like assuming a frictionless surface in your physics class.

    The first thing I did is go Googling around to look for opinions about whether rich people ought to pay for their children’s college educations, or whether they ought to make the young person work for some of the money. I was particularly interested in whether the answer varies with household income.

    But I was immediately sidetracked by an extraordinary large volume of discussion about P. Diddy and his son. It seems that back in June — well, let’s let the LA Times tell the tale:

    UCLA scholarship for Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ son raises eyebrows

    When Justin Combs turned 16, his father, hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, gave him a $360,000 silver Maybach.

    When Justin Combs decided to play football in college, UCLA gave him a $54,000 scholarship.

    As UCLA confirmed this week that the recent graduate of New York’s New Rochelle Iona Prep would enroll on a full athletic scholarship, some questioned if the cash-strapped school should pay for the education of the son of a man worth an estimated $475 million — and whether the 18-year-old should have accepted the offer.

    Google is full of titles like “Should rich kids get scholarships??” and “Should kids of the ultra-rich be ineligible for college scholar
    ships?” and just as many answers ranging from “He earned it, he deserves it” to “HELL NO not as long as there is a poor kid who needs the money more.”

    For the purposes of the discussion, it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about academic scholarships handed out to kids with good grades and test scores, or whether we’re talking about athletic scholarships handed out to kids with skill and grace and confidence on court or field. Let’s call both kinds “merit” scholarships to distinguish them from “need-based” scholarships.

    I do not think many people get the purpose that these merit scholarships serve.

    Universities do not offer merit scholarships in order to reward hardworking or smart high school students for being hardworking and smart.

    Neither do universities hand them out because they are good institutions and they wish to recognize deserving good people.

    (If that was the point of merit scholarships — to reward merit — why not give away no-strings-attached cash awards, instead of tuition at their own institutions?)

    Full disclosure: I fell for that line back in 1992 when I was a high school senior weighing multiple scholarship offers. I really didn’t think to question why someone wanted to give me a pile of money! All the adults around me were saying “Congratulations! You earned it!” and I believed them. This was not a belief that turned out to be good for me overall (although the money was sure nice).

    But even if the age of print advertising failed to get it across way back then, the age of Internet media and the like should have rammed it home: when someone wants to provide you a service for free, chances are good that his real product is YOU and his real service is selling YOU to someone else for money.

    We get to use Facebook for free because the owners are rewarding us for all our wonderful attributes, right? Heck no: the owners are selling our eyeballs to advertisers. And smart kids and good football players go to college for free because they’ve worked hard and earned it, right? Heck no: football players put butts in the seats and sell licensed merchandising, and the smart kids look good in the glossy charts describing the statistics of the student body population. Colleges routinely brag about how many National Merit scholars they capture, and test scores/GPA of the entering classes are a big part of the U.S. News college rankings which exert so much power over a school’s admissions policies.

    Few people “earn” scholarships. “Win” is a better word; but “earn” is reserved for things you have a right to, like your wages. Universities have to distribute merit scholarships with some appearance of fairness, but otherwise they don’t have to offer them to anyone. If you are number 20 on the list at Big State U, whether you get a scholarship depends on whether Big State U decides to hand out more than 19 this year — it is out of your hands — so it can’t be something you “earned” because they don’t have to give it to you. You have given them nothing in return. They offer it up front in the hopes that, having been enticed to attend the school, you will improve their bottom line somehow (whether it be by rankings, or by football wins, or by demonstrating compliance with Title IX, or by enhancing their student body diversity, or some other measure the University cares about).

    Universities offer scholarships because it suits them, and because they are competing with other universities for the high school seniors who will make their numbers look good. What will happen if the university takes away a rich high-scoring kid’s scholarship and gives it to a low-income, slightly-lower-scoring kid because he needs the money more, or because a low-income kid with a good score has demonstrated more “merit” than a rich kid with a good score? It will only result in the high-scoring kid going somewhere else and the school’s average admissions score going down ever so slightly. This does not help the university’s ranking, nor the bottom line. That will not change until U.S. News and World Report starts boosting universities’ rankings based on the number of low-income kids who go there and succeed.

    Organizations do exist to give scholarships to aspiring postsecondary students who are at risk because they lack funds to attend school, or to provide incentives and rewards that recognize academic achievement or encourage study in particular fields. Most of these organizations are small ones, offering small amounts. (I help operate a very, very small one: a yearly scholarship offered in memory of my mother in the school district where she taught kindergarten for many years. The money literally comes out of the pockets of Mom’s family and friends. It’s about enough to pay for textbooks and supplies for one semester.)

    Local and state governments also offer scholarships to promote the interests of their communities: to stop a brain drain, or to create positive incentives for at-risk youth, or to encourage study in some industry that is economically important to the area.

    Both of these are fine things. But let’s not pretend that the universities have the same motives.

    + + +

    More on the “But what if you were really really rich?” question next time.

    —

    |

    4 comments on Postsecondary education questions: Merit for the moneyed?

  • More business…

    Gosh, I had to stay up until 1 AM to finish that not-very-new-or-exciting summary post about post secondary education (what I have learned so far). Often I find that I have to clear the pipeline of some annoying clot of material before I can get on to the good stuff. Hopefully I will have some new material soon.

    If you have been following the post secondary education series and would maybe like to discuss related topics in a different forum from mine, let me point you to the blogs of two other commenters.

    Darwin, a known liberal-arts graduate, is writing about the liberal arts education (broadly defined: he says I can count engineering) on his own blog. The most recent is here. An older one in response to Mark’s guest post is here.

    Jennifer Fitz, who has graced me with some links, is asking questions about college on her blog and inviting combox discussion?

    Please visit and comment!

    —

    |

    No comments on More business…

  • Joy!

    A short piece of news for those who are following along:

    After an unhappy few weeks at a local charter school, and a new insight about the purpose of going through all of that, my dear friend's dear teenage daughter is back co-schooling with us again.  :-)

    —

    |

    3 comments on Joy!

  • Postsecondary education questions: A summary of what I have learned so far, before moving on to entirely different aspects.

    So, here's a rough summary of what I think I've figured out for myself (your mileage may vary) while I've been writing this series so far.

    Education is by definition "the development of the right use of reason and the right use of freedom."  TEducation necessarily includes moral and theological understanding, the transmission of culture, and an especially firm grounding in human sexuality.  A detailed list of features of education is here.  

    Education includes features like skills-training and home economics.  I believe this is supported by Catholic doctrine: an individual who will likely marry must be educated so that, by means of that education, he can "establish a family in favorable moral, social, and economic circumstances."  

    When it comes to determining if your education is adequate, "latent competency" counts.  I wrote about latent competency here.  Basically, if you've learned how to learn, and you possess the intrinsic motivation to learn, then education has done its job.  You'll acquire what you need to know when you need it.  

    The parts of a liberal-arts education that are truly necessary for full human development must be included before high school graduation.  When young people are legally emancipated at an arbitrary age, parents have a positive duty to present and develop (at least to latent competency) all the necessary components of a whole education by then; or to cultivate successfully in their children the values that will motivate their children to go on to acquire those competencies at older ages.  Otherwise they may fail in their task of education, when a legally-adult son or daughter abandons it unfinished. 

    Parents do have a positive duty to support their sons' and daughters' education beyond age 18 if they haven't acquired at least "latent" ability to establish a family in favorable circumstances.  I believe it's contrary to Catholic understanding of the purpose of education to declare that parents can morally declare children "on their own" at an age that's derived from the civil government's arbitrary definition of the age of majority.  But this "latent ability" can be quite broadly defined.  A 19-year-old who's secured a scholarship and has a prudent plan for her education and future employment, and is possessed of character traits that are maturing towards healthy adulthood, can be assumed to have it, only because she's on a track that is likely to be successful.

    Parents also have a positive duty to make decisions concerning the good of the whole family, including their own needs (present and anticipated).  This creates a tension between what a single individual might demand of the parents and what parents ought prudently offer.  

    Adult sons and daughters who are so supported by their parents retain the moral duty of filial obedience.  This extends to all matters decided by the parents for the good of the family, and continues until they become "emancipated" and are living outside the parents' home.  Pragmatically speaking, this means that parents rightly place judiciously chosen conditions upon financial support of their offspring's continuing education.  The parents choose these conditions to the end of helping their son or daughter acquire the ability to "establish a family in favorable moral, social, and economic conditions," within the limits set by the good of the whole family.

    Parents may not pressure their sons and daughters in the choice of vocation, profession, or spouse.   But I think this still allows them to prudently offer different kinds of support to different children, tailored to the young person's particular plans, abilities, and circumstances.  This is so even if this creates the appearance of offering more money to support some choices than others.  Some choices need more money; some choices might suck money into a black hole, never to be seen again.   Some young people might achieve maturity with a little more hand-holding and direct support; some young people might need to learn from the experience of trying to support themselves.   Education is not one-size-fits-all.

    Though parents have the duty to begin education and carry it to a certain point, the adult learner bears the responsibility for a great deal of his education.   I divided the tasks up here.  Certain professional specializations; self-education through choice of leisure; retaining an understanding of the whole human person; cultivating appropriate patriotism; all these are assigned not to the parents, but to the adult.  They tend to be what you might classify as "lifelong learning."

    Large amounts of education debt are positively to be avoided.   Debt is anti-vocational.  There are probably a very few circumstances in which it is warranted, but always with caution.

    The old assumptions about the value of college don't hold firm anymore.  While in the aggregate college graduates earn more and suffer less unemployment, it's not clear that a given individual will significantly raise his future earnings (enough to justify the cost) by enrolling in a four-year university.   Different degree programs offer widely varying prospects.  The "signal" of a quality employee that used to be conferred by any college degree is getting diluted by sheer numbers.   Particular individuals might do better economically if they choose an alternative to four-year-college-right-out-of-high-school; for other individuals, choosing a different path might be morally safer or might more securely develop a mature character.  Finally, the quality of the education (measured in the richness and quality of the culture it promotes; the variety and vividness of the intellectual atmosphere; the commitment to authentic human values; the challenge to an engaged student) varies from institution to institution, department to department, so that many students graduate seemingly intellectually unchanged.

     It makes sense to delay spending any money at all on postsecondary education until the young person has a plan that is ordered to establishing a family in favorable moral, social, and economic circumstances. Without a plan, the education cannot be tailored to the vocation, and the money spent has a high probability of returning low value, either in tangibles or in intangibles.  The delay can be spent in productive work, and if that's not much fun, then it is itself a motivation to come up with a plan.  While you're at it, it's a good idea to have an "escape hatch" plan in case the first one becomes unfeasible.  As Darwin said, "Borrowing tens of thousands of dollars is a bad way to avoid making decisions;" in my opinion, from the point of view of parents, "spending tens of thousands of dollars is a bad way to enable someone else to avoid making decisions."

    Just as young people ought to consider alternative means of self-development, parents ought to consider alternative ways of materially supporting young people.  I outlined some thoughts about that here.

    Consider whether you'll actually get the four things you might be buying when you pay for college:  a signal of quality; a required credential; a set of vocational skills; and a difficult-to-measure acquisition of other experience, skills, and knowledge.  Will you be paying too much for a poor signal, or will you be "found out" for flying a false-flag signal (because you're really not the kind of person that employers are looking for in a college graduate?)  Do you have what it takes to obtain the required credential, or will you pay a lot of money and then drop out before getting there?  Will the education really develop the skills you are hoping for, or is it a bunch of empty promises?   How much are you willing to pay for returns that you think you'll value, but that are unmeasurable?

     

    I think that's a good summary.  I'm going to shift gears in my next post and consider… The Case Where Money is No Object.

    —

    |

    2 comments on Postsecondary education questions: A summary of what I have learned so far, before moving on to entirely different aspects.

  • Bipartisan deal-breakers.

    Here is conservative Catholic blogger Erin Manning, who blogs as Red Cardigan at …and sometimes tea, discussing why she refuses to vote for Mr. Romney just because he's the "lesser of two evils" compared to President Obama.  In a comment on an earlier post she wrote:

    [T]he issue to me has always been about character.  I've never voted for a pro-abort, not even the so-called moderate Republican ones, because to me anybody who thinks that human beings can be legally declared disposable due to age and/or condition of dependency doesn't deserve to be dogcatcher, let alone president. The same thing goes for people who think it's okay to manufacture, buy and sell human beings based on age and/or condition of dependency–even if their church thinks it's okay.

     

    And here is Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic Monthly discussing why he refuses to vote for President Obama just because he's the "lesser of two evils" compared to Mr. Romney.

    Sometimes a policy is so reckless or immoral that supporting its backer as "the lesser of two evils" is unacceptable. If enough people start refusing to support any candidate who needlessly terrorizes innocents, perpetrates radical assaults on civil liberties, goes to war without Congress, or persecutes whistleblowers, among other misdeeds, post-9/11 excesses will be reined in.

    Both writers use the term "deal-breaker" to describe their discomfort with the major-party candidate.  For Ms. Manning, the "deal-breaker" is purportedly a revelation that Mr. Romney personally paid for an IVF/surrogacy arrangement; prior to that she'd already stated that she wouldn't support him because of his history as a supporter of legal abortion.  For Mr. Friedersdorf, the "deal-breakers" are "a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids."

    FWIW, I won't criticize either Ms. Manning or Mr. Friedersdorf and say they're "throwing away their votes." Neither will I criticize anyone who wishes to use the vote to express a preference among the two major-party candidates even if he doesn't like either.   I think it's acceptable either to vote for the lesser evil OR to vote for the best candidate even if s/he won't win.  

    I just thought it was interesting to see the same point expressed on both ends of the spectrum on the same day.   Particularly since I have sympathies with both their arguments, although — unlike either Ms. Manning or Mr. Friedersdorf — I'll probably cast a perceived-lesser-evil vote between now and November 6.

    —

    |

    2 comments on Bipartisan deal-breakers.

  • Balance and the buffet.

    Last evening we all got back late from the gym after swimming lessons.  I knew there were lots of leftovers in the fridge, so I didn't make dinner; instead, I pulled out all the soup and deli meat and cheese and breads and fruit and arranged it on the kitchen peninsula to make a sort of buffet.  It was an unusually good set of leftovers because we'd been feeding houseguests over the weekend.

    I've learned that it engenders a panicky rush if we set all the children on the Leftover Buffet at once, so we called them up one at a time (beginning with the pickiest) to choose items for their plate.  Mark and I were tired and not in a mood to argue, so we didn't bother "helping" them, or enforcing any rules about vegetables, and let them put together anything they wanted.

    I always think it's kind of interesting what they come up with.  I think we must be doing okay in the "how to make a balanced meal" department.  This is what they chose (in order):

    The 8-year-old boy:  

    • Peanut butter and jelly sandwich on wheat bread
    • an orange

    Two-year-old boy (okay, he had help):  

    • Part of a homemade blueberry muffin
    • Rolled-up slice of deli ham
    • Sliced oranges

    Six-year-old girl:

    • Three corn tortillas
    •  spread with cold canned refried black beans 
    • and rolled up with lettuce and diced red bell pepper

    Twelve-year-old boy:

    • Homemade bean-and-ham soup
    • Turkey, muenster, and tomato sandwich on a bought whole wheat bagel

    Me, I had curried butternut squash soup with added diced raw cabbage and peppers; some Scottish cheddar cheese; a wedge of cornbread; and a widget-can of English ale.  I think Mark had a dinner similar to Oscar's, plus an ale like mine.  

    In our house we have a rule that the children may have juice boxes with dinner if Mark and I are opening a bottle of wine or if we're each having our own beer (standard practice is to split one, since I am a horrendously light lightweight).  This keeps the juice-box consumption low while retaining a sort of celebratory feeling about it.  Also it leads to the children constantly asking us, "Don't you think some beer would go really well with that dinner, Mama?"  So they had juice box with their leftover buffet as well.

    I guess they are internalizing the things we teach them after all.  We really weren't supervising much, and they could have chosen nothing but blueberry muffins if they'd wanted that.

    (Here's another post about leftovers:  Leftovers with Attitude.  Contains links to a few good ideas for leftover night.)

    —

    |

    3 comments on Balance and the buffet.

  • Postsecondary education: Can the signalling game be fixed?

    (This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)

    + + +

    In my last post about postsecondary education, I enumerated the four things you're buying when you buy education:

    1. Signals of quality
    2. Required credentials
    3. Vocational skills
    4. Valued experiences

    After I finished the post, I got up from the computer and sat down next to Mark, and explained what I had come up with to him.  He thought maybe I should have lumped "required credentials" in with "signal value" — and there is some good reason for that, as you'll see — but otherwise agreed with the list.

    "So, if those are the four things you're buying, then how do you game the system?  How do you win the game?" I asked him.

    "I guess you do it by paying as little as possible for the signal," he said.

    And this seemed pretty reasonable to me at the time.

    + + +

    But I wanted to know more about the signaling model, so I started googling around.  I found out two useful things.  

    First, I learned that the model was devised in the 1970's by American economist Michael Spence, who developed it — in part — around the same scenario that we are discussing here:  that employers use education level as a proxy for valuable abilities.  

    Second, that Spence, along with two others, won the "Nobel economics prize" (technically it is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) for this work, and his acceptance lecture is online and gives an overview of the work.

    I haven't tried to digest the entire thing, but I read enough of it to find something funny about Mark's suggestion.  In the simplest signalling model, Spence explains, there are two kinds of workers:  those with high productivity, and those with low productivity.  There are two salient features that distinguish the  two groups:

    1. Employers are willing to pay more to get high-productivity workers.
    2. Each "unit of education" costs a low-productivity worker more than it does a high-productivity worker.

    This is the whole reason why — in the simplest, pure signalling model — education serves as a "signal" of productivity:  because it costs the undesirable workers more to acquire each unit of education, at each successive level of education the pool of employees is more concentrated in the desirable employees.  Employers will pay higher wages for more-highly-educated employees because at those levels a randomly chosen employee has a higher chance of being one of the desirable ones.

    But the whole reason this works, in the simple signalling theory, is that low-productivity workers pay more for education.  This is almost like defining a low-productivity worker as "one who pays too much for education."

    So when Mark suggested that you could beat the signalling game by "not paying too much for the signal," he was basically suggesting that you could beat the game by being the kind of worker that employers want to hire.

    Which rather gets you back to your starting point, doesn't it?

    Those who have, get more.  Those who have not, lose what they have.  I think I have heard this before.

    + + +

    Anyway, that is about a pure-signal system, where education confers zero added value on a worker — its whole value is to the employer as a sorting mechanism.  In reality, education can confer value on a student — though whether it can turn a low-productivity worker into a high-productivity worker is questionable, and it may be that some students gain no valuable skills at all (or that they have difficulty getting connected with the employers who might value what they have gained).  

    I'm tempted to go off on a tirade about the inefficiencies in the system.  Spence's theory, if you go on reading it, is that the signalling system is made more efficient if you tax education (which in the theory doesn't confer any value, only signals it).   This raises the cost of education, so people buy less of it with the same out-of-pocket costs, and the tax revenues can be distributed to all the people as refunds; but it preserves the signal.  Of course, we don't tax it, we subsidize it, which is the opposite of taxing it, and maybe that makes the system the opposite of efficient.  

    And of course there is the problem of the third party not mentioned in Spence's theory (at least as far as I read), namely, the people who are selling the education; they don't have an incentive either to make the signal more useful or to confer skills on people; you might say that they have an incentive to attract as many low-productivity customers as possible, because those are the ones who spend the most for what they get.  Maybe, if you are selling educational units for their signal value, you only want as many high-productivity people at your educational institution as you need to keep the prestige of your institution high, so you can attract lots of low-productivity people, who are paying your bills.  It costs less to sell them education.

    + + + 

    But the question before us is not whether we should change the current system; it's what kind of education the individual should buy, given the system that we have.

    It seems like it might be useful to know yourself.  Are you low-productivity or high-productivity by nature?  Are you already the kind of person that employers want?   Will you be paying too much for a signal that  says "I'm high-quality goods?"  Will you be found out in the end anyway as the impostor you are?  Or are you the real deal, and will stand out from the crowd?

    It seems like it might be useful to know whether you have what it takes to get the required credential.    What are the chances that you'll sink a lot of money and time into education, only to drop out before acquiring the degree/certificate/license that the gatekeepers require?

    It seems like it might be useful to consider how education might build your measurable skill-set.  And watch out for promises that education will build a set of skills that are "intangible" or "unmeasurable" but that are nevertheless, supposedly, valuable… the emperor may not have any clothes.

    Finally, what about those valued experiences?  It seems like it might be useful to consider how much you are willing to pay for each year of a multi-year vacation.  Because, you know, you could spend your money getting valuable experiences a lot of other ways, too.

    —

    |

    14 comments on Postsecondary education: Can the signalling game be fixed?

  • Middle-aged.

    A couple of days ago BBC News published an article about a recent survey (in the UK, so) that determined that "middle age" begins at age 55:

    Never mind the ridiculous language about "research suggests" and "pinpointing," here is the lede:

    Middle age starts much later than previously thought – at the age of 55, research suggests.

    And Britons do not see themselves as elderly until they are nudging 70, the survey of 1,000 UK adults aged 50-plus for the Love to Learn online learning website says.

    Previous studies have pinpointed the start of middle age as early as 36.

    The research suggests that as the population ages, new cut-off points are being drawn.

    Whatever.  Let's not take this too seriously, but use it as a jumping-off point.

    This isn't the first time I've mocked the inflation of "MIDDLE-AGED."   I have been known, for instance, to go around casually calling myself "middle-aged" in order to upset old people.  Basically, as I do for much of the degeneracy in society, I blame the Boomers, who are using their numbers to abuse the language so they don't have to call themselves "old" yet.  What, do you think you are going to live to be 110?

    I know, unfair.  These are Brits.  Being a "Boomer" probably means something entirely different to them.  What about Americans?  When does middle age begin for us?  I went googling around and found an interview with Patricia Cohen, the American author of In Our Prime:  The Invention of Middle Age, who was asked:  When does middle age begin?

    That’s the first question that everyone asks.

    Forty has long been the traditional turning point in adulthood in the West. The New American dictionary defines middle age as “the period between youth and adulthood, generally 40 to 60,” while the U.S. Census Bureau define middle age as 45 to 64.

    Extensive surveys reveal that the definition frequently depends on a respondent’s age, sex, class and ethnicity. Those with more schooling tend to mark its onset later, as do those who are older; men think it begins earlier than women. Men between 25 and 34 say middle age commences at 40 and ends at 56, for example, while women between 65 and 74 say it starts at 48 and lasts until 62.

    As life expectancy has increased (by more than three decades in the 20th century), people have stretched the ribbon of middle age like a rubber band, extending it into their seventies. In 2009, a survey asked people between 50 and 64 when midlife ended. Most chose age 71.

    Middle age is like a Never Never Land — a place that you never want to enter and never want to leave.

    I think we are a little safer in the United States against all that inflation because of the persistence of the "black balloons on your 40th birthday" meme.  The greeting card industry will also help us here.

    I tease about the "living till 110" thing, but "middle age" obviously doesn't go by life-expectancy number-crunching alone.   The life expectancy for American men is (as of 2006) 75, for women 81, so let's call it 78.  

    • We could suggest that middle age begins halfway through the life expectancy, I suppose — that gets you to age 39 — which might be about right — but it doesn't tell you much about the end.   
    • Or we could suggest that "middle age" is the "middle third" of the lifespan — but that makes it 26 to 52… nope.  You're not middle-aged at 27 unless you are an exceptionally crotchety person.
    • Mark suggested it may describe the middle third of adulthood.  Okay then… subtract off the first 18 years and divide the remaining 60 by three, and you get 38 to 58.  This is definitely more promising, but something about the upper end is unsatisfying to me.

    "[N]early one in five" of the Brits thought middle age didn't begin until after age 60 (!) but about the same number thought middle age was a "state of mind."  This terminology — it's all in your head! — I also find unsatisfying.  Partly because I suspect — can't prove it, but suspect — that this is the doing of the "You're only as old as you feel!" people, whose fault is all this "when I'm an old lady I shall wear purple and wear a red hat" business.  

    One reason I think this is silly, is, well,

    Redhat

    (photo from here)

    But another reason I think this is silly is the obvious implication that it's important to think like a young person your whole life, and do your damnedest to feel like a young person (in your heart, dear) as long as you possibly can, and, well… You know what?  There's only so much plastic surgery you can get, and how much pretense you can put on.

    The fact is, you're going to die sooner or later, you might as well accept it.   Being old is, in part, getting ready for death, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that.  You don't have to go gently into that good night, but you do have to go, and it's possible to do it gracefully instead of, um, the opposite of gracefully.  

    + + +

    A better definition of middle age, I think, comes from rites of passage and stages of life.  The only thing inherent in its name is its "middle-ness" — it is between something — by implication "youth" and "old age," but I think it's something else.

    As a mother I'm inclined to think that middle age begins somewhere associated with the child-raising years — some would say, "When the kids are out of the house!" but I'm reluctant to say so, because with people having kids later that can be quite late indeed.    Unless you want to put your foot down and say that middle age begins at menopause (and that's not an unreasonable place to put it, for women) you could be having babies in middle age, and have them not out of the house until you are old.  

    That's not really fair to the people who don't have children, though — to mark middle age entirely by child-raising.  I would like to give it a more generally applicable spin.

    Right now, at 38, in what I think is my early middle age (unless you buy the menopause thing, in which case I'm not there yet) I think the start of it has something to do with confidence.  They are the years when you realize that this is the life you are leading, and (hopefully) by now you are comfortable in it and have developed some skill in it.  

    When people fight against believing they are in middle age, I think they are fighting against the idea that the "anything is possible" time is over.   I think it's kind of nice to get past the "anything is possible" time, myself, because the vast array of possibilities are so paralyzing.  I am happy that I have roots now.  I feel that I am hitting my stride as the matriarch of a family.  

    I want to believe that this is the start of middle age, in part because — if it is — I am off to a seriously great start.  

    —

    |

    11 comments on Middle-aged.

  • Self-nightweaning.

    This month it seems that the 32-month-old is night-weaning himself, on his own initiative.

    This is the first time that we’ve been through this. Each of my three older children was still co-sleeping and night-nursing right up until I became pregnant with the next younger sibling. Pregnancy made me want to crave the soundest sleep I could manage, so I asked Mark to get up with the toddler (each was age two at the time) and offer milkshakes or snacks or WHATEVER IT TAKES AS LONG AS YOU DON’T WAKE ME UP, and within a few weeks they weren’t nursing (or waking) at night anymore.

    My current two-year-old has no in-utero competition, and I am really quite happy to continue nursing him at night for the time being. But a few months ago, he unexpectedly begin asking me to nurse him to sleep “in the little bed” — the twin bed that’s pushed up next to the queen-size bed in our bedroom, to give us a little more room for children who sneak back in the middle of the night. I would nurse him to sleep there, and then I would move back to my spot on the other side of Mark in the queen-size bed.

    In the wee hours of the morning he would sit up, call “Mommy!” and I would say, “Over here,” and he would clamber over his sleeping daddy and nestle in between us, and I would nurse him down again, both of us falling back to sleep together. Very sweet.

    A couple of weeks ago, though, he didn’t wake until it was nearly time for the alarm to go off. This happened again a few times — then, days ago, he slept right through in the “little bed” until Mark had gone off to work and I was downstairs drinking coffee.

    So it does, eventually, happen on its own.

    + + +

    One of the things that pleases me about this is that it doesn’t look very different from the nightweaning that I purposely put my older children through. Whenever I decide, deliberately, to mess with a comfortable life process, I like to try to mimic — if I can — the state of nature, so to speak.

    So, I prefer a longer, later, and closer-to-child-led process of full weaning, for example; I had quite a lot of input into the day-to-day process of course, but my first child stopped nursing (all the time, not just at night) more or less on his own schedule, around age 4. When I weaned #2 deliberately starting at age not-quite-3, I looked around for various pieces of advice on how to do it peacefully, but in the end I decided to mimic my first child’s more hands-off weaning.

    I had observed that, that first time, the time between nursings got longer and longer. Eventually he would forget to nurse for a whole day here and there, and then two days, and after a while we would go more than a week between nursings. Finally the day had come when we nursed for the last time, although I didn’t realize it had been the last until many weeks later when the next request never arrived.

    So when I set out to wean #2, I decided to copy that process — deliberately distracting him from nursing for just an hour or so at first until the gaps between nursing stretched to a few hours, then half a day, then a day. I would tell him when he finished, “Now the next time we’ll nurse will be three o’clock,” or, later, “The next day you’ll get milk is on Thursday.” And I stuck to it. I don’t remember it being all that difficult. I was free to stay at one frequency for long enough to let him get used to it before pushing for a longer gap. Also, once the process got going and he was nursing less, it alleviated a lot of the pressures I had been under that had made me decide to wean him in the first place, so after a while the was no need to hurry him.

    All in all, I recommend it to anyone who has decided to wean (as long as it doesn’t have to be over quickly, because it isn’t a quick way to wean — just a fairly peaceful one). It seemed like a good compromise between what I needed and what he needed. If you are going to try some different ways to wean, I suppose my method is as worthy of a trial as any other.

    + + +

    My three previous children, however, got night-weaned without the benefit of any maternal experience with hands-off nightweaning. But I am pleased to report that my youngest is cutting back his night nursing not too differently from how his older siblings were made to do it.

    First of all, he is around the same age that they were at nightweaning. My first was probably about 30 months old, my second was 28 months, and my third was 34 months. Number 4 is now 32 months.

    Second, I always started by putting them to bed on the other side of Mark, then moving back to my spot. (I think one of the times it was me who moved into the “little bed” to sleep by myself, but it is still basically the same arrangement). And here is my youngest voluntarily asking to sleep in his own little bed.

    Third, he is wanting to be nursed to sleep in the little bed — which I did two of the other three times. (One of them tended not to fall asleep until after latching off, so I would nurse him and then we’d be done and turn out the light.)

    Fourth, I usually did nurse the others once in the morning before we’d get up and start our day.

    + + +

    So this hands-off nightweaning looks a lot like my deliberate night weanings. If I wanted to cement it — and I might yet — I guess I could add the part where, when he wakes up and asks to nurse, Mark takes him downstairs and offers him ice cream instead. That is the main missing piece so far…

    —

    |

    10 comments on Self-nightweaning.

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

…more to come later