Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW

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"By 2020, America will once again have the largest proportion of college graduates in the world."

by Paul Wells on Wednesday, February 25, 2009 8:57pm - 57 Comments

By some measures, Barack Obama last night was promising to beat Canada in producing highly-educated citizens. So one interesting question is whether he can count on Canadian governments’ help.

Tags: Barack Obama, rowing with one oar

More by Paul Wells

hosertohoosier

The US already beats Canada – and most of the world.

Paul Wells

Yeah, see, if you click on the link, there’s numbers, and suddenly the phrase “by some measures” is revealed not to be meaningless. Almost like it was Put There For a Reason.

http://perdogperday.blogspot.com Jesse

But clicking is hard.

seaandthemountains

as is being informed….

Wayne

as well as actually thinking about things.

http://mikeanddean.blogspot.com Dean P

I love the reflexive “The US is better” response. I live here in the US and so many people just assume that the US is number 1 in everything, when the data never really support that . . .

hosertohoosier

I also live in the US and have found the opposite. Granted, it is a college/hippie town. I was disappointed when only one of my students preferred a parliamentary system to a presidential system when I polled them (and I was totally shilling for the parliamentary system).

hosertohoosier

Let me elaborate: Canada is inflated by CEGEP and Ontario’s college system, however when you look at more objective measures, Americans are very well-educated, Canadians slightly less so.

Average years of schooling:

#1 United States: 12
#2 Norway: 11.8
#3 New Zealand: 11.7
#4 Canada: 11.6
#5 Sweden: 11.4
#6 Australia: 10.9
#7 Switzerland: 10.5
#8 Germany: 10.2
#9 Finland: 10
#10 Poland: 9.8

This is in terms of “tertiary education”, from the OECD.
#1 Canada: 42%
#2 United States: 37%
#3 Ireland: 36%
#4 Japan: 34%
#5 Finland: 32%
#6 Sweden: 32%
#7 Australia: 29%
#8 New Zealand: 29%
#9 Norway: 28%
#10 Belgium: 27%
#11 Denmark: 27%
#12 United Kingdom: 26%
#13 Switzerland: 25%
#14 Germany: 23%
#15 France: 23%
#16 Netherlands: 22%
#17 Austria: 14%
#18 Italy: 10%

The US already spends a ridiculous amount of money per post-secondary student, and gets generally poor results.

United States / États-Unis 22476
Switzerland / Suisse 4 21966
Sweden / Suède 16218
Denmark / Danemark 15225
Norway / Norvège 1 14997
Australia / Australie 14036
Austria / Autriche 13959
Netherlands / Pays-Bas 13846
Finland / Finlande 12505
Germany / Allemagne 12255
Japan / Japon 12193
Slovenia / Slovénie 8 12109
Belgium / Belgique 11842
United Kingdom / Royaume-Uni 11484
Israel / Israel 11289
OECD average / Moyenne OCDE 11100
France / France 10668
Ireland / Irlande 10211
Spain / Espagne 9378
Brazil / Brésil 6 9019
Iceland / Islande 8881
New Zealand / Nouvelle-Zélande 1 8866
Portugal / Portugal 2 7741
Italy / Italie 3 7723
Hungary / Hongrie 2 7095
Korea / Corée 7068
Chile / Chili 7 6873
Czech Republic / République tchèque 6752
Slovak Republic / République slovaque 5 6535
Mexico / Mexique 5778
Greece / Grèce 1 5593
Estonia / Estonie 3 4552
Poland / Pologne 4 4412
Russian Federation / Fédération de Russie 3 2562

This is while outspending much of the rest of the OECD on education overall (this is education as a % of GDP – note also that the US has a larger GDP than Israel, and the vast majority of other countries in that survey… probably Iceland too right now)

Israel / Israel 8.3
Iceland / Islande 8
United States / États-Unis 7.4
Denmark / Danemark 7.2
Korea / Corée 7.2
Chile / Chili 4 7.1
New Zealand / Nouvelle-Zélande 6.9
Sweden / Suède 6.7
Mexico / Mexique 6.4
OECD total / Total OCDE 6.2
Slovenia / Slovénie 5 6.2
Belgium / Belgique 6.1
Finland / Finlande 6.1
France / France 6.1
Poland / Pologne 6
Australia / Australie 5.9
United Kingdom / Royaume-Uni 5.9
OECD average / Moyenne OCDE 5.7
Hungary / Hongrie 5.6
Austria / Autriche 5.4
Portugal / Portugal 5.4
Germany / Allemagne 5.2
Netherlands / Pays-Bas 5.1
Czech Republic / République tchèque 4.9
Italy / Italie 4.9
Japan / Japon 4.8
Slovak Republic / République slovaque 4.8
Spain / Espagne 4.7
Ireland / Irlande 4.6
Turkey / Turquie 3 4.1
Greece / Grèce 3.4

Where America really excels, however, is at the top end of the education spectrum – Phd’s – the guys who are inventing the next sliced bread. Of course it would be more useful if you could sort out the worthless social scientists and humanities folks (I’m a polisci grad student – and no, I don’t expect my work to ever help anybody). That is reflected in scientific journal output.

#1 United States: 211,233
#2 Japan: 60,067
#3 United Kingdom: 48,288
#4 Germany: 44,305
#5 France: 31,971
#6 China: 29,186
#7 Canada: 24,803
#8 Italy: 24,696
#9 Spain: 16,826
#10 Australia: 15,809

The bottom line: the notion that there is some crisis in Canada’s support for education – which has been middling – is not supported by the evidence. Canadians continue to do among the best in cross-country tests.

This rush to mass-produce university students will backfire – as it already is for millions of Canadians and Americans who now find their hard-fought degrees largely worthless as a result of credential inflation – forcing them to accept jobs they could have gotten anyway, or to get even more education. At the same time universities are decreasingly becoming places of research (the primary public good they provide) and increasingly serve as dormitories. In Canada our ridiculous system of subsidization pays for a large chunk of the cost of a degree – regardless of the income of a student or his family. So if you are an Irving and you go to Dalhousie, the government pays $X of the cost of your degree. Because more middle and upper middle class people go to university, it isn’t even clear to me that this policy (justified in terms of access) is beneficial to the working class folks it is supposed to offer options. A system of 100% student loans on request would ultimately be cheaper, would get around the problem of students being denied loans based on their parents income (in cases where their parents refused to pay), and would prevent students from taking worthless degrees in basket-weaving unless they believed the added income for the degree was worth the cost of 4 years and the loan. This would weed out students that are not really serious about education.

Insofar as the United States is “falling behind”, insufficient education spending seems like the smallest problem. Better education might be a preferable approach. That means more streaming, it means a tougher and more flexible (why not have schools catering to the learning styles of students) curriculum, and it may mean larger class sizes with better teachers (most evidence finds class sizes only strongly predictive of better performance when you get below 15 students), more male teachers (or something to address the real crisis in declining test scores of men), and decisive action against grade inflation (grade inflation means that students leave high school not knowing what they suck at – postponing the eventual heartbreak I have seen when say, undergrads realize they will never be a doctor, lawyer, etc.).

Throwing more money at the problem (no child left behind doubled federal education spending) is not the answer. Mr. Wells, I like your writings, but I differ with your general slant on education.

John D

How can college attainment be “inflated” by the presence of colleges? Isn’t that sort of the point?

archangel

Oh, all right, here goes: our current government will do everything in its power to help Obama by starving our education system to the greatest extent possible — because the best thing governments can do is get out of the way.

We then can import even more Harvard MBAs to enter Canada and completely screw up our markets.

Besides, we’ve been churning out too many darn journalists.

archangel

And WAY too many polisci grads.

hosertohoosier

I know you are being facetious, but I think you are somewhat correct.

First-off, there are degrees that are over-produced. A lot of people want a university degree as a status symbol more than anything. That is fine, but probably not something governments should subsidize.

I think there is a second and more pernicious aspect though, and that has to do with whether the right people are going to university. If, for instance, 100% of people went to university, what would make it different from high school? At least some of the advantage of a university is that it is selective, and therefore able to proceed at a particular pace, and moreover, to effectively demarcate between different workers in an economy (if everybody had a BA, how could employers pick between people – this is a great recipe for cronyism).

http://macleans.ca kc

I know i’m out of date, but 30ys ago when i arrived here from the UK i was astonished how many Canadians went on to university. Great, so i thought. Turns out so many first and secnd yr dropped-out that i came to realize the Uk system, which was much less egalitarian maybe wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
madeyoulook

If, for instance, 100% of people went to university, what would make it different from high school?

The fact that nowhere near 100% of people go to high school?

It’s fascinating that we want to churn out more and more subsidized B.x.’s when a quarter to a third (or so) of our young adults can’t read their own high school graduation certificate, either because they will never have one or because they can’t read.

Deborah

What’s with all the poli sci and social science hate?
Most of them end up in politics, governement and/or law so they do good in the end.

hosertohoosier

Deborah, you are a comedic genius.

Deborah

I try, I try.

Angela K

I say less college or university grads is good. More money for the ones who go to university, put in the hard work, pay their tuition and earn a good job. If you don’t want to be educated, in any field, don’t complain.

hosertohoosier

Exactly – anybody on this forum who is a university grad has a material interest in suppressing the number of university grads so we can make more money by having rarer skills. This will also give us a greater ability to be snooty to young people.

Angela K

But not to the educated young people. Those young doctors, engineers, lawyers, MBA grads, they’ve done their share of hard work and are entitled to good paying jobs. But only a select few should get there so the other ones just have to settle with being lower middle class.

Paul Wells

Well, I’m glad I answered h2h with a snarky comment, because it spurred him to contribute to this discussion way above and beyond the call. Thanks for all this input, h2h.

And it’s true: when I write anxious articles about the state of Canadian higher ed, I should say more often that I’m advocating for a system that is already near the top of the global league tables. I just think it could be higher, and I know it wasn’t quite as high before governments began making some smart choices a decade ago. I also know, from long conversations with Canadian researchers, that comparisons to the United States are not a cheap reflex: they reflect the simple fact that by many measures, in academia the United States produces a disproportionate number of the best-of-the-best.
http://www.jackmitchell.ca J@ck M!tchell

I haven’t thought long & hard about research funding like Paul Wells and hosertohoosier have, but herewith my 2 cents on a $10 issue. I’m looking to be corrected so please shoot me down where I’m wrong on facts if not opinions.

It’s all well and good to say that university funding furthers research, but doesn’t university-produced research go into the public domain? At least, it’s usually published in peer-reviewed journals; and even if patent law were irontight, the patent will be sold to the highest bidder. What with global capitalism, that might very well be an offshore company.

RIM is our golden paradigm, but isn’t half the reason RIM has been such a Canadian success the fact that the founder was a great patriot? If he’d been either less of a patriot or less of an entrepreneur, he might very well have taken his secret formula away to Wisconsin, or Singapore, or wherever.

It seems to me that if we invest Canadian money in Canadian research, we also need some mechanism to keep the fruits of that success in Canada.

Take Silicon Valley. We like to say that it grew up around Stanford, recipient of zillions in US Government investment in the 70′s and 80′s. But Silicon Valley is also in the United States, where the private sector investment that drove the computer revolution after the USG had kick-started was naturally keen to see it flourish. Moreover, the climate is excellent. By contrast, we have a severe climate and we just don’t have the same number of capitalists looking to invest.

It seems to me that patent-protected, non-university research is the way to go, along with some clause or other that would make the research available primarily to Canadian companies. I say “non-university” because the one thing that would make up for our lack of cold hard cash, in recruiting top researchers, might be not forcing them to teach undergraduates — a severe drain on their time. So why not set up independent research institutes like the NRC — but a lot of them, specialising in their fields, across the country — funded to the hilt? That’s when you’d see Kelowna become the new biotech centre or Sherbrooke as the latest . . . well, the latest science stuff place, whatever it is that scientists do. Waterloo has its new Perimeter Institute, but that was established specifically to foster theoretical science with very long-term payoffs. No insult to theoretical physics, the most hardcore of sciences, but as a matter of national policy we need applied research institutes first and foremost.

Here endeth my 2 cents.

edeast

Here’s a post on private research institutes receiving public funding. The author argues that 3 things for effective research. And the comments are all really good. One even who worked at bell labs vs teaching.
http://hunch.net/?cat=23 The other articles by the author with the tag research are below it.

http://www.jackmitchell.ca J@ck M!tchell

That’s a very interesting thread, thanks.

Stewart Smith

Canada’s system in the hard sciences is to provide a minimal level of funding broadly through NSERC in a program entitled “Discovery Grants”, These are basically operating funds for grad. student training, curiosity-based research. The vast majority of this research goes to the public domain and the two most important criteria for getting the funding are: quality of the ideas, value as a training project.

If a researcher has an idea that could actually provide value to society, much larger pots of money are available. At NSERC these are in the “Partnership Program”. The reason for the name is that a requirement for all of these funds is to identify a pathway (usually an existing company that would be the receptor of the technology) for the work to provide value to Canada. The academic, the university and the company must pre-agree on how the IP management will work, what publication rights there are etc. Generally, if the work is long-term, typically the company will be expected to participate in the project, provide in-kind support but will have limited IP rights. If the work has short-term implications, the company can get the IP rights but they are expected to provide significant cash to the project. There is also the potential to get provincial contributions to the project cost if there is a case for value to the province.

Contrary to public perception, a tremendous amount of applied research flows through Canadian universities and they are very good at providing value. (A recent study showed that $1 spent in Canada was equivalent to $4 spent in the US (this was in the general field of nanotechnology). Canadian universities have also become much more sophisticated in IP management. Finally leading universities have figured out that finding mechanisms that allow students to participate in applied research provides superb training for those students to go on and work in innovative companies. McMaster and Waterloo are way ahead of the curve in this area but other universities are also developing programs for “technology entrepeneurs”.
Wotcher?

An interesting model, but who would teach the undergrads? The university concept is based on students being able to learn from the best in their fields. While this isn’t, in fact, possible for all students (there are only so many “best’ to go around), what happens when we remove the top researchers and scholars from this process? Will the students be taught only by the mediocre?

http://www.jackmitchell.ca J@ck M!tchell

I think we should allow specialists to choose between research paths and teaching paths. At the moment the incentives are all towards research, but they require a good deal of undergraduate teaching. There is not a lot of connection between the two, apart from both requiring rock-solid knowledge of the basic field. This seems to me to be a bad combination, for it forces people who are not necessarily gifted teachers into teaching and rewards natural teachers not on the basis of their teaching but on the basis of their secondary interest, research. In other words, gifted researchers may be mediocre teachers — which harms the student — and gifted teachers may be mediocre researchers. Besides, as long as we have one combined teaching-research path, the vast majority of the actual teaching will be done by TA’s and postdoc’s, who while not “mediocre” are not fully developed in their knowledge and experience.

Wotcher?

I suspect that the majority of specialists, given the choice, would choose their own research over teaching undergrads.

I can only speak from person experience, but I would say that, overall, I learned more from gifted scholars who may not have been gifted teachers than from the reverse – content trumping style.

With regard to your point about who does the majority of the teaching, again from personal experience both as student and teacher, I have found most of the core teaching (even at undergraduate level) is done by professors rather than TAs or sessionals.

edeast

And here is a debate on the philosophy of government funded science. Cato guy vs ex grad student. I’ll admit I haven’t read it it all, very long winded, but for reference I post.
h”ttp://scienceblogs.com/authority/2009/02/government_funding_for_scienti.php

And another topic, is the open nature of publicly funded science, this is something that I think about quite a bit, apparently there is a bill before the U.S. congress, h”ttp://tinyurl.com/PLoSessay by way of h”ttp://tinyurl.com/tscott by way of h”ttp://tinyurl.com/openacessnews by way of “h”ttp://tinyurl.com/johnhawks that seeks to get rid of the NIH’s provisions that the research it funds gets distributed publicly a year after publication. Checking the NSERC ip policy h”ttp://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/_doc/NSERC-CRSNG/ip-pi_eng.pdf we do not have the same pressures in Canada so you don’t need to click through all those posts( “scientifically significant advances will be pubished in the open literature without delay”) My concern is mostly security related, and dealing with genetics.

It just amazes me how much information gets put out freely available, h”ttp://tinyurl.com/clone-home
I’m not sure how how nuclear research gets protected from proliferation, but it seems like genetics should be somehow similar. This type of thinking leads me into a maze of terrorism-> pathogens-> human cloning -> human rights -> downfall of sociality-> GitRdun and then my thoughts peter out. Oh ya.

Enough of basic research. Here is the future of applied research, http://gw.innocentive.com/ar/discipline?categoryName=Chemistry‏
Andrew (not Potter or Coyne)

I’m not sure the problem for Canada is in the post-secondary system so much as the secondary system. It is badly broken. General education is very important for society in making knowledgeable citizens (history, geopolitics, economics, personal finance, philosophy/logic/critical thinking), and these subjects are often ignored in university as well. If high school were less of a glorified babysitting service, useful citizens would be coming out of high school, only some of which would need to specialize by going on to post-seconday.

My pet peeve is lack of personal finance education just about anywhere. It’s appalling when you consider how poorly managed most people’s finances are.
oompus boompus

The question is whether keeping a large proportion of your citizens locked out of the job market for years and years studying esoteric and impractical subjects and stuck in a long-term, impoverished form of adolescence really benefits anyone in the long term – other than the politicians and bureaucrats who run the system and who skim huge salaries and benefits off the top.

The USSR and allied Eastern Bloc countries had superb, free high school and university systems which produced millions of extremely smart and highly knowledgeable graduates in a wide range of fields from literature to particle physics. That’s right, in both soft and hard sciences.

But all of this “priority on education” didn’t do these countries a damn bit of good. Every single one of them went broke and their governments collapsed. Then they re-organized, borrowed billions of dollars from western countries and tried to keep their superb public education systems running as before. And guess what – they’re broke again … only this time they’re also going to bankrupt the western banks who lent them money and the western governments which back up the banks. So much for the knowledge economy.

Despite these repetitive disasters happening in plain sight, plus many other related economic and political disasters occuring throughout the 20th century and right up to today – all of which are due to the idea that central government planning “works” – you will almost never find a single word of comment in any mainstream media which advocates anything other than greater and greater central government planning, control and funding.

Now it’s time for a pop quiz. Read the following facts and fill in the blanks. (Yes, this counts toward your final grade.)

When the government runs the agricultural system you get famines which kill millions of _____, such as in the USSR in the 19__s and 19__s, and in PRC from 195_ to 196_.

When the government runs the factories you get scarce, shoddy goods such as L___s and Y___s.

When the governments attempt to establish global or regional trade hegemony you get protectionism, trade wars, embargoes and then shooting wars such as Word War _____ and World War _____ .

When the government provides poverty relief you get vast, permanent slums such as in _______, Michigan and ________, DC.

When the government controls what people put in their bodies you get drug wars, gangsters, corrupt governments and police, and millions of people incarcerated for doing nothing worse than selling people dried ____ containing mild stupefacients.

When the government controls the currency you get monetary bubbles in which trillions of dollars are thown away on bad investments such as dot ___s and McM____s, and then busts which wipe out everyone’s j__s and s_____s.

When the government runs health care you get billions of dollars in bureaucratic waste, budgets which spiral ever [CHOOSE ONE: upward | downward], overcrowded emergency ____s , d____ shortages and w____ lists for vital _____s .

When the government runs pension plans you get generational ponzi ______s which end in an impoverished whimper

ESSAY QUESTION – write at least 300 words on the following topic.

When Obama throws billions of dollars of borrowed money into the education system you get …

T. Thwim

Ha! I see what you did there.

If we answer any of them, we’re wrong, right?
Because we’re only supposed to fill in the blanks on the “facts”

Nicely done, just about caught me there.

Jim

It’s not about volume its about quality. The UK degree system is (or was) based on shorter, more focused and more intensive degrees. I had my PhD by 24 and I was not unusual. Between 16 and 18, I took only four “A” levels (math, physics and chemistry). OK, so my broader education likely suffered but my kids each took four years at Ontario Universities and I simply don’t think they came away with the depth of knowledge required to be useful. We need to contract the amount of time students spend in high ed – it would save space, save tuition and get these kids into productive careers instead of keeping them on hiatus. We could keep the cooperative programs (e.g. U Waterloo) but what is with 4-5 year undergraduate degrees and up to 8 year PhDs?

Secondly, the number of research publications produced by a country directly relates tot he number of scientists. It’s meaningless. There are 6000 or more journals. 95% of publications are not cited by anyone except for the author. There is so much dross out there. It doesn’t mean that every publication must be in a “top tier” journal, but there have to be standards. If you look at the proportion of papers published in the top 50 journals (not counting reviews which cause citation bias), you’ll find much more informative data.

But this brings us to the central question of how many scientists do we need in Canada? No one knows. We base numbers on other countries and fudge through. But, by not setting a clear target (which could be higher or lower than what we have) we suffer from either over or under funding. If we support too many scientists, then the actual $$ available to the best scientists will be reduced. If we support too few, there will be areas of expertise that are not covered. We graduate too many PhDs and postdoctoral fellows who find there are not enough appropriate jobs for their refined skills. What a waste. If you are underemployed, does your employer care you have 10 years of post-secondary education?

If we took this seriously, and set aside the vested interests of the universities, we might actually evolve a system that serves the country in terms of education, awareness, ingenuity, skills and economics that are appropriate to our nation. Some hope…..
Mulletaur

Any new taxation policy is analysed for its potential to be progressive or regressive. The question is whether the tax redistributes wealth from the poor to the rich or the rich to the poor.

The same analysis can be applied to post-secondary education. Those with the highest marks in high school are admitted to university. Those with the highest marks in undergraduate and college have the best chance to go on to professional school or graduate studies. Those with high marks in high school and those who attend post-secondary education have better social and economic outcomes.

Why do we keep making the educationally rich richer ? Why not redistribute some of the wealth to the educationally poor ? How much better off would be all be, socially and economically, if those who are illiterate or functionally illiterate were suddenly able to read ? Why should those who already have educational advantages get even more, paid for by the taxpayer including the educationally poor ?

Illiteracy is a serious problem in this country which holds us back economically and socially. I’m all for more money for higher education. But I think we need to balance this with a hugely increased effort to redistribute education from the educationally richest to the educationally poorest. It might even have a positive effect on efforts to reduce poverty.

We could start by requiring all graduate students and all those who are employed in a teaching capacity in publicly funded colleges, universities and professional training institutes to spend at least 40 hours per term working as volunteers in adult literacy programs. The full economic cost of education is in no way reflected in fees. Such a policy would allow those who benefit from this educationally regressive system to pay back at least some of what they have gained at the expense of the educationally poorest.

Brammer

I think Mel Hurtig had the right idea.

Granted, he is shorter than the average Dutchman / Masai.
T. Thwim

An easier way to go about is to simply eliminate tuition regulation and balance it with publically supported student grants based on needs assessment.

Expensive in the short term, but huge long-term payouts.
Mike T.

Teaching literacy is probably a skill best left to full-time literacy teachers, rather than forcing it on busy graduate students. And the benefits are reaped by society as a whole, not just those with higher education. It makes more sense to fill the need with hiring literacy teachers for those who need them, paid for by everyone through tax. If the grad students are going to be paid more over time anyway, they’ll be contributing more to the program overall, so it still gives them some burden.

Mulletaur

Are professors not full time teachers ?

And all those grad students, what are we spending so much money on teaching them for ? So we can have more underemployed and overeducated people ? Great to bump up the stats, but what’s the point otherwise ?

How about we start looking at the resources we spend in higher education a bit more rationally. In the meantime, the ‘educational bourgeoisie’ can be sent out in the field to do something practical with their knowledge.

http://liliannattel.wordpress.com Lilian Nattel

The number of years in school doesn’t necessarily equate with how much was taught or how much learned during those years.
http://azmattressoutlet.com mattresses phoenix

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hosertohoosier

I address this in my longer post. Firstly, even if Canada is better, Obama’s quest is pretty lame, considering America is quite high itself. Secondly, the US wins in terms of average years of schooling. Thirdly Canada is inflated by CEGEP and colleges in Ontario. At the same time community colleges are not considered for the US.

From the Canadian 2006 census:
17.9% of Canadians over 15 have BA’s or more.

http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-595/P2C.cfm?TPL=RETR&LANG=E&GC=35068
(I went through the federal riding subdivisions, but you can get the Canadian numbers in the third column).

From the 2007 US Current Population Survey:

24% of Americans over 15 have a BA or higher.

http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/education/cps2006.html

If we are talking about a countries ability to invent new products, and to compete in a high tech world, I don’t think the overly broad (and inconsistently applied) OECD numbers make a good baseline.

I did not say “USA is number 1″ reflexively. I said that because I have seen these numbers before, and know the nuances that are missed by a lot of the data out there.
hosertohoosier

So you think social scientists are as productive or more productive than those in the hard sciences? I don’t think the social sciences are useless. I do think they are in over-production (except may be economists), and the job market bares me out on this. It was damn hard to find a job even before the recession, much less a job where one’s degree yielded an increase in income.

When we are talking about subsidizing something – and yes, grad students are heavily subsidized – we have to defend its utility in terms of public goods produced by that spending. Heck, I would be happy if you could demonstrate positive externalities for spending on social science phd students.
Terry

I think there has to be a massive overhaul in the way the humanities are taught at the college level. Right now it doesn’t really provide you with a good education to compete in the labour market, and provide job skills suitable to earn your bread and butter. A humanities education can give you a boost in the way that any college degree can, but it doesn’t really train people for anything.

As for social science, it is slowly evolving into something useful as it discards Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Campbell, Jung, Freud and all the rest of the frauds that have been discredited by the integration of the discipline with the hard sciences, and the application of the scientific method to observing human behavior. There are just a bunch of baby boomers who have to die to make room for their graduate students.
hosertohoosier

Public goods do not have to be monetary. They can be benefits to society as well.

Also, explain the link between the death of vocations and economic decline.
http://www.jackmitchell.ca J@ck M!tchell

“explain the link between the death of vocations and economic decline.”

Drugs?
http://www.jackmitchell.ca J@ck M!tchell

I agree, we can never compete with the USA if we do exactly what they do with 1/10th the money.

Stats (pre-stockmarket crash):

Harvard’s endowment: $45 billion

U of T’s endowment: $1.75 billion

Stanford’s endowment: $17 billion

UBC’s endowment: $1.03 billion

MIT’s endowment: $10.07 billion

Waterloo’s endowment: $0.17 billion

We just can’t compete with the US endowment structure, now matter how much money we invest in universities: they’ve got a virtuous (or, depending on your point of view, vicious) cycle going in which elite education is the ticket to the upper middle class, the upper middle class pays less in taxes, and in turn chips in big alumni donations to their alma maters (oh and also to let Junior in).

We need to think outside the box, i.e. reform the purpose of university education. Money won’t buy us big-time success, we just don’t have enough of it floating around in our much more egalitarian society.
http://macleans.ca kc

“…let junior in.” So that’s how W made Havrard? Endowment system sorta sounds like 19 cent UK private education. Still the concept has some appeal. Pay into an endowment fund or uncle sam will come after you. If the standards are high it has some utlity i suppose. I would hope scholarship pick up some of the slum boy geniuses?
Sisyphus

W made Yale.

My contribution to the discussion is that Radio Netherlands International just told me that the Dutch are the tallest people in the world. I always thought it was the Dinka.
http://macleans.ca kc

Oops have i offended? Or is my wit meter out again?
http://macleans.ca kc

No i see. Wrong university. Damn it! And i tried so hard too!
http://macleans.ca kc

Dang it sisypus, i never went to havard? ya shore bout thet . yor such a hard marker. I only got it completely wrong.
Go on, try me agin. im redy thes thyme boy.
W. ex prezedunt.
http://www.jackmitchell.ca J@ck M!tchell

Re: the Dinka vs. the Dutch, apparently the Montenegrins are now the tallest nation-state, but the Masai are the tallest ethnic group. I think they’re distantly related to the Dinka, aren’t they?
Sisyphus

Sorry. I really wasn’t being snarky. It’s just that these discussions make my head hurt.

Education , formal or informal , is , in and of itself, a good thing. There is some correlation between broad- based higher levels of education and economic performance but it’s hardly a 1:1 relationship and says nothing about an individual’s inherent value nor his/hers’ value to their community.

We should strive to provide as much education as we can to as many people as possible because it’s a good thing to do. And see what happens.

What I find sad is that was a time , not that long ago , when free education through the post-secondary level was a subject of serious consideration. The frame of public service issues has been shrunk and that is no longer in it.

But the Dinka are still pretty tall.
http://macleans.ca kc

Sis
I too remember free or let’s say affordable education.
I also remember that many of the generation of pols who turned the system on it’s head, were themselves the recipients of “free” education. What did Mulroney say about old whores? Well, he would know!
archangel

Jack,

The Dinka do. Or did, anyway.
archangel

The Dutch are taller on average. Even people that relocate there are taller. It’s an adaptation allowing their heads to remain above water — what with rising sea levels and all.
John D

It depends on level of education really. I have an undergraduate “hard science” degree and it is pretty much useless. My social science degree is far more “productive.” Now if I had a PhD in Chemistry I might get some more sciency job offers.