Cheating

Plagarism and cheating in general are surely big problems at universities these days. The fact that there is a cottage industry of essay-writing companies is also disconcerting.

Lawrence Hinmann, a philosopher, wrote a surprisingly good op-ed on the topic a few years ago.

I think he overemphasizes the importance of investing time in students and creating unique problems. In many fields it's hard to make up good problems because of complexity (math, engineering, etc.) and in others new topics are often just rehashed forms of old topics: philosophy students rarely have anything interesting to say, except when they rediscover an age-old argument.

By the same token he probably underemphasizes the good that technology can do, at least to fight plagiarism. If students were asked to a little bit more work, and had more and more of their writing digitized, perhaps starting in high school, then there would probably be enough data to identify each student's "writing signature." Essay-writing companies would try to adjust to that but I think it'd be difficult, and fear must cut down on their business in the short run.

The real solution is cultivating norms, as he notes in passing, though no one knows quite how. Fortunately, with so many colleges and departments, there is plenty of room for experimentation.

For-profit Colleges

The big puzzle is why . . . the for-profit college market is not self-regulating . . .

The solution of the puzzle may be . . . that the private-college industry . . . has targeted a class of people who cannot gain admission to [public] colleges because they do not meet their entrance standards. There is evidence that just as in the case of the marketing of mortgage loans during the housing bubble of the early 2000s, the for-profit colleges use aggressive advertising to attract students from low-income families that lack financial sophistication and the ability to evaluate the benefits of attending a for-profit college. These people . . have little information about higher education and are therefore prey to skillful marketing that even if literally truthful may create a misleading impression of the benefits of attendance at a for-profit college. For-profit colleges often pay recruiters by the number of enrollments that a recruiter generates.

from Richard Posner on his blog. It could be more concise but it's worth reading.

Two things (Posner mentions #1):

1. Public colleges also prey on misinformation and youth. No one warns you that majoring in English is not going to lead to the same career satisfaction or pay as a degree in Computer Engineering.

2. All the evidence suggests that the average effect of college education makes college a great value. But the effect could be highly heterogenous. Why isn't there more public, easily accessible and understandable information on the payoff to this and that degree? And (this is a common refrain for me) why isn't "work satisfation" reported side-by-side?

Grade inflation

I posted a while back about grade inflation. I was inspired by a short article on the Economix blog and offered a question in the comments.

Lo and behold, my question was answered (toward the bottom). I think it was a fair answer, but I wish he had more to say. I agree that its very difficult to compare apples and oranges (Harvard GPA to UMass GPA)--in this case because we don't have any good data for estimating the variance in GPAs at each college.

Also, this is funny. I found a treasure trove of law school admissions data that I'm going to mine for insights. One day they will appear on this blog (vis a vis medical school admissions).