Friday reading

• Idea: a system of federal universities Not sure how this is an improvement over state public universities, but okay 
• The Census Bureau's new non-official, more-accurate poverty index Not surprising: more people are living in poverty than the official estimate
• Sierra Leone has its first free self-organized (that is, not run by the UN) elections this weekend And hopefully someday soon they too can have billion-dollar campaigns and an entire competitive election industry 
• The BBC magazine gives the etymology of the word "nerd" because, why not "According to reports, the Swedish Academy says it might change the definition [of nerd] to something more neutral in the future."
• If sequestration cuts come to be, schools would lose more than $2 billion, or 8 percent of the current federal education budget 
• Longread: 8,000 words on the future of the human race

Why higher education should be free (or at least a lot cheaper).

Money troubles interfere with the academic performance of about one-third of all college students, and a similar number of students regularly skip buying required academic materials because of the costs, according to a survey released on Thursday.

That's from the New York Times today. Also: "students who spend the most hours at paying jobs are, not surprisingly, those feeling the most financial stress." 

Education is a public good. I've read my Max Weber and my de Tocqueville, so I get it, we're a country of the Protestant work ethic, the by-your-bootstraps American Dream. And for a while, it was possible to work your way through college. That's admirable, that's awesome, good for anyone who can pull it off.

But lighthouses don't get built and firehouses don't get funded only because people work really hard for them. Lighthouses and fire departments exist because the electorate pools its money, elects a government, and the government allocates all our money to public projects. It's entirely possible for the fire department to be privately funded through insurance: only the people who pay in get to benefit. We know people tend to underestimate the probability of infrequent occurrences, so many people who probably should will in fact not buy coverage. So then your neighbor's house catches fire, but he hasn't bought insurance, so the fire department doesn't come, and then everyone is out on the street watching the fire jump from home to home until an insured one goes up in flames, and finally the fire department drops by. But will they only selectively fight the fire on insured homes? That wouldn't really work, so you get free riding and moral hazard. 

As the old adage goes, if you want less of something, tax it. So if you want more of something, subsidize it. The "but kids can work their way through college" defense of not giving everyone free higher education is a terrible one because it fails to accurately or fairly distribute costs to everyone who benefits. The current system also does a terrible allocation job: brilliant but poor students receive fewer degrees than optimal while more affluent students who won't benefit from them get more degrees than is efficient. 

My point is, there are some goods where the transaction / coordination costs are high, and where free riding is rampant, that government administration is the only thing that makes sense. And higher education is one of those cases. Everyone benefits from a more-educated citizenry, but the costs fall mainly on students who, by the logic of being kids and students, are the least able to pay them. Ergo, government should subsidize higher education to a greater degree. 

"Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable." Foucault summarizing Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia."

As the Sandy hurricane cleanup continues in NYC, NJ, Haiti, et. al., it's got me thinking about the responsibility of seriousness in the way we talk about disasters and politics. Alongside photographs of devastation, there are political reporters yammering on about how the storm will affect the presidential election. They have to do their job, and their job is to make things to talk about, so I'm hesitant to judge too harshly. And the storm's aftermath may have implications for voter turnout that are worth considering, especially if particular groups of voters are left without access to the polls in some systematic way. Whether that story is covered in the appropriate way is up to the journalists to figure out for themselves, we'll just have to hope they get it right. 

But beyond Sandy, beyond this election, when we as policy advocates and activists confront social ills, it's really easy to react with anger or sadness. When we say we're advocates for economic justice, what we're really saying is that we're fighting against economic injustice. And there's a lot of economic injustice around to get angry, sad, and hopeless about. But weeping over every statistic about the gap in educational attainment won't make rural or inner-city schools educate their kids any better. That we want to react with sadness to each of these "abominable" injustices is a good sign, yes. But sadness needn't be the dominant tone of our reactions. Sometimes that's a necessary reminder, at least for me. Otherwise we'd end up caught in a cycle of sadness, guilt, and inaction. And that's no good for anyone. 

"Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects." - Theodor Adorno, 1951

What an eerily prescient statement to make in an era before text messaging and IM and email. 

How to improve the assignment to remedial classes.

A great new NBER working paper on using evidence and prediction to improve the way students are sorted in remedial college classes to improve their graduation rates. From the abstract: 

Our analysis uses administrative data and a rich predictive model to examine the accuracy of remedial screening tests, either instead of or in addition to using high school transcript data to determine remedial assignment. We find that roughly one in four test-takers in math and one in three test-takers in English are severely mis-assigned under current test-based policies, with mis-assignments to remediation much more common than mis-assignments to college-level coursework.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that putting students who are ill-prepared for college-level work in regular classes is bad because (1) they'll likely fail, (2) they'll become frustrated and will drop out of school altogether. But the other side, the case of putting students who are capable of handling college work in remedial classes, doesn't, on its face, seem as terrible of a cost — so what, students spend an extra semester on foundational material, this'll help them be even more prepared for rigorous college work. 

Students who are unchallenged will become unmotivated and may do worse, even in easier classes. See, e.g., this study from UChicago which found an algebra-for-all policy hurt high achievers because of mixed-ability classrooms. High, low, and middle ability students all deserve the highest quality education.

Algebra-for-all isn't prima facie a bad policy; remedial college classes are not prima facie terrible. As always, though, it comes down to implementation. And it's nice to see some real empirical work to compare treatments to find the right mix.