Academically Adrift review

Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

College fees have seen enormous fee inflation the past decades and many have started wondering whether college is actually worth that much investment.Academically Adrift evaluates how much learning is actually happening at US colleges; the verdict? Not much.
The book reads like a journal article more than a book. The authors use a measure of learning, the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which was designed to assess "core outcomes espoused by all higher education, critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing" to perform their evaluation.
The book is full of data and statistics on how various factors affect academic learning: race, parental education and occupation, family status, hours spent studying, mother tongue, whether the students lives on campus or not, the impact of working part-time while studying, instruction methods, faculty expectations, faculty interactions, courses taken and other. They compare differences across institutions as well as within institutions.

The authors compare the CLA performance of students on their third year to their performance in the same test in their first year of college. The result is that the improvement in the skills measured by the CLA is not significant. The CLA does not measure any learning towards the student's field of study. So if the student had gained significant knowledge in Computer Science, while her "critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing" skills did not improve, the CLA will not capture anything.

Also students said most of their courses required not much effort to achieve a satisfactory grade. On average they about 12 hours per week. Most of the courses did not require the students to read 40 pages or more of readings or write 20 pages of coursework over one semester.

At one point the authors say the following: "Limited learning in the U.S. higher-education system cannot be defined as a crisis, because institutional and system-level organizational survival is not being threatened in any significant way. Parents—although somewhat disgruntled about increasing costs—want colleges to provide a safe environment where their children can mature, gain independence, and attain a credential that will help them be successful as adults. Students in general seek to enjoy the benefits of a full collegiate experience that is focused as much on social life as on academic pursuits, while earning high marks in their courses with relatively little investment of effort. Professors are eager to find time to concentrate on their scholarship and professional interests. Administrators have been asked to focus largely on external institutional rankings and the financial bottom line. Government funding agencies are primarily interested in the development of new scientific knowledge. In short, the system works. No actors in the system are primarily interested in undergraduates' academic growth, although many are interested in student retention and persistence. Limited learning on college campuses is not a crisis, because the institutional actors implicated in the system are receiving the organizational outcomes that they seek, and therefore neither the institutions themselves nor the system as a whole is in any way challenged or threatened.

While in the long term this country's global competitiveness is likely weakened by white-collar workforce that is not uniformly trained at a rigorous level, colleges where limited academic learning occurs in the short term can still fulfill their primary social functions: students are allocated to occupational positions based on their credentials, not their skills , students are provided settings where they can experiment with new forms of social behavior and develop independent identities []."

In other words, nobody has the inventive to change the current system. Then could it probably be the case that the current system works fine? Or could it be the case that one actor is missing from the system? Where are employers for example? Maybe employers should have some stake in undergraduate education so that incentives are better aligned and no money is wasted on "useless" courses.

My personal opinion of the book is that it is not ambitious enough. A lot of data and barely any discussion. I would expect to read the authors' opinion on why CLA skills are relevant, as opposed to field of study learning. For example if IT employers value coding skills more than CLA skills, then probably it is not worth it for a computer science major to learn how to write well or "think analytically".

Employers do say that CLA skills are important, however do the put their money where their mouth is? Why don't employers invest on writing and critical judgement skills for their employees?

Then there is the case of citizenship. For a functioning democracy, the electorate must be well-informed and be able to critically analyse public policies.

Then there is the issue of credentialism  Most students don't care whether they are actually learning anything, all they want is to get a degree with a good enough grade to get a job interview and then a job. I am surprised that the authors have not even mentioned the Spence signalling model of education in the book. According to that model, education is valuable even if it doesn't increase the individual's productivity at all. Education level just serves as a signal to employers to distinguish hard workers from slackers.

There are some ideas at the end of the book on how to reform college education; there are not radical at all though. The authors suggest a method to improve college accountability and transparency on how much learning is actually happening. For me it is a bit like putting the cart before the horse. How can you have have a discussion on how to improve the current system's accountability when you have not talked about why should we keep having the current system at all.

Development Economics

Poor economics - Dufol, Banerjee : http://pooreconomics.com/

Easily readable and engaging book. It is the result of many years of studies in developing countries using standard econometric methods as well as modern techniques (in economics) such as randomized control experiments. The authors did an excellent job explaining why aid is not as simple as it looks; for example in some cases aid might even be harmful. Their main point is that we shouldn't label all aid as bad or all aid as good. Those who want to help must observe and careful analyse each problem case by case.

Development as Freedom - Amartya Sen

The author discusses fundamental concepts such as the use of "utility" method of ranking preferences and proposes an alternative method based on different kinds of "freedoms". It is also not as an easy reading as Poor Economics; a few concepts are hard to understand if you haven't had some university level economics education. It is a mostly theoretical book, discussing the main concepts of development economics one has to know before he embarks on any applications. Sen writes his thoughts on how to improve the lives of people in the developing world. Among others, he discusses the role of markets, governments, democracy, women's role in society, culture, human rights and Social Choice.

Economic Fables by Ariel Rubinstein

Ariel Rubinstein is a well-known game-theorist. Economic Fables is available for free online but I instead chose to buy it. I did that because I like having it in print to put it on by bookshelf and see it lying there every day reminding of its ideas. This book is totally not what I expected. I expected a book with conventional views on how economics, from a game theory point of view, are used in everyday life; with a conclusion that game-theory teaches us useful lessons applicable in our daily routine. You know, like the standard non-textbook economics books we are used to. The “standard” characteristics are objectiveness, impersonal writing, like text-books but with a pinch of salt. Economic Fables is different. It is very personal and in a way controversial. And the conclusion is that game theory is not useful from a practical point of view.

One of the main aims of Rubinstein is to convey to the reader that what economists are really doing is writing fables, short stories that try to resemble reality, but in mathematical language. He gives two purposes for studying economics: the first one is that economic models predict human behaviour in the real world based on data analysis; the second one is that economic models sharpen perception, “an intellectual exercise”, which makes those who write them (the economists) suitable for specific high-profile decision making. Rubinstein goes on to suggest a third purpose: “economic models are essentially not different from a model in logic”, “we are satisfied even if the model is merely interesting”, and does not have any predictive value.

When the author describes game theory, less than half of the book, it feels almost like reading a text-book but with much more words which are inevitable when you translate from maths to English. If you have studied game theory before you can easily skip those parts. He goes through the “rational man” assumption of economics in the first chapter. There are many examples from behavioural economics, e.g. the Kahneman-Tversky experiments that challenge the standard homo-economicus assumptions, with results of online surveys published on the books website (accessible for free).

In the book you can find the author’s personal memories from young age in Israel, such as how come he became a game-theorist, brief discussion of his relationship with his parents, and later in Princeton where he met John Nash in person. There is also a part where he talks about the interdisciplinary study of economics and language, something which I had never heard before.

Rubinstein also included his thoughts on the Middle East problem and he chose to end the book with a chapter on economic policy. His thoughts are not mainstream at all. He chooses to emphasize market failures and very successfully parallels the economy as a school game where the strong boys bully the weak ones and so set the rules of the game and can also adjust them however they see fit. The bully kid in economy are the rich and the powerful who adjust the laws whenever they feel threatened from below and therefore the market mechanism doesn’t really work to deliver a fair outcome. After he describes a dismal world in the future where everything is privatised, Rubinstein suggests to young economists that if they want to be ahead of their time they should research nationalisation instead of privatisation.

Economic Fables is written by an economist who is nothing at all like the ones you see on TV. There are no bold statements and throughout the whole book you can sense that the author is a humble person, who clearly understands the limits of his knowledge. Excellent read if you want to read something different.