Tag Archives: education

Yes, Do That

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A letter-writer in Friday’s WSJ Letters section wants us to stop calling degrees useless and, instead, encourage students to follow their bliss in their courses of study.

He cited principles of education that learning thinking is as important as learning facts and arithmetic. He’s right on this. He also cited statistics that indicate that most formally trained STEM graduates find work in other than STEM fields. Stipulated.

He closed, though, with this:

But if most STEM students leave their field, shouldn’t we stop labelling programs as “useless” and instead encourage students to develop their intellectual strength by studying whichever field they find most interesting?

Yes, do that. But also do this: require each college (including colleges within universities) to publish the median and mean wage/salary incomes at the five year post graduation mark for each major offered, and require each college to be the primary lender to its students or sole guarantor of other lending facilities’ loans to the college’s students.

Let each student know in advance his likely income from following his “most interesting” course of study along with his cost for pursuing that course.

Blue Books

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They’re making a comeback on campuses as a way to get around student cheating via ChatGPT and other AI packages. I say good for those profs and schools that are requiring them for assignments and exams. Blue books make the student do his own work at the moment of truth: writing down, in class, their own answers to the varying assignments.

There is a valid beef to requiring blue books [emphasis in the original].

Many of them believe students should be using AI to get smarter. It would be stupid not to. These tools will be a part of their lives and knowing how to use them effectively will be an important advantage in their future workplaces.
“They will use ChatGPT all the time for all sorts of things, and that will make them more efficient, more productive and better able to do their jobs,” said Arthur Spirling, a Princeton University professor of politics who gives proctored blue-book exams. “It is strange to say you won’t be permitted to do this thing that will be very natural to you for the rest of your career.”

There’s an obvious solution to that problem, though, and assignments and exams easily can be used to teach the use of AI. This would apply as well to STEM courses as humanities courses.

The professors can issue assignments and exams that mandate using AI to generate answers, then in class use blue books to require the students to critique the AI answers, identify AI “hallucinations,” and to improve the AI answers. To short circuit attempts to do the critiquing and editing in advance and simply writing down nearly memorized answers, the profs could require specific edit types of specific paragraphs or blocks of code or certain arithmetic sections or…. Alternatively, the profs could do the above as Part I of the assignment or exam, and then in Part II, provide his own AI-generated answer to a question and require the students to do the critiques and edits de novo. Then, returning to/maintaining basics, use Part III to pose questions that the students will not see until that point in the in-class exercise or exam and that the students must answer via blue book on the spot.

That last, especially, is how things work IRL.

Serious Judicial Error

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Federal District Judge Myong Joun (District of Massachusetts) has issued a preliminary injunction requiring the Trump administration to desist from its moves to dismantle the Department of Education. Fair enough; the Department was created by Congress, the administration can jawbone for its elimination, but only Congress can do so.

Unfortunately, the judge didn’t stop there. He also ordered DoEd to rehire those employees who’d been RIFed as excess to the Department’s needs.

Not only is there no evidence that defendants are pursuing a “legislative goal” or otherwise working with Congress to reach a resolution, but there is also no evidence that the [reduction in force] has actually made the Department more efficient[.]

Judges don’t get to dictate the purpose of agency/Department heads’ firings of employees. RIFs have as their purpose the removal of unneeded employees—the essence of making any government agency more efficient.

Joun gave the lie to his employment ruling by his decision to not say how the RIFs reduced Department efficiency. He simply wholesale-ly accepted the plaintiffs’ (a group of states, school districts, non-profit organizations, and labor unions) claims regarding efficiency and coupled that with his blithe, unsubstantiated rejection of the government’s position.

It gets worse. Joun wrote in his opening

Defendants do acknowledge, as they must, that the Department cannot be shut down without Congress’s approval, yet they simultaneously claim that their legislative goals (obtaining Congressional approval to shut down the Department) are distinct from their administrative goals (improving efficiency). There is nothing in the record to support these contradictory positions.

Even logic doesn’t seem to matter. There’s nothing contradictory in DoEd Secretary Linda McMahon both working with Congress to eliminate the Department while simultaneously working to make the Department more efficient—which she must do while the Department remains in existence.

Beyond that, judges do not get to dictate to a coequal and separate branch what that branch’s employment practices must be. The judge’s role in the present case, his sole legitimate role under our Constitution and his oath of office, is to adjudicate whether these firings comport themselves with statute and with our Constitution.

Activist judges, judges who go beyond that limit, are violating their oaths of office; from that they are not hold[ing] their Offices during good Behavior. That is an impeachable offense.

This one would have been fine, if on disagreeable ground, had he stopped with his order to stop dismantling DoEd. His meddling in Executive Branch employment decisions has gone too far.

Full stop.

Joun’s injunction can be read here.

“here’s an idea”

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Allison Leigh Cowan, late of The New York Times had one concerning college admissions and how to weed out lawbreakers. Do some actual prescreening.

Start by asking applicants to pledge that they will be respectful, law-abiding members of the community if admitted. Assuming no one quibbles with that minimal threshold, delve a bit further using moral-reasoning prompts drawn from recent headlines. Applicants can reply with a simple “yes” or “no,” or submit longer answers:

      • Is it ever justified to spit on another human being?
      • Is it ever justified to pull a fire alarm in a crowded auditorium to protest a speaker some find offensive?
      • Is it ever justified to mar public spaces with hard-to-remove graffiti? Should perpetrators pay to clean it up?
      • Is it ever justified for a private individual to assassinate another private individual?
      • Is it ever justified to burn a Quran? What about destroying a mezuza on someone’s door?
      • Is it ever justified to restrain custodians or other bystanders as part of a protest?
      • Is it ever justified to set fire to the homes of authority figures?

These are, as Cowan acknowledges, navel-gazing questions, but diligent reviews of the answers can serve as useful prescreening.

Here’s another idea: in addition to that prescreening, a good idea in concept but as with all prescreening, it’s imperfect, take the follow-on step: those inclined to foment chaos or who change and become prone, should be expelled promptly and with prejudice when they do start to foment chaos, and those who broke laws in the doing should be criminally prosecuted, equally promptly.

Price Fixing

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And this time it’s by the Republican caucus in the House. Among the moves they’re making in the reconciliation bill currently being debated in the various House committees is a badly needed move to reform the cost of college/university education and so improve the value of that education. The goal is to hold colleges accountable for student outcomes and curb the open-ended loan buffet.

The specific plan under consideration, though, is a terrible idea.

The House would reduce the aggregate limit for undergraduate loans to $50,000 from $57,500. The bill would also impose a $100,000 borrowing limit for master’s degree and doctoral programs and $150,000 for professional programs like law degrees. Graduate student loans are currently uncapped.

This is just price-fixing by another name, though, and worse than not addressing the underlying problem, it hides—like any price-fixing scheme does—the true costs and gains of the services being offered.

Better, and more efficient, would be to let free market forces solve the problem. I’ve offered this alternative before; it bears repeating, with a couple of additions.

• statutorily require colleges and universities to publish the average, median, and range of income at the five years employment mark for their graduates in each of the major fields offered
• [added] statutorily require colleges and universities to publish their graduates’ employment percentages at the five year post-graduation mark for each of the major fields’ graduates
• statutorily require student loans to be originated by private lenders or colleges and universities
• statutorily require colleges and universities to guarantee at least 50% of each loan granted their students [added:] by private lenders
• [added] bar any government or government-affiliated entity from guaranteeing any part of any student loan
• statutorily allow current and future student loans to be discharged in “ordinary” bankruptcy proceedings

With private lenders and colleges/universities having skin in this student loan game—and being the only players in the game—loans and their borrowers would be carefully screened for repayment risk. Just as importantly, prospective students and parents could better evaluate which majors to pursue and which schools best teach those majors. A happy side effect of that will be better use of us taxpayers’ money.