FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Both Joanne Jacobs and Number 2 Pencil commend Kay Hymowitz on the evolution of generational attitudes. She concludes,

With their genius for problem solving and compromise, pragmatic Americans have seen the damage that their decades-long fling with the sexual revolution and the transvaluation of traditional values wrought. And now, without giving up the real gains, they are earnestly knitting up their unraveled culture. It is a moment of tremendous promise.

Perhaps, but there is still work to be done.

Think about how much more child-centered Americans have become compared with 15 or 20 years ago—the era of the latchkey kid, when the Nickelodeon children’s network touted itself as a “parent-free zone,” and Home Alone was the signature kids’ movie. But by the nineties, soccer moms had the keys to the house and the minivan, which was mounting up thousands of miles on trips to soccer matches, violin lessons, and swim meets. Studies showed a big drop in children’s unstructured time. Even older kids came under their parents’ hothouse scrutiny: “helicopter parents,” in Neil Howe and William Strauss’s term, hover over their children even after they leave for college, talking on the phone every day, visiting frequently, and helping them with their papers via e-mail.

Erm, is that why the big-name colleges are attempting to transform themselves into stress-free zones (see also this.)

The article provides one useful paragraph cautioning people in the interpretation of numbers.

And in fact, the incredible shrinking married-couple-with-children statistic cited by [author Laura] Kipnis is a statistical mirage, an artifact of two demographic trends, unconnected with American attitudes toward knot tying. First, young people are marrying later; the average age is 25 for women, 27 for men, up from 20 and 23 three decades ago. That means there are a lot more young singles out there than there were in 1970. Further swelling the ranks of these un–Ozzies and Harriets is the vastly increased number of empty nesters, retirees, and widows, beneficiaries of major health-care improvements over the past decades. There are 34 million Americans over 65, and it’s a safe bet that only those few living with their adult kids would be counted as part of a married-couple household with children. What it comes down to is that a smaller proportion of married couples with children is no more evidence of the decline of the family than more cars on the road is evidence of a decline in trucks.

The times, they are a-changing, and some of the change reflects different experiences of different birth cohorts. But there are still windmills to tilt against. More later.

IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY? Does a real war require real sacrifices on the part of the civilian population? Andrew Sullivan suggests that it does.

We're at war. So far, the Bush Administration has refused to ask for a general sacrifice to pay for this effort. But that leads to a sense that we're not all involved, that we do not all owe the troops our support. More important, the war is about the Middle East. A long-term strategy to protect us from constant involvement in that region would include greater energy independence. A gas tax helps pay for our current struggle and helps us avoid future ones. Why not therefore a wartime gas tax of a dollar a gallon? If we do not owe it to our fellow citizens, to the environment, to greater fuel efficiency, can we at least owe it to the troops? Or is that minimal level of personal sacrifice too much to ask of ourselves?

Ramesh Ponnuru concurs in part, dissents in part, suggests that breaking OPEC would make more sense. But to break OPEC might involve turning the United States into a larger oil producer than it currently is. Tradeoffs everywhere...

RUNNING EXTRA: Skip at The Sports Economist notes,

A "wartime tax" is not the way to go. Wars are typically financed via deficits. This makes perfect sense, since wars are temporary, and temporary taxes distort decisions in inefficient ways. Bond finance minimizes the distortionary effects of financing temporary expenditures.

He also has some thoughts about requiring gas purchasers to pick up more of the costs of garrisoning the Middle East.

LOSING PATIENCE, FALLUJAH VERSION. Marine Lance Cpl. Ryan Christiansen sums up the likely fate of Saddam loyalists and assorted other reactionary elements in Fallujah:

"I really don't care; they're all gonna die."

Tim Blair picked up the report; it is indicative of a change in mindset in U.S. troops. Betsy's Page picks up the Associated Press coverage, in which the "May the fleas of a thousand camels ..." is recast.

At night, the psychological operations unit attached to the Marine battalion here sends out messages from a loudspeaker mounted on an armored Humvee. On Thursday night, the crew and its Arabic-language interpreter taunted fighters, saying, "May all the ambulances in Fallujah have enough fuel to pick up the bodies of the mujahadeen."

The message was specially timed for an attack moments later by an AC-130 gunship that pounded targets in the city.

Insults Unpunished follows the news, with links to several other articles.

Outside the Beltway observes that the change in attitude among the troops parallels that of police in rough neighborhoods; the post also suggests the "culturally sensitive" training troops received is wasted effort, if some of the reactionary elements don't really want to make the kinds of changes in their own lives that would make their own lives better.

Those reactionary elements will, as LCpl. Christiansen explains, meet their fates more quickly than the workplace slackers or the collegiate slackers.

LOSING PATIENCE, WORKPLACE VERSION. What fate awaits the collegiate slacker (who very well may have developed those bad habits in middle school.)

Good help hard to find for manufacturers

is the headline to a USA Today article by Barbara Hagenbaugh.

Manufacturers across the USA are having problems finding qualified employees, even though millions of factory workers lost jobs in recent years.

What is the first problem?

Larry Kensington, president of Kentwood, Mich.-based Bananza Air Management Systems, sifted through scores of résumés to hire three workers this year. One of his biggest gripes: Job applications riddled with spelling errors. "They can't even express themselves in a simple sentence," he says, noting employees need to be able to write so they can fill out quality-control data and other reports.

So much for "invented spelling" in the elementary schools, and the neglect of grammar and composition in favor of so-called critical theory in the higher grades. As Joanne Jacobs notes,

Statistical quality control is a big deal in manufacturing now. Employers want workers who can keep track of data, read technical information, write reports and communicate with each other about problems.

Good luck, there. The USA Today article offers this assessment of the quantitative abilities of many of these workers.

"It puts a high premium on basic numerical skills, it puts a high premium on the ability to learn and to take instruction, but it also puts a high premium on ... creativity," says Thomas Duesterberg, president of Manufacturers Alliance, an industry group.

So much for "invented math" and the end of a serious calculus requirement in college. By their fruits shall ye know them. So much, by the way, for the excuses.

Employers say it goes beyond skill, saying they are having problems with work ethics, which slipped during the economic boom of the late 1990s. That's as a surprise, considering nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs have been cut in the last four years.

Bob Confer of Confer Plastics in North Tonawanda, N.Y., says he has fired eight of the 18 people he has hired this year. They showed up late, didn't show up at all or didn't work hard — and those are the people he chose out of about 60 applications.

"Supposedly these guys are the cream of the crop," he says.

Kevin at Truck and Barter has some additional thoughts that are worth a look.

Could this possibly be true? A vast swath of the unemployed are simply unprepared to be employed?

It's implied that the even the top workers in the current pool of unemployed lack basic skills, have little work ethics, and just can't do the job required. But it's also possible that manufacturers are not paying high enough wages to attract the skilled unemployed. Perhaps in the labor market, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for.

Some manufacturers are having a hard time finding people who can write correctly and show up on time, while others want creativity in addition. These are two separate labor pools, and perhaps two separate problems.

Those 3 million competent former manufacturing workers are NOT just waiting around, begging to be hired. The labor market is tremendously dynamic, and it is very likely that most of those 3 million workers are in other manufacturing jobs, have jumped ship to the service industries, joint the military, started a business, have left the labor force, etc.. Are manufacturers putting enough effort in trying to steal former manufacturing employees away from the service industries they've entered?

Perhaps so. All the same, the possibility that some proportion of the work force is simply unprepared requires consideration.

LOSING PATIENCE, COLLEGIATE VERSION.

I love my students. Most are sincere, motivated, and assets to any classroom. I n fact two of them this semester have not registered on the Excuse-0-Meter once. That's significant because one was very pregnant, has given birth, not asked for any extensions and kept up with all the work so far. The other student is in a wheelchair, and prone to leg and kidney infections. If he misses something, he merely apologizes and we move on.

That's Beverly Carol Lucey, reporting on her collection of classic lame excuses. Her post pulls no punches on who is complicit in the Excuse Factory.

Complicit in the architecture of a college campus' intellectual machinations are professors who dole out "Incompletes" like lagniappes on top of the extra credit given for going to hear a speaker they fear will not garner a crowd, or to a job fair that would be for the student's own benefit anyway, or for showing up to class on a regular basis.

Amen.

PROGRESSIVE INTOLERANCE. A referendum that receives support from seven of ten voters is clearly illegitimate. Why? If it's a referendum in which University of Illinois students get to vote to keep their Chief, and the North Central cartel Accreditation folks object to the Chief, the university is in trouble. (Via Illini Girl.)

No mention of whether anyone has suggested that the vote is flawed, because there were only 13,000 votes cast from a potential voting population of approximately 30,000.

UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE DECADE. Interested Participant laments the closing of the Stetson Hat factory in St. Joseph, Missouri.

People are just not wearing hats like they used to.

Scuzzy looking ballcaps are another matter, I suppose.

DOESN'T ANYBODY AT THE NEW YORK TIMES RIDE THE SCOOTS? Evidently not. Live from the Third Rail comments on a test of some additional security measures at a passenger train station somewhere in the East. The Superintendent proposes the following amendment to their description.:

1. Take one train station in the entire nationwide interurban network, conveniently close to Homeland Security headquarters.

I would guess that the bad guys, unless they're really brazen, are going to attempt something where the Homeland Security folks are not, but I digress.

The New York Times has the story, complete with an entry for the corrections page.

Generally, no identification is needed to buy a ticket on a commuter train, and those trains carry more people in close proximity than Amtrak trains do, although unattended packages might be more obvious on a commuter train.

Not in my experience. Commuter trains are full of ... COMMUTERS ... schlepping backpacks, toting briefcases, possibly returning from Marshall Field (oh, that's right, Times reporters are as familiar with Marshall Field as they are with commuter trains ...) and placing said items in one-to-one correspondence with riders would be difficult, even with a spotter in each compartment. (For British readers, that's not the usage you're used to, but on center-entrance gallery coaches, a spotter at the A end of the car will not be able to see any packages in the B end.)

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE. Dunkin' Donuts sponsors a donut eating contest for policemen... An officer from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, wins it.

PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE OF ECONOMICS? Tightly Wound likes the idea, which receives more explanation here.

EXPECT RIVET COUNTERS. Military reenactors do their modeling on a scale of 12 inches to the foot. The hobbyists get past those relatively minor differences with reenactors who do their modeling on the scale of 1/4" to the foot (I understand that there are others who swear by 3.5 mm to the foot as well as other scales.) Belle at Crooked Timber meditates on reenactment, and the comments section brings out the rivet counters.

(Superintendent's note: in model railroading, "rivet counter" is a pejorative reference to the modeler who objects to another modeler's work as being insuffiiciently detailed, or excessively free-lanced. It is probably a good thing that most members of university committees are not model railroaders. They'd probably set new standards for rivet-counting.)

TODAY'S MEME:

Input:

Pick up the nearest book.
Open it to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

That would be Pilgrim: A Biography of William Brewster.

Finally, exhausted, she cancelled her attendance at a performance of Sophocle's Ajax.

The sentence concludes a description of a 1564 visit of Queen Elizabeth I to Cambridge University.

(Via Spitbull.)

WHEN SCIENCE AND FAITH COOPERATE. The Shroud of Turin has two sides, and researchers have until recentl looked at only one. Captain's Quarters has more.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

In academia, left-liberalism is so entrenched its advocates' debating skills have gone rusty. When you've been talking to yourself for decades and imposing speech codes on everyone else, your ability to argue coherently - let alone entertainingly - inevitably wanes.

Andrew Sullivan suggests Air America fails because it's intellectually flabby.

SECOND SECTION: Scrapple Face puts Air America in perspective.

ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS? The University of Tennessee might have Insta Pundit (and Pat Summitt.) All the same, former Tennessee provost John Peters is staying at Northern Illinois University, for now.

“I think I demonstrated passion for NIU,” [Peters] said. After reflecting on the interview, he said he realized his feelings toward NIU. Even if he had been chosen as one of the six candidates, he’s not sure he would have continued with the search process, Peters said.

There is a lot that is good going on here, despite the best efforts of Springfield and the central administration to screw things up. There is a lot of work to be done, all the same.

Consider, for example, last night's spring football game. The Superintendent watched the first half, which is when all the scoring took place, and then watched this year's graduate string quartet (Azmari -- get thee a web page, ladies!) give an intense performance of two Beethoven quartets, the op.18 no. 1 and the op. 127.

It is gratifying to see almost as much student attendance at the spring game as there used to be at the regular season games, and some tenants of the nearby apartments decided to have balcony parties. All the same, the experience at Wisconsin, where a successful football program has become a candy store that remains on probation for a few more days, is not something that calls for an encore. Wisconsin's former chancellor, John Wiley, has the proper perspective.

Wiley also reprimanded athletic director Pat Richter and Bald for their failure to properly investigate the allegations. Both received letters of reprimand for their personnel files, and Richter's salary was frozen for one year.

Wiley praised Richter for his work to restore Wisconsin's athletic program to national prominence, including three Rose Bowl championships since 1994 and a trip to the Final Four for the men's basketball team in 2000. But he also noted this was the third time under Richter's watch that the university has committed a major rules infraction.

Now, about that Pat Summitt reference ... Once upon a time, the women's basketball program at Northern Illinois University led the country in scoring. Of late, despite four players elected to the All-Freshman team (including one Freshman of the Year) in five years, the program has had five losing seasons in six years, with no players recognized for academic achievement.

President Peters, sentiments will only get you so far. There is work to be done supporting the academic departments, and the Faustian bargains in intercollegiate athletics will not provide that support.

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. Interesting reading in today's Northern Star. Above the fold is the headline, Police arrest 3 football players. Each player faces 11 charges of criminal damage to property, involving a tire-slashing spree early in April. Below the fold is a pay raise for the football coach, who received an extension of three years and a $60,000 per year increase, despite no evidence of any external offers from stronger programs.

Compare and contrast these articles with some stories from the Department of Economics, where the university administration did not see fit to make a sufficiently attractive offer to a colleague who received an offer from a slightly better-known economics program, and where the Northern Illinois graduate students can kick back without being tempted to slash tires afterwards.

HARBINGER OF SUMMER. Afternoon temperature hit 85 degrees, it was a good afternoon to take pencil, paper, and calculator to a coffee house with a view of the railroad tracks and work on a paper. The calculations came out properly, which will make the paper better, the iced mochas were quite good, and the railroad put eight trains through in 90 minutes, including two pairs of meets downtown (eastbounds picking up speed after their lunch stops, westbounds in Run 8 ...) It was a productive and enjoyable afternoon. Thanks for looking in, if you've been waiting for the free ice cream, there's some to come.

STILL WORKING ON THOSE TERM PAPERS. Back with some more substantive stuff Tuesday evening.

RUNNING EXTRA. Granted, the next set of posts doesn't show up until Friday. Thanks for your patience. It has been a productive week at the day job.

D'OH! "Weblogs are creating a whole new campus culture." Big Media are sometimes so slow on the uptake.

EVERYBODY'S A MUSIC CRITIC. Tyler at Marginal Revolution comments on the Ten Dirty Secrets of classical music. I'll concur with Professor Cowen in dissenting to points 2 and 8, and concur in part and dissent in part on British composers (Edward Elgar? Stick to daytime TV and high-school graduations, please.) I'll also add my own candidate: music written for purposes of getting tenure serves no other purpose. Flame away.

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING

Dean's World has the story.

QUOTE OF THE DAY.

The reason the hash the older Boomers had made of the country was so apparent to us was that we were living in it -- it was called "the '70s." What a dismal, flattened-out, dreary decade. So I've been mystified too by the nostalgia some young people have for "the '70s." (What do they actually know about the '70s? And where and how did they form their ideas about it? They seem, in any case, to love their image of the '70s.) Many young people seem convinced that the '70s were one long blast -- a campy, coked-up package a-brim with silly fashions, silly music, and casual sex. What a hoot!!!

Michael at Two Blowhards is amused with the younger set discovering the Destructive Generation. They're not the only street sweepers following the circus parade.

SPELLING OUT YOUR LOSS FUNCTION. In statistical inference, there are two serious mistakes a researcher can make. The first type, which practitioners call Type I error, involves the rejection of a true null hypothesis. In many circumstances, people will describe such a case as a "false positive," because the null hypothesis is commonly absence of something (a disease, a price effect) and its rejection involves a mistaken diagnosis or a "statistically significant" coefficient (particularly troublesome if said coefficient also has the "wrong sign.")

The second type, per corollary a Type II error involves the failure to reject a false null hypothesis. Here, a sick person tests as healthy, or a coefficient that ought to differ from zero prints out as "statistically insignificant."

The current political tussle about the September 11 hearings and Saddam's missing weapons involves a confusion over the types of error in inference. Here is Dean at Dean's World claiming to see some careless thinking.

Time to open your eyes and ears. You can't blame people for not stopping something bad (9/11) with bad/vague intel, then complain that they are stopping something bad (Iraq) with bad intel, saying there's "no proof, they didn't do anything to us."

True up to a point. The policy maker, and the voter, must decide what their loss functions are in case of error. To the extent that Saddam's weapons programs were a cassus belli, their absence after the fact has the potential to be a Type I error. (I use the hedge, "potential," to forestall any angry emails alleging those weapons being secreted in Syria or poured into the Euphrates river.) Type I errors are not by themselves grounds for condemning a policy, but policy makers have an obligation to spell out their loss functions. Defenders of the Iraq campaign, for example, might argue that they would prefer to explain why the intelligence was faulty once Saddam is in jail, against the alternative of explaining to their children why they now have to pray with their noses pointed south of east. Their loss function is biased in favor of acting on a positive, whether false or not Critics of the campaign, on the other hand, might argue that future claims of gathering danger are less credible. Their loss function is biased in favor of not acting on a negative, including a false positive.

The September 11 attacks, on the other hand, are an instance of a Type II error. Such error is a bit more difficult to deal with, as much of the statistical inference treats the false positives as the more serious error, and investigators seek to find the most powerful test against the type II error given a small risk of a type I error, or a desire to avoid false positives.

If memory serves, the August 2001 the threat board came up empty, or with indicators of an attack on Japanese interests, when the real threat was within our borders. Critics of the intelligence activities (of several Administrations) are tussling with the loss function they wish to specify. Some would prefer not to explain why there is a gaping hole in Battery Park: their loss function is biased in favor of acting, although that puts them at risk of acting on a false positive. Some would prefer not to act in the absence of a clearly true positive: this increases the risk that there will be a hole in Battery Park. There is, however, evidence that intelligence-gathering activities involving both al Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq missed both positive and negative signals. Part of the art of designing inference that is more powerful against both Type I and Type II errors is understanding the failures of the existing intelligence activities. Two counterfactual columns, by Gregg Easterbrook and by Kathleen Parker illustrate yet another pitfall: suppose that in late August or early September of 2001, the U.S.military had rolled up the September 11 plot and clobbered Afghanistan. As the Twin Towers would still be standing, would that be evidence of a Type I error on the part of the Bush Administration, or would the critics be guilty of committing a Type II error by inferring that nothing was wrong?

(Thanks to Betsy's Page for linking these counterfactuals and other columns in a related vein.)

EASTER SUNRISE as Sgt. Hook sees it, somewhere in Afghanistan.

STOP ME BEFORE I SPEND AGAIN. At Boots and Sabers, Owen has two posts on the logic of a tax-limitation amendment Wisconsin legislators are considering. In the earlier post, he notes,

What strikes me is that the public universities, public health, and transportation belong to the voters. Those things are paid for by the voters and used by the voters. What, exactly, is wrong with having to ask the voters regarding their funding?

A comment notes that voters already have the power to control spending, by voting for fiscally responsible legislators, an observation that is valid up to a point. Legislators find the trading of "yes" votes more congenial than the trading of "no" votes, a development that led to the Base Closing Commissions whose recommendations on military bases were to be considered in full, on an up or down vote in Congress. A later post considers some of the specifics of the proposed constitutional amendment.

SECRET AMNESTY PLAN? Presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry would like to see ten million new jobs "created" in the United States over the next four years. Econ Log draws unkind parallels between such rhetoric and roosters crowing at sunrise. Spoons Experience sees a more sinister plot. The first commenter there had the same thought I did ...

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND DIVERSITY RESOURCES FAILED TO NOTIFY US that April 6 was National Tartan Day. (Via Black Five, who also reminds readers of the Highland events in Greater DeKalb. (This one is good, and it takes a certain amount of class to honour a representative of H.M. the Queen and sing "Rose of Scotland" at the same closing ceremony. Imagine recognizing a representative of the Soviet Government at an Estonian cultural event.)

PREVIEW OF A COMING HOMEWORK PROBLEM. Graduate students, read and understand this article and this commentary.

I KNEW MAX McGEE. AND YOU'RE NO MAX McGEE:

(Hat tip: Matt Margolis.)

PURIST, AND PROUD OF IT. St. Paul at Fraters Libertas kindly quotes these observations about women's collegiate basketball concurrently with more sympathetic reader mail. In a more recent post, he cites additional reader mail.

As far as the general slowness and lethargy of the women's game, you're right. The women's game does not produce the display of athleticism you'll see in the NBA or men’s college ball. The women's game is for purists. For those who love the art of the game. The women's game is bedrocked on fundamentals, discipline, and teamwork. The reason the women's brackets in the tourney were so less tumultuous than the men is because success in the women's game is founded upon much more predictable factors than the men. The women's game rewards great coaching, and team cohesiveness.

No disagreement here.

The men's tournament is most certainly more exciting.

Yes, in the same way that the Penn Central is more exciting than the Norfolk and Western. There is a certain kind of excitement that accompanies indiscipline.

It's the same kind of excitement the perpetually undependable student can be counted on to bring to class, particularly when a project is due or after an exam is returned.

Before I started law school and actually had time to watch television, you couldn't pull me away from ESPN in early March. I love the upsets, the underdogs, and the uncertainty of it all. And there are some men's coaches who I can always count on as putting together great team basketball rather than just herding phenomenal athletes (Mike K. at Duke and Rick Majerus at Utah come to mind). But if I want to appreciate the finer points of the intellectual pursuit of basketball, give me the women's game any day. Whether there's enough of an audience of weirdoes like me who think basketball is an intellectual pursuit to warrant giving the women's game as much time as it gets, I don't know. I don't necessarily contest your conclusion, just thought I'd provide another perspective on the debate.

I rest my case.

The balance of the post deals with Thirteenth Generation crudity, and it's worth reading. Go have a look.

PROPERTY BECOMES CLOTHED WITH A PUBLIC INTEREST when it is used in such a way as to affect the public at large. It therefore follows that if an owner uses property in such a way as to reduce the consumption of adult beverages by young adults, that action is in the public interest, does it not? The Sports Economist teases, "Students sue for right to drink cheaply." The post focusses on some voluntary cooperation by Madison, Wisconsin tavernkeepers to preempt a ban on cheap drinks.

The ban began after the University of Wisconsin's Policy, Alternatives, Community and Education, or PACE Project, recommended the creation of an ordinance to ban drink specials in downtown bars.

Instead of making the ban public policy, a group of bar owners decided to voluntarily ban weekend drink specials. These bar owners are now being sued for their actions.

No big surprise here. The Interstate Commerce Commission, according to retired Professor George Hilton, existed to stabilize collusive agreements the railroads couldn't stabilize themselves. The Commission is long gone, but the game-theoretic modeling continues.

Returning to the story,

The case alleges any talk of banning drink specials at one particular time is price fixing. It printed instances in which bar owners such as the owner of the Nitty Gritty, Marsh Shapiro, stated a group of bars would begin a ban on drink specials for the weekend.

The lawsuit also cites an instance in which UW Chancellor John Wiley stated the ban on specials may make the bars more profitable.

Quite so. I have used the happy hour problem as a brain-teaser in public policy courses for years. Now, for as long as the linked sources remain live, I will have supporting material for students. The idea of regulation in self-interest sold as a regulation in the public interest is probably as old as codified law itself, and Adam Smith correctly diagnosed it years ago:

To widen the market and to narrow the competition is always the interest of the dealers ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

(The Wealth of Nations, Book I Chapter XI)

SUPERINTENDENT'S DISCLAIMER: The Superintendent at one time wrote and edited for the Badger Herald and is a proud Badger (B.B.A. 1975, Ph.D. 1980)

I HAVE TO BE THE BEARER OF BAD NEWS. Betsy's Page follows up on the articles Joanne Jacobs linked to, which provoked a recent elaboration that has been commended (thanks!) in St. Cloud. Mrs Newmark's observations today are to the point:

When I taught middle school, the slacker kids would tell me that they would shape up in high school. They would do their homework then, because it would matter then. Now, I've moved on to teaching high school and I get the same response. They'll claim that they can do their homework when they set their minds to it and it matters. Sure. I look at some of these kids and seriously doubt that they'll be able to change their ways when they're in college. Also, in high school, most teachers will give some credit just for doing their homework whether it is correct or not and for class participation. I have some students who can do poorly on every single test, but by doing their homework and participating in class discussions. I worry about how they'll do in college when their grades will be based simply on how they do on tests and papers.

I hesitate to generalize from my own experience, but the high defect rate in higher education suggests the following observation is not off base.

Bad habits acquired in middle and high school persist as bad habits in college.

Got that? Good.

Here's what provokes today's rant: a stack of term paper drafts, some of which students are attempting to write in order to satisfy a new departmental graduation requirement. Absent substantial improvement, some of these papers will not satisfy the requirement, despite my efforts this week to make public the criteria by which the papers will be evaluated. A number of them read as if they are the first efforts, EVER, by these students to commit anything longer than the "pay to the order of" line on a check to paper. Be grateful, Mr. and Ms. America, that the universities are holding the last line of defense against social promotion into the workforce. But be very angry that the lines of defense the middle and high schools were supposed to have held have been deserted, often at the urging of the students and of some of their parents.

CLOSING THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT? Joanne Jacobs picks up a Debra Saunders column ridiculing a proposal by the president of San Francisco State University (at one time presided over by the incomparable S. I. Hayakawa) to cope with budget cuts by closing the College of Engineering. One commenter to the post recognized the strategy.

While you're visiting Joanne's site, read and understand The Awful Truth. The various admissions counselors, protectors of the eligibility of the unprepared, and hand-wringers about "retention" would do well to grasp the following:

The vast majority of high school seniors say they plan to get a college degree. Yet less than 40 percent will earn a two- or four-year degree in 10 years. Success is linked closely to high school performance: While 64 percent of A students with college plans earn a two-year or higher degree; only 14 percent of college-bound seniors with averages of C or lower earn any sort of degree within 10 years. Half of the C and D students will not earn a single college credit. They'll take remedial classes and then give up.

Ms Jacobs links to sound advice that high-schoolers who aspire to a degree ought to read and understand. Go there now.

Welcome back. James E. Rosenbaum spells out the bad news.

Every year I ask my college class how many students have seen a high school teacher cry, and most students raise their hands. When I ask what provoked the crying, most stories are about teachers who threaten to give students bad grades and students who do not care. When I ask my colleagues the same question about their high school teachers from one or two generations ago, virtually none can recall such tears. This is not a systematic survey, but it suggests a big change.

A hint to teachers: don't threaten. Just. Do. It. The kids will thank you later.

Beyond the negative effect that the college-for-all push has on individual students, there is the broader negative effect it has on high schools? academic climate. Seeing that college access is guaranteed, some students believe that they can challenge teachers? authority and suffer no penalty; some teachers may respond to their diminished authority by leaving the profession or by reducing their demands on students (Sedlak et al., 1986). While these changes have their greatest impact on low-achieving students, even high-achieving students will be in classes where teachers? authority is questioned, and such students may wonder if they could prepare for college with less effort.

Those looking for justice may see it in the finding that unmotivated students will end up worse off--stuck with remedial classes, fewer college credits and degrees, and lower earnings. But this is not a happy ending. Students waste their high school years, disrupt high school for others, drag down the standards in high school, and force colleges to provide high school courses as an increasingly larger segment of their curriculum.

What's that cliche? If you think education is expensive, try ignorance? The preceding spells out some of the costs of that ignorance. Add to that the lost output as teachers and professors move from work they'd like to do and would do well, if only given the opportunity and the support from their principals, superintendents, deans, and provosts, to other work where they might be as well (or better) paid but less enthusiastic. Add to that the losses taxpayers bear in the form of prison for some of the kids the education system failed, and in relief payments to workers whose work is outsourced owing to their own lack of technical competence. (Ms Jacobs has a lot of stuff on bad algebra skills and diminished prospects. Just keep reading.) Add to that the losses consumers bear in the form of incompetence taxes (the forklift driver breaks the goods, the picking clerk misreads the form, the order-taker at McDonald's is surly, the checker at the convenience store can't make change.) Life after college may be the Revenge of the Nerds, but the rough justice Professor Rosenbaum alludes to in the second paragraph supra does not come for free.

On the other hand, San Francisco State's president might be able to more effectively threaten to close the Washington Monument by closing down everything that's remedial: the not-for-credit classes in lieu of high school classes, the tutoring and retention bureaucracies for so-called "at risk" students, and some of the dubious centers Ms. Saunders singles out.

There is one part of Professor Rosenbaum's essay that calls for a bit more commentary, particularly if Cold Spring Shops wishes to move up in the Economics B. C. S.

The past 40 years brought three radical social transformations that together have dramatically increased the percentage of students who want to attend college. First, the earnings advantage of college graduates has grown (Grubb, 1996). Second, college--especially community college (a minor factor in the prior generation)--has become much more accessible. In the past four decades, while enrollments at four-year colleges doubled, enrollments increased five-fold at community colleges (NCES, 1999). Third, and perhaps most remarkably, virtually all community colleges adopted a revolutionary policy of open admissions. Unlike many four-year colleges, virtually all two-year colleges opened their doors to admit all interested high school graduates, regardless of students? prior academic achievement. Even high school graduates with barely passing grades are routinely welcomed because almost all two-year colleges offer a wide array of remedial courses. Indeed, in many cases, students do not even have to be high school graduates because most two-year colleges offer these students access to some non-credit courses, including GED courses.

The first of these developments is more subtle than Professor Rosenbaum lets on. Ceteris paribus an increase in the production of college graduates depresses the premium to a degree. If the demand for degreed professionals simultaneously increases, the premium will increase provided the demand increase exceeds the supply increase (professors are reluctant to ask students to diagram such things as there is much room for confusion.) There might be some increase in the demand, but the controversy over work permits for immigrant engineers and computer programmers suggests something else is at work. One possibility is the defect rate in higher education. Under this hypothesis, the premium to a degree is higher because although more people are entering colleges, fewer are completing degrees, particularly the technically demanding (if boring) ones that command the highest salaries.

The second and third transformations are not necessarily for the good, either. Consider in particular the opportunity to earn a high school equivalent degree at community college. Nobel Laureate James J. Heckman has been doing some work on the effectiveness of the GED (among other things, scroll around) that suggests the equivalent degree is not in fact equivalent to a standard high school diploma ... but whether that is a consequence of the people who leave high school being in some way different from those who finish on time remains a topic of interest.

Is there, somewhere, a senior university administrator who will stand up and say, "We will no longer spend any money doing the things the high schools ... nay, the kindergartens ... failed to do, and we will no longer offer admission to anyone who is not sufficiently prepared?"

TRAIN THEM UP IN THE RIGHT WAY. The Thomas the Tank Engine tapes, movies, and preservation railway events (coming this summer to Greater DeKalb) are having a salutary effect on the development of the next generation of train enthusiasts, although some youngsters are having troubles with some of the terminology. (Wait until he discovers hot boxes.)

AND UP FROM THE GROUND CAME A BUBBLING CRUDE. The next thing you know, ol' Jed's a millionaire:

Last month, a Kentucky company hit oil on a farm in Pickett County. The pressure of oil naturally bubbling to the surface has been so great that the producers have been unable to remove the drill for the past 25 days. . . .

(Hat tip: Insta Pundit.)

IN THE ECONOMICS BCS. (That's Blog Championship Series.) Thanks, Craig, and welcome, Marginal Revolution readers.

SECOND SECTION: Betsy notes that Craig is being a mensch.

NO DISAGREEMENT FROM MY STUDENTS

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.

(Hat tip: Atlantic Blog.)

AUDITOR'S REPORT. Atlantic Blog reports reader warnings that the quiz site is attempting to load Trojans onto the websites of people posting the quiz. The image and the link to the quiz have been accordingly embargoed.

GREAT COMEBACK. The Elder at Fraters Libertas reports the outcome of the Western Bracket of the collegiate hockey tournament. Denver rallies to eliminate Minnesota-Duluth, a disappointment to Bulldog fans particularly with Duluth leading 3-1 after two.

As comebacks go, Denver's is great, but not quite up to the standard Wisconsin set in 1973. Cornell lead 4-0 after two and 5-1 with 10 minutes to go, yet Wisconsin tied it with under a minute to play and won it in overtime. In the finals, Wisconsin dealt rather handily with Denver. The Best in the West. The heck with the East.

REINVENTING THE DOODLEBUG. Live from the Third Rail asks "How New is the DMU?" An article in the Miami Herald about a commuter rail demonstration project linking Johnstown and Pittsburgh provokes the question. The term "diesel multiple unit" is a British term for a self-propelled diesel rail car capable of running in multiple with other self-propelled diesel rail cars. The car to be demonstrated is a new offering from Colorado Rail Car. In North America, the Budd Rail Diesel Car is the most commonly-used first-generation example, although Amtrak and some northeastern commuter rail authorities invested in a second-generation version that made use of the Metroliner tooling called the SPV-2000 (for "Self Propelled Vehicle for the year 2000.)

To my knowledge, none of these vehicles are still running, although the Superintendent will welcome corrections from Connecticut readers, should any still be running there. A few Rail Diesel Cars continue to serve remote parts of Canada.

The news report expresses concern about the new diesel multiple unit car being able to handle the west slope of The Mountain on The Pennsylvania Railroad.

But can the DMU make the grade? Specifically, can it climb the 2-percent grade that trains must negotiate between Johnstown and Altoona?

The answer will come April 15 when a DMU will roll through the region as part of a multistate demonstration, which begins and ends in Miami.

Trains en route from Johnstown to Altoona must traverse the steep and rugged Cresson Mountain, said Bob Abraham of Monroeville, regional director of Keystone Association of Rail Passengers.

The Budd Rail Diesel Car was up to the challenge. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad offered a train called Daylight Speedliner connecting Pittsburgh with Baltimore. The train used Budd Rail Diesel Cars, which were not capable of pulling unpowered coaches. The Colorado Rail Car product has some train-hauling capability.

The folks at Live from the Third Rail wonder whether or not shorter self-propelled trains offering a more frequent service are an improvement over longer locomotive-hauled (or pushed trains) running less frequently. The answer to that depends in part on track capacity. In Railway Blunders (the usual suspects don't have it in stock), author Adrian Vaughan argues that the shorter more frequent Virgin Voyager trains on more frequent headways are not practical on the stressed-to-capacity British metals.

TO VISIT THE MAN IN THE MOON. Not yet, not even 1/10,000 of the way there, but Space Ship One has completed a second powered flight. (Hat tip: Will at Vodka Pundit.)

TRASHING TITLE IX. St. Paul at Fraters Libertas finds reason to question Title IX compliance in intercollegiate sports, the creation of cheerleading as a sport (distinct from the spirit squads some universities now field) and a number of other things, including women's basketball in general.

First, the sporting event aspect. The game action, as it were, is painfully slow and deliberate. Compared to the men's game, it actually appears as if they’re all playing under water. And while the scores are often competitive and some of the fundamentals of the game are being executed to a reasonable degree of skill, due to the overall low standards of athleticism, any potential drama or excitement is negated, for the objective viewer.

In a pig's eye. What St. Paul is describing is the defensive breakdown that men's basketball has degenerated into. For "slow and deliberate," substitute "moving without the ball and hitting the cutter," or "freeing the shooting guard for an open shot." Very few men's teams (unless they are coached by a Bennett) understand what these things mean. For "low standards of athleticism," substitute "presence of transition defense, precluding breakaway dunks by a bucket-hanger." Very few men's teams (same disclaimer) get this either. That leaves as "drama and excitement" the typical men's game (including in the NBA), characterized as 36 (or 44) minutes of no defense and individual improvisation, followed by 30 minutes to play the remaining four minutes, in which the leading team plays no defense and the trailing team commits fouls. To repeat, in a pig's eye.

HERE WE GO AGAIN. It's springtime, which means the Glenbrook North students have to do something arrest-worthy involving underage drinking. No chumming or manure involved this time. Let us give thanks for small favors.

RAPTOR RULES THE SKIES. Peregrine falcons are no longer endangered in Chicago, although their habit of making a lunch of a pigeon in plain view of human diners is not for the faint of heart. Local bird watchers have observed bald eagles nesting near the Cal-Sag Channel on the South Side.

WHEW.

The Cubs and the owners of Skybox on Waveland announced Thursday afternoon they have reached a settlement of their lawsuit. Both sides declined to release details of the agreement.

Ludicrous litigation averted.

(NOT) RIDING ON THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS. Josh at Harvard Republican notes that few people died because few people ride Amtrak's City of New Orleans (formerly the Panama Limited; the City was a day train with an 8 am departure and a midnight arrival at the other end of the line, 16 hours from the Foot of the Lakes to the Delta.) Chris at Signifying Nothing suggests that neither the Amtrak subsidy nor the pricing make much sense.

[Passengers] particularly aren’t enticed by a train that costs $182 to ride round-trip, $320 if you want to ride on the lower level, and a whopping $520 if you want to have a bed to sleep in. By contrast, you can fly non-stop round-trip to Chicago from New Orleans next weekend for $398… or, if you’re willing to do some advance planning, you can fly round-trip for $244 over a weekend in May. Not to mention that your trip will be almost 17 hours shorter in duration.

Or, you can ride Greyhound, completely unsubsidized, for $138 round trip—and, if you pick the right bus, it doesn’t take much more time than the Amtrak train.

I'm not sure I follow the lower-level tariff, the City has most of the seating upstairs, but the sleeping car service is not the equivalent of a six-star rolling hotel. Moreover, Greyhound does not have to lease its right of way from the Interstate Highway Authority, which sounds like a subsidy to me.

Sadly, the passenger who died on the train is Chicago resident Clara Downs, a mother of a paralyzed son returning from her sister-in-law's funeral, who rode the train account a fear of flying. The Superintendent's condolences to the Downs family. On a per-passenger mile basis, airplanes are safer than Amtrak trains, with both modes much safer than driving.

INVOLUNTARY SEGREGATION. Dynamist discovers the adaptive reuse of Roanoke's Raymond Loewy redesigned passenger train station. Ms. Postrel laments that the O. Winston Link photographs of the concourse area show the "Colored" waiting room signs that the museum has removed. ("Wouldn't want to remind visitors of just how recent--how modern--legally enforced segregation was.") It is likely that the Norfolk and Western Railway removed the signs sometime in the mid-1960s. The last passenger trains on the line terminated effective April 30, 1971.

Unfortunately, a visitor to the Roanoke museum is not able to go downstairs and see one of these babies:

VOLUNTARY SELF-SEGREGATION. Via Andrew Sullivan, a Timothy Noah column on the emergence of what Mr Noah terms "landslide counties," leading to a hypothesis:

Maybe the vulgarization of the American political sensibility predated the media trend. Maybe it arose from people no longer having any friends who could challenge their political beliefs.

There are a few doctoral dissertations lurking in this story.

The change in neighborhood segregation between Democrats and Republicans is so much greater than the change in neighborhood segregation between whites and blacks that the latter scarcely seems worth mentioning, except to express outrage that geographic racial integration, one of the most important goals of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, has advanced so slowly. A young and hungry sociologist seeking a dramatic new fin de siècle trend to study wouldn't give geographic segregation by race more than a passing glance before committing the next 10 years of his life to the study of geographic segregation by political orientation.

It is worth remembering that "geographic racial integration" included attempts to correct de facto segregation by measures such as school busing, which had the side effect of relocating so many bus-worthy students outside the affected school districts as to render the integration efforts moot; by attempts to make some voluntary associations illegal, which had the side effect of ending group health insurance plans not bundled with workplaces; and by attempts to "celebrate" the authenticity of some kinds of yobbery while marginalizing others. It is one thing to say that the state shall not compel people not to associate with others; it is quite another to say that the state shall compel people to associate with others even if they don't want to. The polarized counties are simply a consequence of the latter compulsion.

SECOND SECTION: Speaking of compelled association ...

SETTING THOSE STANDARDS FOR HIGH SPEED RAIL:

(This is a linked image. Buy a print from artist Robert West, who prefers that people not download it.)

The Superintendent has long maintained that contemporary high-speed rail initiatives are useless, unless they surpass the standards set during the Depression and the years immediately after World War II, most recently with this comparison. This site provides all sorts of information about mass transportation developments in the Kenosha, Wisconsin (site of Wisconsin's most modern streetcar line) and includes recollections of genuine high-speed trains that would shame Wisconsin's current efforts.

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS NO. 81 calls at Leaking Pure White Noise. Scroll down to find the show's itinerary. The Superintendent expects an electric railway reference from Where Worlds Collide.

LOOK WHO IS BRAGGING ABOUT DEREGULATION. Northern Illinois University brags on its conservation efforts. Note the institutional changes the University is taking advantage of:

By using tools such as performance contracts and learning how to purchase gas and electricity in the recently deregulated markets for those commodities, NIU has saved more than $9.3 million over the last two years alone.

“Looking for ways to save money on energy costs is not a new idea for us,” said Robert Albanese, associate vice president for finance and facilities for NIU. “We have been working to trim those costs for years, and we have developed some fairly sophisticated tools to assist us in that process.”

Among the biggest cost-saving tools used are “performance contracts,” which allow the university to pay for energy-saving improvements using the resulting savings.

Currently, the university is realizing a savings of about $2.8 million a year as a result of performance contracts to install more energy efficient lighting in some buildings and to convert other buildings on campus to chilled water cooling (vs. standard air conditioning).

According to a report released this week by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, that total makes NIU the leader among state universities (Emphasis added by the Superintendent), accounting for almost half of the $6.2 million in savings realized from such contracts at all universities across the state.

Northern also has realized significant savings on natural gas and electricity costs in recent years by taking advantage of the recently deregulated markets for those commodities.

In 2002, NIU’s ability to negotiate with electricity vendors allowed the university to save $1,074,000 on electricity, and its natural gas buying strategy netted a savings of $1.2 million vs. what it would have paid had it purchased those commodities at the standard index rates in effect at those times.

In 2003, those cost-cutting measures resulted in savings of $978,000 on electricity and $320,000 on natural gas.

The university also has saved tens of thousands of dollars through its participation in special rider programs with electricity providers, receiving a cash incentive in return for its willingness to make emergency reductions in power usage during times of peak demand on the power grid.

In Illinois, the cash incentive is available to some residential consumers. The Superintendent sells Commonwealth Edison the right to turn off his central air conditioner for consideration of $10 a month in June, July, and August. The power system is not sufficiently sophisticated yet for Edison to allow residential consumers participating in that plan to also choose their own power suppliers. Universities, and other large commercial and industrial users, receive both opportunities.

HERE WE GO AGAIN. It's teaching, scholarship, service, right? Not according to Critical Mass:

Last time I checked, it was a running joke in my department that winning a teaching award actually harms your chances of getting tenure. I don't think Penn's unusual in that respect, and as shrinks and theorists will both tell you, jokes often express some pretty unpleasant truths.

Charlie Sykes (details or compare prices -- it's real cheap) made that observation years ago. The Critical Mass post highlights yet another ten-step program for taking teaching seriously as part of the evaluation of probationary (translation: earn tenure as a good teacher) and continuing (translation: get some merit money) university faculty. Ms. O'Connor is skeptical.

The cynic in me says that at many schools--those with pretensions to be elite, anyhow--teaching must and will remain a lesser form of work than scholarship. The internal pecking order that is so essential to such schools' sense of themselves as nationally important must be maintained. Even more cynically, and more broadly, the new disfunctional norm, in which teaching labor is increasingly fobbed off on undertrained grad students and underpaid, uninsured adjuncts must be maintained.

But there's nothing really new here. Consider the 1992 Myth of the Superhuman Professor which makes some of the same points.

Consider the universal vision of the professor of the 90's. She does pioneering research in a critical area and brings in big bucks to support the research, including several six-figure NSF grants and 60% release time. She publishes 5-10 papers each year in the most prestigious journals in her field and is a shoo-in for the National Academy. She is a dedicated and stimulating instructor and wins teaching awards at her university and nationally. She does more than her fair share of the tedious but vital service chores that no one wants to do and does them excellently.

She is mostly imaginary. The classical academic fantasy is that every professor should resemble this combination of Leonardo, Socrates, and Mother Teresa, but the reality is that very few can pull it off - certainly not enough to populate every engineering department. Nevertheless, requiring every new engineering professor to be first and foremost a researcher has become standard academic policy in the past several decades, with dramatic effects on every aspect of academia from the makeup of the faculty to the structure and content of courses and curricula. You might presume that there were compelling theoretical or empirical reasons for so many universities to adopt a policy with such profound ramifications, and that there must be equally compelling arguments for maintaining the policy.

You would be wrong. The usual justification for trying to make all professors researchers is the argument that teaching and research are inextricably linked, to an extent that the first cannot be done well in the absence of the second. This argument is a strange one. Its proponents - usually academicians, trained in scientific method and the rules of logical inference - offer it with unbounded conviction, passion, and a total absence of evidence. They argue that only researchers are aware of recent developments in their field, so that courses taught by nonresearchers must be irrelevant or obsolete. They add that nonresearchers whom students rate as good teachers must be merely "entertainers," providing style without substance. When challenged to produce some evidence for the linkage between research and teaching, they name professors they know who have both admirable research records and teaching awards, which is like claiming that you can only be a world-class organist if you practice medicine in Africa and pointing to Albert Schweitzer to prove it.

There is much wrong with the academy, and much more to post about, as time permits. Do bear in mind that the alleged neglect of teaching for other things has a long history, it was the late William Arrowsmith who long ago observed, ""At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert is to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the-year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests." Nothing in that quote, or in the "Superhuman Professor" essay, about the corrosive effects of Jacuzzi U., or of stress-free zone, on the additional burdens the marketing mentality places on the professoriate.

THE BOURGEOISIE HAVE NO COUNTRY. Milt Rosenberg points to Samuel Huntington's latest:

Nationalism has proven wrong Karl Marx's concept of a unified international proletariat. Globalization is proving right Adam Smith's observation that while "the proprietor of land is necessarily a citizen of the particular country in which his estate lies . . . the proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country." Smith's 1776 words describe the way contemporary transnational businessmen see themselves. Summarizing their interviews with executives of 23 American multinational corporations and nonprofit organizations, James Davison Hunter and Joshua Yates conclude:

"Surely these elites are cosmopolitans: they travel the world and their field of responsibility is the world. Indeed, they see themselves as 'global citizens.' Again and again, we heard them say that they thought of themselves more as 'citizens of the world' who happen to carry an American passport than as U.S. citizens who happen to work in a global organization. They possess all that is implied in the notion of the cosmopolitan. They are sophisticated, urbane and universalistic in their perspective and ethical commitments."

Professor Huntington doth generalize too much, but the essay is worth a careful reading, and he well might have correctly summarized the domestic cultural clash:

These critics are right. Throughout American history, people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting its Anglo-Protestant culture and political values. This benefited them and the country.

Millions of immigrants and their children achieved wealth, power and status in American society precisely because they assimilated themselves into the prevailing American culture. Hence there is no validity to the claim that Americans have to choose between a white, racist, WASP-ish ethnic identity, on the one hand, and an abstract, shallow civic identity dependent on commitment to certain political principles, on the other. The core of their identity is the culture that the settlers created, which generations of immigrants have absorbed, and which gave birth to the American Creed. At the heart of that culture has been Protestantism.

The prevailing culture, on the other hand, has borrowed from what others brought. Leisurely Sundays? Thank the Germans. Friday fish-fry? Thank the Roman Catholics. Rock-'n-roll? Thank Black America. Pizza? Tacos? Five-dollar coffees?

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. Big Name College. Stress Free Zone. What's wrong with this picture?

Some college officials see the contradiction inherent in their new efforts to offset stress and encourage the joys of reflection and unstructured time. After all, it was multitasking, hyperorganized, résumé building behavior that helped some students get admitted to their schools in the first place.

So notes Sara Rimer (via Betsy's Page.) Read on:

Many students here said they welcomed the emphasis on the joy of learning. And many said they were having fun at college. But they were quick to point out the realities of the world they live in.

Travis Brennan, a Bowdoin senior who wants to be a lawyer, said all his love of learning would not get him into a good law school. What he needs, Mr. Brennan said, are high law board scores. "You have to be mindful that you're operating in a larger system," he said.

And why does Mr. Brennan want to be a lawyer? Some of the most miserable middle-agers are the people who chose a field of study because it seemed like the thing to do, even if it wasn't any fun.

In the 1960's and 1970's, with students demanding liberation from administrators, colleges relinquished their role as in loco parentis chaperones. Now, some of the students who once told administrators to get out of their lives are parents paying high tuition and expecting colleges to smooth over everything from their children's relationships with roommates to grades.

Generational generalizations have their limitations, but the hypothesis that people might as adults over-correct for perceived errors in their own upbringing is worth further investigation.

Colleges, in the meantime, are coaching their students on how to manage their overmanaging parents. At Austin College, in Sherman, Tex., Rosemarie C. Rothmeier, director of student services and counseling, coaches pre-med students who are afraid to tell their parents that they hate organic chemistry and do not want to be doctors after all. One piece of advice, "Don't drop the bomb at Thanksgiving dinner."

Some college officials say parents must share responsibility for their children's difficulties in coping with the inevitable stresses of college.

"Rather than seeing late adolescence as a time of learning by trial and error," Mr. Bradley told the trustees, "many parents put great energy into trying to eliminate the error." He suggested that perhaps parents were creating a generation of students afraid to take risks.

Sad. The best thanks a kid can give his or her folks is to live well as an adult. The best way the parents can earn that thanks is to give their kids the freedom to discover what "living well" looks like.

REINVENTING THE WHEEL? King at SCSU Scholars wonders why there are no economists on the committee developing economics content standards for Minnesota. I wonder why the Minnesotans are bent on doing from scratch something that has already been done. There is a state council on economic education (with a branch in St. Cloud) and the National Council on Economic Education has developed twenty content standards (that's educationese for "big ideas") that are ready to be adopted and implemented.

There is plenty of work to be done in teaching economics, as this discovers. It's not just the common schools that ought to be thinking of these things. Tyler at Marginal Revolution contemplates economic illiteracy in the adult world, and guest revolutionary Craig offers more, including a tribute to the late Paul Heyne. Professor Heyne had the right idea about exposing students to economics.

We construct introductions to our fields on the assumption that everyone in the class will go on to acquire a Ph.D. in the subject. So there’s no need to arouse their interest in the subject, [or] to persuade them that a knowledge of this subject can provide the zest of life …

I am absolutely convinced that the first course in economics and, I suspect, in every other academic discipline, should be directed almost exclusively toward raising interesting questions and suggesting ways in which the discipline can be used to generate interesting responses.

The approach presented in the second paragraph might solve a problem confronting many professors.

Teaching supply and demand to hormonally-charged 18-year-olds is a thankless task, and one with few professional rewards. In today’s universities, advancement depends on research and publishing. As a result, undergraduate education has become the ugly step-child of the academic world—one that’s increasingly forced on grad students rather than faculty.

The National Council's twenty big ideas can be a great help to a professor who wants to introduce something other than endless formulas and graphs, most of which don't receive the kind of attention they deserve in a survey course anyway.

(More general comments on the teaching enterprise yet to come.)

WE HAVE TO BEAT ON OUR STUDENTS TO GET THESE RESULTS. According to Chris at Signifying Nothing, "On the other hand, maybe I should just publish in economics journals… that discipline apparently considers three sentences to be a long lit review." It takes a LOT of reinforcement in seminars to instill those habits in new Ph.D.s, many of whom as students would rather motivate what everybody else did than get into the difficulties they are facing, which are the more important things to get in front of others.

HABIT PERSISTENCE. Is there a legacy of regulation in the corporate culture of some airlines? Kevin at Truck and Barter picks up the latest airline quality rankings (read league tables and news coverage.) The upstarts are whupping the legacy carriers. It's not good scholarship to generalize from one's own experience, but this story does not offer a counterexample to the research.

CONTINUING TO PLAY THAT WEAK HAND. Robert at Liberty and Power continues to cover the escapades of hapless Southern Mississippi president Shelby "Ten of Diamonds" Thames.

At this point, supporters of Glamser and Stringer are feeling more optimistic about their prospects for reinstatement. Of course, the job will not be done until

Thames is pushed into immediate retirement;
Angie Dvorak is fired for lying on her vita;
Jack Hanbury?s specially crafted administrative position (?Director of Risk Management?) is abolished; and
The USM faculty manual is revised to exclude non-academic administrators from tenure and promotion decisions.

Angie Dvorak's false claim to have been an Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky became an extra big deal because at USM the VP for Research plays a role in faculty tenure and promotion decisions. Yet Dvorak had never earned tenure at a 4-year institution. (Her Associate Professor position, which in any event came packaged with her job as President, was at Ashland Community College. It remains to be seen whether she ever actually held a tenure-track faculty job at a 4-year-institution before that. Meanwhile, her claim to be an Associate Professor of Economic Development at USM has now been quietly yanked from the university?s Web site.) Since the VP for Research, at a place like USM, is on the same level as the Provost and Chief Academic Officer, and controls a separate bureaucracy from the academic administration, such a person has no business being involved in tenure and promotion decisions. Otherwise, why not cut in the Chief Financial Officer and the VP for Student Affairs?

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS calls at Crazy Pundit.

TODAY'S ODD FACT.

Teenage lesbian or bisexual girls are many times more likely to smoke regularly than straight girls their age. They are the worst hit by tobacco among all groups of young people, according to a new US study.

(From The New Scientist, via Amygdala, who teases, "Cause and effect! Smoking causes lesbianism!")

A GOOD SUGGESTION. Occasional reader Kristi Kelley sent a funny advertisement to her email contact list.

I found the image sufficiently funny to forward it to my email contact list. List member Bill Sjostrom replies, "Now that is funny. Me, I would have blogged it." Australian Legal Eye already has. In fact, the end of the advertising ban in lawyering gives law firms the opportunity to compete in this poster contest, which is for higher stakes than this poster contest. On the other hand, the participants in the latter poster contest have a pretty good grasp of basic economics, something that has been keeping several sources of Company Mail busy. Expect some observations on that topic later this evening.

INSTEAD OF A PIGOUVIAN TAX? Andrew Sullivan links approvingly to a 1999 speech by then-Harvard Professor N. Gregory Mankiw, now an advisor to President Bush.

Cutting income taxes while increasing gasoline taxes would lead to more rapid economic growth, less traffic congestion, safer roads, and reduced risk of global warming--all without jeopardizing long-term fiscal solvency. This may be the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer.

(No, not another mini-dissertation about sequestering funds in the Highway Trust Fund.)

Mr Sullivan updates the suggestion a bit, something along the lines of "for the duration":

A gas tax for the war would be a great idea: it would mean a real general sacrifice, it would help wean us off the oil that is one reason we're mired in the politics of the Middle East, and it would cut down on those ghastly, unsightly, fuel-wasting armored tanks that now pass for cars throughout America. Yes, I mean SUVs.

Perhaps it is also time for a massive rollback of those average fuel economy standards. The converted trucks including minivans) take advantage of an exemption originally intended for farm and small business service trucks, meanwhile less-guzzling station wagons and large sedans are illegal except in small numbers. Real price increases have a salutary effect on fuel consumpbon, including the purchase and use of smaller cars; the rules effectively preclude some sport-ute and minivan drivers from substituting one size downward. (The downside to such depreciation, which we have to deal with ultimately, will be cheaper used sport-utes, trickling down to indigent or novice drivers.)

THEY MAY NOT BE GRADUATING, BUT THEY ARE ENTERTAINING. Both semi-final games in the men's basketball tournament are decided in the final minute with Georgia Tech breaking a tie late, and Connecticut rattling off twelve unanswered points.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT? Success in business means socializing away that Thirteenth Generation crudity.

BLOWIN' IN THE WIND. A Wind Power Summit meets in Chicago, concurrent with the blowing in of the Mendota Hills Wind Farm, soon to be lighting up a Naperville near you. The wind farms are still recipients of seed money, to the extent of a 1.8 cent per kilowatt-hour tax credit for windmill owners. There had to be a lot of tax credit generated today, it would have been a great day for Laser sailing.

MUCH ADO ABOUT THIS? Kyle at Chicago Report links to news that Radio Flyer is moving production of little red metal wagons to China. The news article reports that people have been revealing a preference for plastic wagons, including plastic wagons manufactured for Radio Flyer in Wisconsin.

Presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry included the Radio Flyer closing as evidence of the continuing economic weakness in his Saturday radio address. The loss of 45 metal-stamping jobs, while a setback to the people receiving those paychecks, does an Enron collapse or a Penn Central bankruptcy, let alone the Great Depression make.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

In short, another way of looking at Mr. Hornung's words is that he simply put into balder and less politically attractive form the same assumptions that allow our colleges and universities to rake in the big bucks off black athletes whom they admit to their schools knowing most will never see a college degree.

That's an unsigned Opinon Journal commentary (via Betsy's Page.)

SPELL OUT YOUR CRITERION FUNCTION. Best of the Web snarks at experts, but the linked health advice is sound.

Paul Streets, chief executive of the [British Health Development Authority], said: "Many people waste energy feeling guilty for not going to the gym, when instead they should think about what activity they can do easily and just do it. The key is tailoring the activity to the individual, whatever the age or ability."

He advised taking exercise for at least 30 minutes, five days a week, though this can be broken into shorter periods.

Public health minister Melanie Johnson said: "We want people to recognise that increasing physical activity does not necessarily mean pumping iron at the gym, but undertaking activities like walking a bit more, using the stairs rather than the lift or gardening."

Spot on. There is nothing quite so amusing as to watch the local children walk by enroute to their karate practice or what have you, observing my 19th century style lawn-mower in action, and wondering "what's that?" Their parents sometimes have trouble getting their brains around the idea that when my workout (which is not done in an air-conditioned room, by the way) is done, the grass is cut.

The [Authority's] message was supported by David Jones, professor of sport and exercise science at the University of Birmingham, though he warned campaigns can have a limited effect.

Professor Jones said: "If you want to become fit for a 1,500m race or a marathon, you do need to train very hard. But if you want to stay fit to stay alive, it is very likely that light activity helps."

SO MUCH FOR LINEAR HOMOGENEITY IN HEAD START.

The problem with the research [on Oklahoma preschool programs], said David Blau, a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina and author of "The Child Care Problem," is that it focuses on very high-cost, high-quality programs unlikely to be duplicated in a broad public system. "What we don't know," he said, "is whether, if you scale it down, you get proportionally smaller but similar kinds of benefits. If you cut the costs in half, do you get half the benefits? Or is there some threshold before you get benefits?"

Full story here, via Joanne Jacobs, who observes,

Head Start and state-funded pre-schools for the poor rarely provide a high-quality program; it costs too much, even for a small group. "Universal" pre-school inevitably would be the sort of program that duplicates what happens in middle-class homes and isn't intensive enough to help truly disadvantaged children.

That, too, is a call for further research. At one time, the common schools existed to socialize children into the middle class. (That goal seems to have gone by the boards, but whether it went after the students convinced the administrations to get rid of the dress codes, or after the teachers took off their coats and ties remains to be seen.) The tougher question is, would teachers in universal preschools receive support in holding their charges to a middle-class standard.

THERE ARE GAFFES AND THERE IS STUPIDITY. Heisman Trophy winner and Packer great Paul Hornung (nobody else will wear Number 5 in green and gold) attempted to explain the recent ill fortunes of Notre Dame football on excessively demanding academic standards, suggesting in particular that they have a disparate impact on black athletes. The American Mind checks facts. Captain's Quarters checks premises. King at SCSU Scholars calls for more research.

THE FRANKEN NETWORK. Right Thinking from the Left Coast is unimpressed, particularly with claims that siting the initial stations in large cities suffices to establish a network. Perhaps, but the Chicago outlet is WNTD at 950 KHz on the AM band. Their power is limited account Detroit's more powerful news radio station occupying the same frequency. How limited? It doesn't reach DeKalb, which is 58.3 miles west of Canal and Madison. Thus, no chance to check them out this morning. Milwaukee's WTMJ at 620 KHz comes in 54555 during daylight hours, which change to more convenient hours effective Saturday.

GAS PAINS? Lynne at Knowledge Problem diagnoses it as a blockage. Keep scrolling.

IN PRAISE OF THE MID-MAJORS. David Brooks anticipates the arrival of the thin envelopes.

Even if the admissions criteria are dubious, isn't it still really important to get into a top school? I wonder. I spend a lot of time meeting with students on college campuses. If you put me in a room with 15 students from any of the top 100 schools in this country and asked me at the end of an hour whether these were Harvard kids or Penn State kids, I would not be able to tell you.

There are a lot of smart, lively young people in this country, and you will find them at whatever school you go to. The students at the really elite schools may have more social confidence, but students at less prestigious schools may learn not to let their lives be guided by other people's status rules — a lesson that is worth the tuition all by itself.

As for the quality of education, that's a matter of your actually wanting to learn and being fortunate enough to meet a professor who electrifies your interest in a subject. That can happen at any school because good teachers are spread around, too.

Laura at Apartment 11-D, who recommended the Brooks article adds (read and understand the whole thing)

I've taught now at an elite university and a plebian university, and truthfully I liked the kids at the plebian university better. Sure, there were a few that couldn't write an essay or analyze a text, but for there were also some that were smarter than me. In addition to brains, they had a hunger and a drive that I never witnessed at the elite university. And because I really liked them, I bent over backwards to help them.

Word. I have had the pleasure of arranging the workshop series at Northern Illinois University for years, and when our guests from the more famous universities ask about working conditions and the like, I alert them that my best students are as good as any they have encountered.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

A few years back I met a professor who said that he could never be anything else...everyday he gets to sit around and tell stories to kids, be a mentor, a comedian, a writer, and they actually give him a paycheck...

wow, sign me up.

ok, I'm not stupid....I know that there are some not so fun parts, but to tell you the truth...I have seldom heard an econ professor bitch about any part of their job....a rare breed I'd say...

Now you are beginning to catch on, young apprentice.