Pleading poverty on Montlake

This article in the Seattle Times is about the hard financial times at the University of Washington, the state's flagship university. At this point I'll take a quick aside to point out that despite the university's woes, things are really looking up for the football team.

Anyway, the article is all about how there isn't as much state money as there used to be, so the UW is scrimping and saving to make ends meet. Frankly, I don't see what the problem is, but then I don't quite understand why higher education is publicly funded. I'm dense that way, I think. The externality argument gets more and more tenuous the farther you get from basic skills. By the time you get to college, you're talking about a transaction where the vast majority of the costs and benefits are borne by the parties - the student and the school. I see no need for the state at all.

Having a little trouble staying on track, here.

The article states that the UW is implementing an "activity-based budget system," which will allow them to earmark a student's tuition for the courses he takes, and identify which courses cost more than the revenue they bring. Bravo! The only thing lacking is a strong signal that the courses whose revenue is below their cost will be cut. Or the professors could agree to be paid less, that would be fine, too.

This reminds me of an old joke. The president of a university comes to the dean of the physics department and says, "We're having budget trouble, and your school is one of the most expensive, with all the lab equipment and so forth. Why can't you be more like the math department? All they ask for is pencils, paper, and wastepaper baskets. Or the philosophy department? All they ask for is pencils and paper."

By the way, you'll note that the positive externality argument goes in reverse order of cost in that joke. It's possible that you can argue that there's some societal benefit to another physics major. A math major might be break-even. But we'd be better off with fewer philosophy majors (along with communications, psychology, sociology, education, and of course American Ethnic Studies).

They also mention differential tuition, where students who want to take expensive courses can just pay more. This used to be called "lab fees." Again, I think this is a great idea. When some whip-smart 18-year-old sets out to go to college, he should consider all the costs and benefits of that decision at every step. There's no reason the rest of us should take some of those costs off the table. Why? Ana Marie Cauce, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences says, "You don't want a student deciding to be a psychology major instead of doing mechanical engineering just because psychology costs less." Why the hell not? This is why academics have such a bad reputation out in the real world. In real life, you have to consider the costs of every decision you make. Academics never do. The costs of every (professional) thing they do are picked up by taxpayers, students, donors, or various others. From my perspective, it would be a very good thing if students thought about the full cost of their college education when making a decision to go. They should consider their lost earnings. They should consider the cost of tuition. They should compare this with the possibility of earning more in the future and decide.

This is the part where somebody says, "Wait! What about the poor, who can't afford to go to college?" I have two replies to this. First, I think it's largely a red-herring. I don't think there are too many students who can get into college but can't afford to go to a state school one way or another. However, since I'm advocating drastically increasing the cost of college, I have to do better than that. The answer is that college education could easily be funded by corporations. If a student can't afford school, he could ask Boeing to pay for part of his college in exchange for agreeing to work for Boeing for some period of time. This model is currently being used by one of our largest companies: the United States Military. The benefit is that all the costs and all the benefits are captured by those who are party to the decision of whether to attend college and what to study. This is how you get economic efficiency.

It would work. It would work great. We just have to get over our misty-eyed sentimentality about education and treat it like any other good. In fact, the UW knows it would work, too, although they're not saying it. Why else would they be admitting more out-of-state students? Maybe we could arrange a trade: We'll send all the Washington college students to Oregon and Idaho, and they'll send theirs here. Everybody will pay out-of-state tuition, and the universities will be self-financing.

Finally, this property downtown. How can it simultaneously be a) worth $500 million and b) producing a return of $8 million? That return is about one third what it ought to be. The UW could triple its money by selling the property and investing the proceeds in the stock market.

Math is hard! *

Here is a YouTube video posted by M.J. McDermott, a weather girl in Seattle who went back to college to get a degree in atmospheric sciences. She soon discovered that her old-school arithmetic was a lot better than her fresh-out-of-high-school classmates'. She talks about college students who can't calculate 4x6 without a calculator.

I'm going to ignore the selection problems -- that she's a highly motivated, adult student, and that her classes were almost certainly diluted by a bunch of people who had no business attending college at all. (I'm also going to ignore that she's talking about arithmetic, not mathematics.) Instead, I'm going to focus on her diagnosis: that the way math is taught is a failure.

To make her point, she pages through a few junior high math books, highlighting the fact that there's not much math in them. There's a lot of multi-cultural diverso-nonsense, of course. Never hurts to saddle up that hobby horse for a quick gallop. But when it comes to actual calculations, the curricula McDermott shows seem to mostly wave their hands and leave it up to the student to get the basic idea.

For many students, this is undoubtedly a terrible way to learn to do multiplication or long division. They need a reliable algorithm they can memorize and that will work every time. One example she shows is a book that suggest multiplying by breaking the numbers into clusters, so 26x31 becomes (20x31)+(5x31)+(1x31). If you would have struggled with the traditional approach to multiplication, I'm sure cluster problems are simply more than you can handle. They're abstract, they're subjective, and they require more thinking. However, speaking as somebody who works in a very math-intensive industry, I can tell you that this is exactly how people who are good at math think about the problem. Furthermore, it's unlikely that you'll never actually need to multiply 31 and 26 without a calculator. I can see the new-math-people's point: Why are we wasting everybody's time teaching a method that has pretty much no application?

That statement was hard for me to make, because it's so obvious that as a first approximation all the changes in curriculum for the last forty years have had one of two goals in mind:
a) to indoctrinate students to a certain point of view (e.g., history becomes social studies,

or (mostly) b) to make life easier for teachers (e.g., Shakespeare is expunged, phonics is given the hook). But like I said, I can kind of see the point in this case.

Nobody needs multiplication algorithms. If you're doing math in your head, its good enough to know that 26x31 is about 800 (26 is about 25, which is one quarter of 100. 31 is almost 32, which divided by 4 is 8. 8x100=800.). If that's not close enough, you really should use a calculator. Actually, nobody who's doing math uses a calculator anymore either. You should plug the numbers into Excel.

Once again, it depends what you think the point of school is.

If you think school is about getting everybody up to a certain minimum level, then you better stick with the tried-and-true algorithms. They work, and pretty much anybody can learn them. On the other hand, if you think school is about educating people according to their abilities, so the smart kids do one thing, the average kids do something else, and the dull kids do something else again, then the answer is different.

* Misquote from Teen Talk Barbie. She actually said, "Math class is tough!" No less true.