Coyote Blog

I'd like to see how they cross-promote Tabarrok's book, Launching the Innovation Renaissance with his co-blogger, Tyler Cowen's book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will(Eventually) Feel Better.

According to Cowen, there hasn't been anything innovative since the early 70s and that's why wages went stagnant. He's the reason I don't bother reading Marginal Revolution anymore. Maybe they need a Tabarrok only section.

The 2000's were also the peak years of 17-18 year old US population so the absolute numbers of psych majors may not be strictly comparable (although the tech fields seem somewhat constant). More importantly the psych/performing arts/communications majors are often the place people with no real strong interests end up. Interestingly the fine arts (music, art) when done well are very demanding. I have a friend who is a physicist turned music professor and one of his courses is how to make a living as musician. Successful musicians have several jobs (teaching, performing).

I think one solution that can be done immediately is to eliminate the undeclared major. I think that even if you change majors later, you benefit from the structure imposed by the major. Coupled with a rigorous core curriculum (and stripped of diversity/international requirements) this would help create a greater seriousness in higher ed.

>>> I think one solution that can be done immediately is to eliminate the undeclared major. I think that even if you change majors later, you benefit from the structure imposed by the major.

One of the biggest problems is the tp-roll educational system, which treats Diplomas as though they were supposed to be pulled off of a roll of TP. The result is good for about the same thing, and not much more.

There's been a strong push for both the "block system" (i.e., you pay for 'x' hours -- usually 15 -- no matter how many courses or hours you take) and for the "2-year-4-year" system, where you take all your non-major requirements in the first 2 years and none of your major requirements until after that. So you're typically well into your senior year before you realize you hate the major you've selected...

I started as a Physics/Math major and switched to an IT/Math major because I found I had no love for modern (post-Einstein) physics. I did that halfway through my sophomore year, because I'd taken 1 physics course each term, and found by the 4th-odd one that I didn't like it any more. In addition, not being in the 2y-4y schedule, I could take courses at the borders of my degree interests that gave me a much wider breadth of understanding of my own fields of interest, courses that have done me well in workplace environments. Moreover, it allowed me to make use of the vast computing resources of the university environment to learn an awful lot of stuff that there were no courses for. If you're interested in something, you can find out who is the local "expert" in it and find some job for yourself or permission to access the resources involved so that you can learn on your own time.

I had a friend who graduated HS a year ahead of me. I went up to see him between my sophomore and his junior years (we attended different colleges -- his was nominally more prestigious than mine). I knew so much more about computers than he did it wasn't funny, and he would never, ever have been able to catch up, because a lot of what I learned I learned OUTSIDE of class, because I had time to explore and "play" with computers.

Moreover, under 2y-4y, if you're taking one of the hard majors, you cannot leaven your schedule with easy courses from outside your major at the same time as you take 1-2 of the really hard courses, such as P-Chem for the chemistry majors. I ALWAYS did this. Once more, it allowed me much more time to explore my majors -- both Math and IT -- than any system without such leavening would have presented.

These three elements -- Block, 2y-4y, and "zero leavening" -- make for sucky graduates taking crappy degrees.

This subject comes up repeatedly. Why do young people study snap courses which result in an economically useless degree? We all have friends and relatives who have gone this route to their sorrow.

An amusing anecdote on the subject of snap courses. My mother had a friend who bragged about her daughter who was a 3.75 student at the university. My grades were much lower (Ch.E. student). My mother was a bit mortified about the comparison. It turned out that the girl was majoring in International Studies, where the dept. ave. grade was 3.75. In engine school, the ave. was 2.1. I pointed all this out and my mother had the last word with the other lady. If you want high grades with no employment possibilities, by all means take snap courses. If you do, don't complain that an engineer makes more money than you do!

"Moreover, under 2y-4y, if you’re taking one of the hard majors, you cannot leaven your schedule with easy courses from outside your major at the same time as you take 1-2 of the really hard courses, such as P-Chem for the chemistry majors. I ALWAYS did this."

My college was designed like this from the day you walked in the doors. They knew they had lots of bright kids interested in engineering and science who would walk away if they were forced to take 2 years of irrelevant stuff before hand, and the crush of 2 solid years of nothing but engineering classes would eliminate the rest. They also knew they had a bunch of kids who were interested in some kind of technical major, be it engineering, computer science, or the "hard" sciences but hadn't been exposed to specifics of any of them, so they forced us to take a smattering of them all early. I'm glad they did it that way. I started as Undecided Engineering, leading toward Nuclear Engineering, and after suffering through physics and chemistry, realized that I hated things like thermodynamic calculations, which would probably be where much of my education would be if I went down the NucE path. But I really liked my programming class, even though they had forced me to take a very outdated language (many MechE/NucE/AeroE applications are written in Fortran due to its superior numerical performance, but it's still the oldest non-assembly programming language out there). So that was the end of my engineering status and why I switched to Computer Science, and never looked back.

If I had had to take 2 solid years of CompSci classes at the end I would have died. Classes with significant programming assignments look all innocent at 3 credit hours apiece. Then you spend 20 hours a week pulling your hair out because your assignment doesn't work. Oops, there goes the "2.5-3 hours outside class for every hour in class" guideline.

How in the hell did we get to a state where everyone is studying "underwater basket weaving" instead of science, engineering, accounting and other economically viable subjects? So few are studying engineering that all sorts of foreigners are being imported to fill the jobs. Most of engineering grad students nowadays are foreigners.

Somewhere along the line, the word got out that a degree is a degree is a degree, no matter what the subject being studied. The profs will not clue in the students. Who will tell students not to study in their department because it is financially a waste of time? The profs are necessarily self-serving in this regard. They won't shut down their own department.

Where are the parents? If your kid is off to college to study poli sci or some such, why aren't you explaining the economic realities to him? If he winds up after four years or more working at McD's, whose fault is that? You will have a thoroughly disillutioned offspring who hates the system.

If you argue tht everyone can't be a scientist, engineer, or accountant, then isn't it better to be a plumber or electrician rather that a college graduate selling perfume in a department store?