On Higher Education As A Bad Investment

Paul Campos wrote a column about the problems of the US college system and in particular the student loans.  It may be the case that college is not such a good investment, after all:

The American system of higher education is increasingly becoming a fiscal disaster for ever-larger numbers of students who move through it.  That disaster is being caused by a combination of terrible incentives, institutional greed — and the pervasive myth that more education is the cure for economic inequality.
The extent of this myth is highlighted by a new report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which indicates that nearly half of all employed college graduates have jobs that require less than a four-year college education.

...

Far from being “priceless,” as the promoters of ever-more spending on higher education would have Americans believe, both undergraduate and post-graduate education is turning out to be a catastrophic investment for many young and not-so-young adults.

The problems Campos refers to are really several in a complicated knot, beginning with the question whether the United States produces too many college students in the first place (compared to what other countries do), whether a college education should be regarded as a general money-making investment in professional skills, whether the way college education is funded is correct in this country and then the question of the role of higher education in that global rat-race for a job which pays enough to live on.

To talk about all of those requires a book or two, and even then room for debate would remain.
Not that Campos intended such a general discussion; those are my thoughts.  What he does is give us an example from law schools.

Law and medicine and a few other fields are actually not the best examples here, because they truly are occupational training.  A general university degree is not.  But that simplifies the problem in a few ways because we can set aside the question of general citizen benefits of education and the benefits which come to the whole society and so on and pretty much concentrate on the financial and career benefits from a law school degree.

These, Campos argues, may not justify the loans most students must take.  Or, rather, he argues that the loans shouldn't be given on such lenient grounds, given the poor state of the law labor markets:

In recent years, law school has become the most striking example of this remarkably perverse system. Consider how American legal education is funded:
    •    Law schools calculate a total annual cost of attendance, based on their tuition and the cost of living in the area where the school is located. For example, American University’s law school estimates this year’s cost of attendance as $70,204.
    •    Any student a law school chooses to admit can, assuming he or she is not currently in default on an educational loan, borrow 100 percent of the cost of attendance for that particular school from the federal government, in the form of educational loans that currently carry interest rates of 6.8 percent and 7.9 percent.
    •    The federal government puts no limits on how much money a school can make its students eligible to borrow, nor does it make any effort to determine whether the federal loans students are taking out have any reasonable prospect of being paid back.
    •    Interest begins to accrue on these loans as soon as they are disbursed. This means that a student who enrolled, for example, in American University last fall will have — assuming a 3.5 percent annual increase in the cost of attendance — approximately $260,000 in debt when the student’s first loan payment comes due, six months after graduation.  The student will owe monthly payments of more than $3,000 on the standard 10-year repayment plan, and nearly $2,000 on an extended 25-year repayment schedule.

Hmm.  I haven't had enough time to think through the alternatives and I'm not sure what the alternatives are that Campos would propose, if any.  Should law schools be more strictly regulated so that they don't take advantage of the students?  Should  student loans be given on the basis of the odds that a particular student will get a good job? 

But that would bring back all sorts of stuff we don't really want back, such as the importance of old-boy-networks and family connections in getting a job, and it would most likely involve geographic discrimination, too.  Or should we stop subsidizing higher education in law?  Or what?  Maybe there should be better predictions about how many law jobs are going to be available and then limits on how many students schools can take so that the two match better?

From the law student's point of view the problem is in the mismatch between the high costs of training and the likely future earnings:

Starting pay is down for 2010 law graduates, and the drop is greatest for law firm jobs.
Median starting pay dropped by nearly 13 percent for all jobs and by 20 percent for law firm positions, according to NALP, which calls itself the association for legal professionals.
The national median for 2010 law grads working full time and reporting a salary was $63,000, compared to $72,000 for the class of 2009, NALP says in a press release. The national median salary at law firms was $104,000, compared to $130,000 the previous year.
The drop in law firm pay largely reflects a shift in jobs to smaller firms, rather than a drop in salaries paid by individual employers. Fifty-three percent of the class of 2010 who obtained law firm jobs went to firms of 50 or fewer attorneys, compared to 46 percent the previous year. Only 26 percent went to firms of more than 250 lawyers, compared to 33 percent the previous year.
The drop in overall pay is also spurred by the erosion of jobs in private practice. About 51 percent of the graduates from the class of 2010 who found jobs were employed by private law firms, compared to about 56 percent of the class of 2009.
NALP executive director James Leipold says in the press release that aggregate starting salaries fell because more 2010 law grads found jobs with the smallest law firms. “This downward shift in starting salaries is not, for the most part, because individual legal employers were paying new graduates less than they paid them in the past,” Leipold said.
The press release cautions that few salaries are actually at the national median of $63,000 or the national average of $84,111. Many salaries cluster at the $40,000 to $65,000 range at the lower end and at the $145,000 to $160,000 range at the high end. The mean and median also skew high because NALP collects more salary information from large than small law firms. When the statistics are adjusted to place greater weight on small firm salaries, national average pay is $77,333 for all full-time jobs.

In fact, the law jobs have shown that clustering into two ranges for several decades now.  One cluster centers on a fairly low level (for a jobs which requires a graduate degree) and applies to small-town lawyers, the other cluster centers on a fairly high level and applies to lawyers in large firms.  So a student trying to figure out whether the investment in law school will pay off should determine which cluster is most likely for her or him.

There's much more to the value of an education than simply the money it provides, of course.  But the money it provides is important because those loans must be paid back and future children must be fed and so on.

I've read a lot about the high loans of medical students and how those affect the desire to enter medical school or the desire to set up an independent business.  But data on starting salaries in medicine demonstrates a totally different reality.  It will not take terribly long to pay those loans back in medicine, compared to the time it will take in law.

What's interesting about these problems is that they might be different for women and men.  This is because the net return from an investment in higher education of some particular type must be compared with what's-the-alternative-pay, and that alternative pay is higher for men than for women.  Thus, to some extent a deal which looks bad for the average man considering higher education might look better for the average woman considering higher education, simply because her alternatives are worse.

As I mentioned above, this particular dilemma has many, many tentacles, and I only shook hands with one.  There's the question of what the value of lawyers to the society might be, too, and the question whether the privately-determined number of lawyers is the correct one from a societal point of view.  A fair legal system depends on everybody having access to a proper and informed defense.  A purely free-market system of producing lawyers most likely produces only enough for the upper and middle classes who can afford to pay for the services out-of-pocket.

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Do Not Be Afraid Of Life. Echidne's Poetry Hour.

A musical adaptation of Kaarlo Sarkia's poem:



A rough translation of the lyrics (by me and without the rhyme):

Do not be afraid of life
Do not deny its beauty.
Welcome it into your house
or if you're homeless,
meet it on the road,
do not turn your back to it.

Death will not slam its door in your face.
Like a bird, fly,
do not evict the present while hiding
among the ruins of the past.
Leave behind what has passed,
leave the dead in their graves,
endeavor to meet the future.
Be free, unchained, like the wind:
The gates of death stand always open.

Never say:
"This is mine, for ever."
Get drunk from the chalice of life,
but when needed, give it up without pain.
The riches of the world are yours
when you ask to own nothing.
Live fearlessly, staking all on this one card:
You always see the open gates of death.

The link above describes Sarkia as the poet of despair and that is true.  But I always found this poem to be optimistic in a sense which appeals to us true pessimists.  What's the hurry, really, it says.  This is a game in which you can only win, it says,  because of the way the stakes are set and the odds calculated by the House. -- I think of this poem as the card that's up your sleeve when you've played all the others and lost.

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In Today's Gun News

The case of Chris Kyle has caught most attention recently.  Kyle was touted as the greatest sniper who ever lived but now he is dead, along with Chad Littlefield:

But on Saturday, far from a war zone, Mr. Routh turned on Mr. Kyle, 38, and a second man, Chad Littlefield, 35, shortly after they arrived at an exclusive shooting range near Glen Rose, Tex., about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth, law enforcement authorities said Sunday. The officials said that for reasons that were still unclear, Mr. Routh shot and killed both men with a semiautomatic handgun before fleeing in a pickup truck belonging to Mr. Kyle.

“Chad and Chris had taken a veteran out to shoot to try to help him,” said Travis Cox, a friend of Mr. Kyle’s. “And they were killed.”

News sources differ on whether Mr. Routh (the killer) suffered from PTSD or not, but if he did, taking him to a shooting range seems to me to be the way to get him to implode or explode.  Perhaps there is a role for such exercises in the treatment of PTSD but they should be carried out by trained therapists.*

This is all quite sad.  Several stories discuss Mr.  Kyle's sniper past, with a whiff of sports-type interest in his accuracy as a killer:

Kyle modestly acknowledged to the Time interviewer that he was "decent" at killing.

"The first time killing someone, you're not even sure you can do it," he said. "You think you can, but you never know until you actually are put in that position and you do it. ... And then, you're worried when you get home, are the politicians going to hang you out to dry and put you on trial for murder?"

Did he regret any of his 160 kills? "No, not at all," he told Time.

A heroic reading?  Then, of course, he was shot himself, perhaps by someone who didn't even have to be very good at it.

None of that is meant to be a deep analysis of the case.

An interesting website lets you find out the rank of all the US states in the number of gun deaths.  The correlation between politics and those gun death figures is obvious:  The states with the highest firearms death figures are more likely to vote Republican, the states with the lowest firearm death figures are more likely to vote Democratic, on average.  What it means is a lot less obvious, because various cause-and-effects chains are running all across the place and getting as tangled as my thing gold necklace does, just sitting in a box.
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*Perhaps I shouldn't have said that.  But laypeople usually don't try to do surgery on other people to help them, and PTSD can be a very serious condition which should be treated by experts who are trained in the specific type of PTSD.

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Gender Differences. In Swearing! Girls Must Be Queens of Peace!

This is a fascinating story about how some gender differences probably came about:  Women and girls were not allowed to do certain things at all.  Then it became customary that they didn't do those things and then we get an evo-psycho story about how the differences improved the changes their genes got passed on in the prehistory.

Partly kidding, but as I'm reading so much evolutionary psychology recently I note that they would not pay attention to any alternative explanations for gender differences such as this one, at Queen of Peace High School in North Arlington, New Jersey:

Female students at a Catholic high school in northern New Jersey have taken a “no-cursing” pledge at the request of school administrators, though some question why no such demand was made of male students.
  Lori Flynn, a teacher who organized the campaign at Queen of Peace High School in North Arlington, told The Record of Woodland Park there is no double-standard. She says that while males weren't asked to take the vow, they have been asked not to swear when girls are near.
 
Flynn says school officials want “ladies to act like ladies.” And Brother Larry Lavallee, the school's principal, says girls have the foulest language.

Another story suggests that the girls at Queen of Peace do not have the foulest language:

Flynn told ABCNews.com that for the month of February, girls at the school were asked to try not to curse. While their language wasn't a serious problem, she said there were plenty of instances of "subtle swearing."

Two things make this story fascinating:  First, that only girls are asked not to swear, and, second, when there were questions about this the boys were asked not to swear when girls are near.

Thus, the requests are asymmetrical.  Girls are not expected to swear at all, boys are expected not to swear near girls.  That's the traditional rule, by the way.  Men have always been allowed to swear but not in front of the "ladies", and "ladies" (upper class women, usually) were not expected to swear at all.  If they did, they became something less than "ladies."

Delicious stuff, and I want to dig into the deep underbelly of all this.  My guess is that the ban on male swearing in front of the "ladies" is because so much of the traditional male swearing is misogynistic, about cunts and such.  It can be awkward to do that right next to a possessor of the said cunt, without, well, coming out as a misogynist.  So keeping all that to the locker-rooms and other men-only-places seems advised, albeit sly and deceitful.

But is this all that is going on here?  I doubt it.  I think the school is trying to create or maintain a sex difference in speech more generally.  And somewhere in the deep background is the idea that the duty of women is to civilize men.  How can women who swear civilize men?

I don't find excessive swearing a useful communication skill.  The more someone swears, the less the swearing counts because it becomes diluted and customary for that person.  I keep mine as a weapon which is used only rarely, because that way it is more powerful.  But to tell me that I cannot have this weapon at all, just because I don't have the carrot-and-two-peas?   The school can shove it.

Finally, I wondered if this asymmetric request might also have something to do with the fact that the American swearing IS pretty misogynistic.  I hear "bitch", "slut" and "whore" quite a bit, and "cunt" is very, very common.  When girls and women use that same language, given that it is the language of swearing, they come across as self-hating, though obviously completely unaware of it.

Nah.  I'm pretty sure that a Catholic school is not much concerned with women's self-hatred.  And if they were, attacking the swearing in general and pointing out how it is about women's bodies etc. would do more good than telling girls not to swear.

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Good News Friday

It's this little piece of news I spotted on Twitter:

 Marine Corps survey shows 17 percent of male Marine respondents say they would likely leave the Corps if women move into combat positions.
The survey says that number jumps to 22 percent if women are assigned involuntarily to those jobs.
Results of the survey of 53,000 Marines were released to The Associated Press on Friday.

Why good news?  Because the following version says exactly the same thing, except for the tone (that can be picked to influence shit):

Marine Corps survey shows 83 percent of male Marine respondents say they would not leave the Corps if women move into combat positions.
The survey says that number drops to 78 percent if women are assigned involuntarily to those jobs.
Results of the survey of 53,000 Marines were released to The Associated Press on Friday.

Isn't it wonderful what a very simple change does?  The tone I pick here is that the vast majority of male Marine respondents (or of female Marine respondents, check the linked item) are not dreadfully upset with the proposed change.

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A Good Cartoon (Content Warning Atttached)

Content Warning:  Rape Avoidance


This one.

It makes you think about the way we frame issues and it makes an important point.  Courses on how to avoid getting raped do not decrease rape; they just make someone else the victim and put all the onus on the shoulders of those who are prey. 

But I also get why courses on how not to rape are unlikely to be run.  The assumption is that everybody already knows that rape is wrong, that hardened rapists wouldn't change from such courses and that those who would never want to rape anyone would be insulted by having to take such a course.  Though of course there's something insulting in being regarded as the natural prey of rapists, too.

Courses on "rape cultures" might work, however.  They could probe common ideas and misconceptions about what constitutes rape and what consent means and they could be taught simultaneously to men and women (or not, as one decides what is best), with the self-care measures included.

This could all be wrong.  The topic is a tricky one to write about and I haven't spent a long time thinking about this.

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How Dare You Attack Science? The Usual Response From Evolutionary Psychologists

Because I'm working on some evolutionary psychology stuff you are getting extra doses of all that makes me thunder about it.  Aren't you the lucky duckies!

Today I'm frustrated by the great difficulty of criticizing evolutionary psychology in the following sense:  The responses to any criticism, however careful, tend to be:  "How Dare You Attack Science?"

Helena Cronin, one of the mothers of evolutionary psychology makes the point here:

Generally, the public reception of a scientific theory concurs by and large with the judgement of the objective world of ideas. Not, however, in the case of the scientific understanding of our evolved human nature and, above all, male and female natures. If the arguments against the evolutionary science of human nature were conducted in the world of the objective content of ideas, there would be no contest; evolutionary theory would win hands down. But, as a sociological fact, in the public market-place it loses disastrously against its vociferous critics.
How? Because, in a complete reversal of the objective relationship between the science and these critics, all the asymmetries are reversed.
First, the burden of 'proof', the burden of argument, is transferred from the criticisms onto the science; it is Darwinism that's on trial. Meanwhile, anti-Darwinian attitudes don't have to defend themselves—they are accepted uncritically; the standards for judgement of these views involve all-too-ready credibility and suspensions of disbelief.
Second, adding insult to injury, a plethora of home-made alternatives is conjured up to fill the gap where the real science should be. This DIY-science includes: pseudo-methodological denunciations, where mere name-callings suffice—essentialist, reductivist, teleological, Panglossian (all very bad) and politically incorrect (very bad indeed); the immutable 'entanglement' of nature and nurture, which renders nature impenetrable—thereby freeing 'pure nurture' to be discussed at length; a cavalier disregard for hard-won empirical evidence—though with a penchant for bits of brains lighting up (no; I don't know either); the magical potency of 'stereotyping' (bad) and 'role models' (good); a logic-defying power to work miracles on tabula-rasa psychologies, as in 'socialisation' (bad) and 'empowerment' (good); made-up mechanisms, even though discredited—multi-tasking, self-esteem, stereotype threat; complaints of 'controversial' and 'tendentious' – which are true sociologically but false scientifically (a case of raising the dust and then complaining they cannot see). The science-free policy that this generates is epitomised by the 'women into science' lobby, which is posited on a 'bias and barriers' assumption and an a priori rejection of—yes, the science of sex differences.
This mish-mash is low on scientific merit. But it is not treated as opinion versus science. On the contrary, psychologically and sociologically, it has a voice far more influential and persuasive than its objective status warrants.

She views what she does as science, what the critics do as opinions.  And of course there are critiques of evolutionary psychology which are based on opinions or on the political harm it can accomplish.  But there are loads and loads of studies and scientific critiques of the field, pointing out its methodological stumbling stones and, indeed, its arrogance, the religion-like anger any criticism elicits*.  The latter is notable by the fact that the criticisms are almost never acknowledged or responded to, except in the terms of that quote.

It's a type of kidnapping of the term "science" which makes me angry.  Even poor research is viewed as science if it is within evolutionary psychology, as evidenced by Cronin herself when she quotes the Baron-Cohen study about one-day-old children in a different context.  Given that one-day-old children have very little ability to move their heads unassisted and that it's unclear what one-day-old children actually see, the assertion that girls already at this age look more at human faces and boys at mobiles should certainly be open to questioning without making the questioner just someone with an opinion.

I see this closing-in among evolutionary psychologists over and over, a reaction so defensive that it's hard to interpret as a scientific one.  Most scientists I know love to debate their science, love to address criticisms and ponder them.  The common evolutionary psychology response is such a strongly emotional one that it really makes me think of religions and their responses to those who question the basic dogmas.  Anathema!

Take the bit in the above quote where Cronin says that

The science-free policy that this generates is epitomised by the 'women into science' lobby, which is posited on a 'bias and barriers' assumption and an a priori rejection of—yes, the science of sex differences.

So analyzing and discussing the biases and barriers women might face in the STEM fields and making theories about them and testing those theories  is not science?  Refusing to simply accept the idea that men's greater participation in those fields is caused by an (unproved) evolutionary adaptation which is unchangeable is the same as an a priori rejection of the science of sex differences?   And might it not be the case that the "women into science" lobby consists of at least some researchers who are, indeed, very well versed in the science of sex differences AND in the science of sex similarities?

What that above example shows is something I've met often from evolutionary psychologists:  If you don't accept our specific theories, then you are not scientific.

And if you don't accept our specific theories, then you are a denier of evolution, a creationist or something worse.  As I've written before, this is like arguing that I must not believe in our ability to predict anything about the future if I don't accept astrology as a valid method of future prediction.

Another common response is that anyone who criticizes evolutionary psychology must believe in human beings as "empty slates" (tabula rasa) on which the environment rights everything that matters.  That doesn't follow, of course.  One might, for instance, believe in evolution of the human mind but not in the particular stories evolutionary psychology has invented about it, or all parts of those stories.

The human mind has plasticity.  To assume that whatever is might be so in an immutable and rigid sense and as an evolutionary adaptation to some assumed stone age circumstances is not the only story we can tell about psychological evolution.  It is also a story, if false, which has very harmful consequences in terms of the support it gives to gender prejudices and which might seriously hamper future improvements in the fairness of human societies.  After all, if whatever exists is supposed to be immutable, why bother?  Imagine if the educators of the past had decided that it is not worth sending girls to school because education is clearly something that is only of value to male humans with their competitive instincts and external orientation,  or if politicians of the past decided that democracy is impossible, what with humans being hierarchical creatures.

These are also fairly good reasons for insisting that the proof must be provided by evolutionary psychologists.  Cronin laments that demand in the above quote, but anyone who argues that evolutionary psychology should be used to guide actual social policies (as she does) certainly should provide extensive and generally accepted evidence for those arguments.

Why all that ire at the critics?  In my opinion, thinking about the criticism and either incorporating it or countering it effectively is what makes a field of research advance.  Ignoring the criticism or attacking the critics does not.

Indeed, I can see some improvements in evolutionary psychology already, when I compare the early cartoonish models to the later slightly more realistic ones, and much of that is the consequence of external criticism, I believe.

Prehistoric women,  for instance, are now seldom treated in evolutionary psychology as if they had the agency of barrels of beer or ham hocks, objects to be competed over by virile men.  Yet that was the case in the very first evolutionary psychology paper I came across in the 1990s.

And the field has moved from using the old " Higgamous hoggamous Women are monogamous; Hoggamous Higgamous Men are polygamous!" saw to acknowledging that both men and women can be promiscuous.  Perhaps one day the field advances to a point where it doesn't regard all women as attracted to only the resources of men, given that anything like "resources" in the prehistoric nomadic small tribe must have been embedded, and thus equal to youth, strength and skills, not that different from the current assumption that men are drawn to youth and beauty in the search for a mate.**  

On the other hand, criticizing any part of the whole is often seen as a nuclear attack on the field, causing not discussion and reconsideration but denial without real explanations.  This defensiveness and inflexibility is especially odd, given that evolutionary psychology is a baby as research fields go. There's no way that its current state can somehow be the last word on evolution in human psychology.  Indeed, given the almost-total lack of actual evidence on our prehistory, we are in for many more decades of these types of debates.
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*The links here go to largely popular articles, because I can't find my academic file right now.  But there are also several books which address the problems within evolutionary psychology. such as  Susan McKinnon,  Neo-Liberal Genetics: Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology,

Robert C. Richardson,  Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology, David J. Buller,  Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature, Anne Innis Dagg, Love of Shopping Is Not A Gene: Problems with Darwinian Psychology and so on.  The point is that the critics of evolutionary psychology are not just feminists or laypeople with opinions.

**I'm not presenting this as a support of the sexual selection theories in evolutionary psychology but simply pointing out that internal consistency would require that the proponents of the women-dig-money school explain exactly how resources were carried by those nomadic prehistoric forefathers in the small hunter-gatherer groups.

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