andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1271 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: David Brooks writes : There’s an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America’s colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it’s not clear how much actual benefit they are providing. . . . This is an unstable situation. At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker. One part of the solution is found in three little words: value-added assessments. Colleges have to test more to find out how they’re doing. I agree with that last paragraph. Eric Loken and I said as much in the context of statistics teaching, but the principle of measuring outcomes makes sense more generally. (Issues of measurement and evaluation are particularly salient to statisticians, given that we strongly recommend formal quanti
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1 David Brooks writes : There’s an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America’s colleges. [sent-1, score-0.232]
2 The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. [sent-2, score-0.255]
3 The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it’s not clear how much actual benefit they are providing. [sent-3, score-0.398]
4 At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker. [sent-8, score-0.181]
5 (Issues of measurement and evaluation are particularly salient to statisticians, given that we strongly recommend formal quantitative evaluation in fields other than our own. [sent-13, score-0.232]
6 ) I don’t have anything to add on the substance (beyond again expressing my agreement on the desirability of empirical measures of student performance) but I do want to hypothesize on the sources of Brooks’s doomy impressions. [sent-14, score-0.134]
7 After all, on first impression, top public and private colleges and universities are doing well, and there’s a lot of demand for their services. [sent-15, score-0.611]
8 suburbs, it was my impression that lots of students who were in the middle of the pack academically in high school could graduate and go to the University of Maryland in nearby College Park. [sent-18, score-0.133]
9 In the decades since, the University of Maryland has become more competitive, reflecting the increasing demand (not matched by increasing supply) for high-quality college education. [sent-19, score-0.317]
10 So why is Brooks so sure that universities are in trouble? [sent-20, score-0.36]
11 Why paint their current success as an “it’s always brightest just before the dark” situation (to borrow the words of Jim Thompson) rather than a more conventional presentation of universities as a shining success? [sent-21, score-0.602]
12 Universities are bastions of liberalism, thus it is pleasant of Brooks to see universities as struggling institutions in need of radical change. [sent-26, score-0.497]
13 Newspapers twenty years ago were where universities are now. [sent-29, score-0.453]
14 Not too many people were starting new newspapers, which was a bad sign, and many people were (correctly) worried that the social and economic basis for newspapers was disappearing. [sent-31, score-0.261]
15 Economics: Universities are indeed doing well intellectually and financially, but much of that comes from government support. [sent-35, score-0.237]
16 Consider three leading sectors of the economy in the past twenty years: education, health care, and government (including the military). [sent-36, score-0.338]
17 I have time to do all this (rather than, for example, spending 40 hours a week grading papers) partly because I have millions of dollars of government grants. [sent-40, score-0.183]
18 (And the granting agencies give extra funding to the university, so my grants also helps support the work of my Columbia colleagues who are not externally funded. [sent-41, score-0.159]
19 ) I think this is a good use of tax dollars—but of course I’d say that, just as Gen. [sent-42, score-0.079]
20 My point here is not to argue the merits of the case, just to point out that much of the financial success of universities relies on public funding for research, student loan guarantees, etc. [sent-44, score-0.628]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 1271 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-20-Education could use some systematic evaluation
Introduction: David Brooks writes : There’s an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America’s colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it’s not clear how much actual benefit they are providing. . . . This is an unstable situation. At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker. One part of the solution is found in three little words: value-added assessments. Colleges have to test more to find out how they’re doing. I agree with that last paragraph. Eric Loken and I said as much in the context of statistics teaching, but the principle of measuring outcomes makes sense more generally. (Issues of measurement and evaluation are particularly salient to statisticians, given that we strongly recommend formal quanti
Introduction: I was thinking more about David Brooks’s anti-data column from yesterday, and I realized what is really bothering me. Brooks expresses skepticism about numbers, about the limitations of raw data, about the importance of human thinking. Fine, I agree with all of this, to some extent. But then Brooks turns around uses numbers and unquestioningly and uncritically (OK, not completely uncritically; see P.S. below). In a notorious recent case, Brooks wrote, in the context of college admissions: You’re going to want to argue with Unz’s article all the way along, especially for its narrow, math-test-driven view of merit. But it’s potentially ground-shifting. Unz’s other big point is that Jews are vastly overrepresented at elite universities and that Jewish achievement has collapsed. In the 1970s, for example, 40 percent of top scorers in the Math Olympiad had Jewish names. Now 2.5 percent do. But these numbers are incorrect, as I learned from a professor of oncology at the Univ
3 0.20869642 2280 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-03-As the boldest experiment in journalism history, you admit you made a mistake
Introduction: The pre-NYT David Brooks liked to make fun of the NYT. Here’s one from 1997 : I’m not sure I’d like to be one of the people featured on the New York Times wedding page, but I know I’d like to be the father of one of them. Imagine how happy Stanley J. Kogan must have been, for example, when his daughter Jamie got into Yale. Then imagine his pride when Jamie made Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude. . . . he must have enjoyed a gloat or two when his daughter put on that cap and gown. And things only got better. Jamie breezed through Stanford Law School. And then she met a man—Thomas Arena—who appears to be exactly the sort of son-in-law that pediatric urologists dream about. . . . These two awesome resumes collided at a wedding ceremony . . . It must have been one of the happiest days in Stanley J. Kogan’s life. The rest of us got to read about it on the New York Times wedding page. Brooks is reputed to be Jewish himself so I think it’s ok for him to mock Jewish peop
Introduction: A Brooks op-ed in the New York Times (circulation approximately 1.5 million): People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. . . . none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers . . . Jay Livingston on his blog (circulation approximately 0 (rounding to the nearest million)), giving data from the 2009-2010 General Social Survey, which is the usual place people turn to for population data on happiness of Americans: The GSS does not offer “bitter” or “Tea Party” as choices, but extreme conservatives are nearly three times as likely as others to be “not too happy.” Livingston reports that the sample size for “Extremely Conservative” here is 80. Thus the standard error for that green bar on the right is approx sqrt(0.3*0.7/80)=0.05. So how could Brooks have made such a mistake? I can think of two possibilities: 1. Brooks has some other data source that directly addresses the happiness of supporters of the Tea Party movement. 2. Brooks looked a
Introduction: After posting on David Rubinstein’s remarks on his “cushy life” as a sociology professor at a public university, I read these remarks by some of Rubinstein’s colleagues at the University of Illinois, along with a response from Rubinstein. Before getting to the policy issues, let me first say that I think it must have been so satisfying, first for Rubinstein and then for his colleagues (Barbara Risman, William Bridges, and Anthony Orum) to publish these notes. We all have people we know and hate, but we rarely have a good excuse for blaring our feelings in public. (I remember when I was up for tenure, I was able to read the outside letters on my case (it’s a public university and they have rules), and one of the letter writers really hated my guts. I was surprised–I didn’t know the guy well (the letters were anonymized but it was clear from context who the letter writer was) but the few times we’d met, he’d been cordial enough–but there you have it. He must have been thrilled t
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Introduction: David Brooks writes : There’s an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America’s colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it’s not clear how much actual benefit they are providing. . . . This is an unstable situation. At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker. One part of the solution is found in three little words: value-added assessments. Colleges have to test more to find out how they’re doing. I agree with that last paragraph. Eric Loken and I said as much in the context of statistics teaching, but the principle of measuring outcomes makes sense more generally. (Issues of measurement and evaluation are particularly salient to statisticians, given that we strongly recommend formal quanti
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Introduction: Timothy Noah reports : At the end of 2007, Harvard announced that it would limit tuition to no more than 10 percent of family income for families earning up to $180,000. (It also eliminated all loans, following a trail blazed by Princeton, and stopped including home equity in its calculations of family wealth.) Yale saw and raised to $200,000, and other wealthy colleges weighed in with variations. Noah argues that this is a bad thing because it encourages other colleges to give tuition breaks to families with six-figure incomes, thus sucking up money that could otherwise go to reduce tuition for lower-income students. For example: Roger Lehecka, a former dean of students at Columbia, and Andrew Delbanco, director of American studies there, wrote in the New York Times that Harvard’s initiative was “good news for students at Harvard or Yale” but “bad news” for everyone else. “The problem,” they explained, “is that most colleges will feel compelled to follow Harvard and Yale’s
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Introduction: Xian points me to an article by retired college professor David Rubinstein who argues that college professors are underworked and overpaid: After 34 years of teaching sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I [Rubinstein] recently retired at age 64 at 80 percent of my pay for life. . . . But that’s not all: There’s a generous health insurance plan, a guaranteed 3 percent annual cost of living increase, and a few other perquisites. . . . I was also offered the opportunity to teach as an emeritus for three years, receiving $8,000 per course . . . which works out to over $200 an hour. . . . You will perhaps not be surprised to hear that I had two immediate and opposite reactions to this: 1. Hey–somebody wants to cut professors’ salaries. Stop him! 2. Hey–this guy’s making big bucks and doesn’t do any work–that’s not fair! (I went online to find David Rubinstein’s salary but it didn’t appear in the database. So I did the next best thing and looked up the sala
Introduction: After posting on David Rubinstein’s remarks on his “cushy life” as a sociology professor at a public university, I read these remarks by some of Rubinstein’s colleagues at the University of Illinois, along with a response from Rubinstein. Before getting to the policy issues, let me first say that I think it must have been so satisfying, first for Rubinstein and then for his colleagues (Barbara Risman, William Bridges, and Anthony Orum) to publish these notes. We all have people we know and hate, but we rarely have a good excuse for blaring our feelings in public. (I remember when I was up for tenure, I was able to read the outside letters on my case (it’s a public university and they have rules), and one of the letter writers really hated my guts. I was surprised–I didn’t know the guy well (the letters were anonymized but it was clear from context who the letter writer was) but the few times we’d met, he’d been cordial enough–but there you have it. He must have been thrilled t
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint. But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales: America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous [emphasis added]. In a word, it was a meritocracy. That’s interesting—and revealing. Here’s what I get when I look up “meritocracy” in the dictionary : 1 : a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement 2 : leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteria Nothing here about “hardworking” or “virtuous.” In a meritocracy, you can be as hardworking as John Kruk or as virtuous as Kobe Bryant and you’ll still get ahead—if you have the talent and achievement. Throwing in “hardworking” and “virtuous”
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Introduction: I received the following unsolicited email, subject line “Chance Magazine – Comedy Showcase”: Hi Andrew, Hope you’re doing well. I’m writing to let you know that we will be putting on an industry showcase at the brand new Laughing Devil Comedy Club (4738 Vernon Blvd. Long Island City) on Thursday, February 9th at 8:00 PM. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s one stop on the 7 train from Grand Central. Following the showcase, the club will stay open for an industry mingle/happy hour with drink specials and all the business card exchanging you can hope for. This showcase will feature 9 of our best: Steve Hofstetter’s latest album hit #1 in the world. He’ll be hosting Collin Moulton (Showtime Half Hour Special), Tony Deyo (Aspen Comedy Festival), Tom Simmons (Winner of the SF International Comedy Festival), Marc Ryan (Host of Mudslingers), Mike Trainor (TruTV), Jessi Campbell (CMT), Danny Browning (Bob & Tom), and Joe Zimmerman (Sirius/XM). I would love for you (and anyone you’d like to
2 0.96779382 536 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-24-Trends in partisanship by state
Introduction: Matthew Yglesias discusses how West Virginia used to be a Democratic state but is now solidly Republican. I thought it would be helpful to expand this to look at trends since 1948 (rather than just 1988) and all 50 states (rather than just one). This would represent a bit of work, except that I already did it a couple years ago, so here it is (right-click on the image to see the whole thing): I cheated a bit to get reasonable-looking groupings, for example putting Indiana in the Border South rather than Midwest, and putting Alaska in Mountain West and Hawaii in West Coast. Also, it would help to distinguish states by color (to be able to disentangle New Jersey and Delaware, for example) but we didn’t do this because the book is mostly black and white. In any case, the picture makes it clear that there have been strong regional trends all over during the past sixty years. P.S. My graph comes from Red State Blue State so no 2008 data, but 2008 was pretty much a shift
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Introduction: By “free energy” I don’t mean perpetual motion machines, cars that run on water and get 200 mpg, or the latest cold-fusion hype. No, I’m referring to the term from physics. The free energy of a system is, roughly, the amount of energy that can be directly extracted from it. For example, a rock at room temperature is just full of energy—not just the energy locked in its nuclei, but basic thermal energy—but at room temperature you can’t extract any of it. To the physicists in the audience: Yes, I realize that free energy has a technical meaning in statistical mechanics and that my above definition is sloppy. Please bear with me. And, to the non-physicists: feel free to head to Wikipedia or a physics textbook for a more careful treatment. I was thinking about free energy the other day when hearing someone on the radio say something about China bailing out the E.U. I did a double-take. Huh? The E.U. is rich, China’s not so rich. How can a middle-income country bail out a
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Introduction: David Brooks writes : There’s an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America’s colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it’s not clear how much actual benefit they are providing. . . . This is an unstable situation. At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker. One part of the solution is found in three little words: value-added assessments. Colleges have to test more to find out how they’re doing. I agree with that last paragraph. Eric Loken and I said as much in the context of statistics teaching, but the principle of measuring outcomes makes sense more generally. (Issues of measurement and evaluation are particularly salient to statisticians, given that we strongly recommend formal quanti
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