andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2070 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Rohin Dhar writes: The Priceonomics blog is doing a feature where we ask a few economists what they think of the the institution of tenure. If you’d be interested in participating, I’d love to get your response. As an economist, what do you think of tenure? Should it be abolished / kept / modified? My reply: Just to be clear, I’m assuming that when you say “tenure,” you’re talking about lifetime employment for college professors such as myself. I’m actually a political scientist, not an economist. So rather than giving my opinion, I’ll say what I think an economist might say. I think an economist could say one of two things: Economist as anthropologist would say: Tenure is decided by independent institutions acting freely. If they choose to offer tenure, they will have good reasons, and it is not part of an economist’s job to second-guess individual decisions. Economist as McKinsey consultant would say: Tenure can be evaluated based on a cost-benefit analysis. How
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Rohin Dhar writes: The Priceonomics blog is doing a feature where we ask a few economists what they think of the the institution of tenure. [sent-1, score-0.064]
2 My reply: Just to be clear, I’m assuming that when you say “tenure,” you’re talking about lifetime employment for college professors such as myself. [sent-5, score-0.26]
3 I’m actually a political scientist, not an economist. [sent-6, score-0.073]
4 So rather than giving my opinion, I’ll say what I think an economist might say. [sent-7, score-0.432]
5 I think an economist could say one of two things: Economist as anthropologist would say: Tenure is decided by independent institutions acting freely. [sent-8, score-0.498]
6 If they choose to offer tenure, they will have good reasons, and it is not part of an economist’s job to second-guess individual decisions. [sent-9, score-0.149]
7 Economist as McKinsey consultant would say: Tenure can be evaluated based on a cost-benefit analysis. [sent-10, score-0.073]
8 How much more would Columbia have to pay to attract professors if tenure were not on offer? [sent-11, score-0.869]
9 Here are a couple more thoughts from the last time we discussed this topic: People sometimes think it’s surprising and wrong that high pay, good benefits, generous retirement, job security, and an easy workload go together. [sent-15, score-0.219]
10 But from an economic point of view, this makes sense: all these can be considered as different forms of compensation. [sent-16, score-0.066]
11 and Getting rid of tenure may solve some problems but I don’t know if it will help much with the slackers. [sent-17, score-0.742]
12 My guess is that universities might use lack of tenure to fire political nuisances and to lay off huge chunks of people for economic reasons. [sent-19, score-1.195]
13 But I don’t see administrators effectively using lack of tenure using as a tool for getting rid of deadwood—given that they have some tools already that they don’t seem to use. [sent-20, score-0.904]
14 More generally, I don’t see tenure as being about “protecting deadwood” or for political freedom of expression. [sent-21, score-0.69]
15 Rather, I see it as affecting the power balance between the employer and the employed. [sent-22, score-0.22]
16 If your boss has the power to fire you or renew your contract, you’ll be under some pressure to keep your boss happy—and your boss will be aware of that. [sent-23, score-0.93]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 2070 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-20-The institution of tenure
Introduction: Rohin Dhar writes: The Priceonomics blog is doing a feature where we ask a few economists what they think of the the institution of tenure. If you’d be interested in participating, I’d love to get your response. As an economist, what do you think of tenure? Should it be abolished / kept / modified? My reply: Just to be clear, I’m assuming that when you say “tenure,” you’re talking about lifetime employment for college professors such as myself. I’m actually a political scientist, not an economist. So rather than giving my opinion, I’ll say what I think an economist might say. I think an economist could say one of two things: Economist as anthropologist would say: Tenure is decided by independent institutions acting freely. If they choose to offer tenure, they will have good reasons, and it is not part of an economist’s job to second-guess individual decisions. Economist as McKinsey consultant would say: Tenure can be evaluated based on a cost-benefit analysis. How
2 0.286403 1028 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-26-Tenure lets you handle students who cheat
Introduction: The other day, a friend of mine who is an untenured professor (not in statistics or political science) was telling me about a class where many of the students seemed to be resubmitting papers that they had already written for previous classes. (The supposition was based on internal evidence of the topics of the submitted papers.) It would be possible to check this and then kick the cheating students out of the program—but why do it? It would be a lot of work, also some of the students who are caught might complain, then word would get around that my friend is a troublemaker. And nobody likes a troublemaker. Once my friend has tenure it would be possible to do the right thing. But . . . here’s the hitch: most college instructors do not have tenure, and one result, I suspect, is a decline in ethical standards. This is something I hadn’t thought of in our earlier discussion of job security for teachers: tenure gives you the freedom to kick out cheating students.
3 0.20297715 740 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-01-The “cushy life” of a University of Illinois sociology professor
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
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Introduction: Tenure track faculty opening at the Center for the Promotion of Research Involving Innovative Statistical Methodology, with Jennifer Hill, Marc Scott, and other world-class researchers. It looks like a great opportunity.
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Introduction: Steve Porter writes with a question about matching for inferences in a hierarchical data structure. I’ve never thought about this particular issue, but it seems potentially important. Maybe one or more of you have some useful suggestions? Porter writes: After immersing myself in the relatively sparse literature on propensity scores with clustered data, it seems as if people take one of two approaches. If the treatment is at the cluster-level (like school policies), they match on only the cluster-level covariates. If the treatment is at the individual level, they match on individual-level covariates. (I have also found some papers that match on individual-level covariates when it seems as if the treatment is really at the cluster-level.) But what if there is a selection process at both levels? For my research question (effect of tenure systems on faculty behavior) there is a two-step selection process: first colleges choose whether to have a tenure system for faculty; then f
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Introduction: Rohin Dhar writes: The Priceonomics blog is doing a feature where we ask a few economists what they think of the the institution of tenure. If you’d be interested in participating, I’d love to get your response. As an economist, what do you think of tenure? Should it be abolished / kept / modified? My reply: Just to be clear, I’m assuming that when you say “tenure,” you’re talking about lifetime employment for college professors such as myself. I’m actually a political scientist, not an economist. So rather than giving my opinion, I’ll say what I think an economist might say. I think an economist could say one of two things: Economist as anthropologist would say: Tenure is decided by independent institutions acting freely. If they choose to offer tenure, they will have good reasons, and it is not part of an economist’s job to second-guess individual decisions. Economist as McKinsey consultant would say: Tenure can be evaluated based on a cost-benefit analysis. How
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: 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
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Introduction: In a thought-provoking article subtitled “Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?,” surgeon/journalist Atul Gawande describes how, even after eight years and more than two thousand operations, he benefited from coaching (from a retired surgeon), just as pro athletes and accomplished musicians do. He then talks about proposals to institute coaching for teachers to help them perform better. This all makes sense to me—except that I’m a little worried about expansion of the teacher coaching program. I can imagine it could work pretty well for teachers who are motivated to be coached—for example, I think I would get a lot out of it—but I’m afraid that if teacher coaching became a big business, it would get taken over by McKinsey-style scam artists. But could I use a coach? First, let me get rid of the easy questions. 1. Yes, I could use a squash coach. I enjoy squash and play when I can, but I’m terrible at it. I’m sure a coach would help. On the other hand, I’m h
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Introduction: Steve Hsu has posted a series of reflections here , here , and here on the dominance of graduates of HYPS (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (in that order, I believe)) in various Master-of-the-Universe-type jobs at “elite law firms, consultancies, and I-banks, hedge/venture funds, startups, and technology companies.” Hsu writes: In the real world, people believe in folk notions of brainpower or IQ. (“Quick on the uptake”, “Picks things up really fast”, “A sponge” …) They count on elite educational institutions to do their g-filtering for them. . . . Most top firms only recruit at a few schools. A kid from a non-elite UG school has very little chance of finding a job at one of these places unless they first go to grad school at, e.g., HBS, HLS, or get a PhD from a top place. (By top place I don’t mean “gee US News says Ohio State’s Aero E program is top 5!” — I mean, e.g., a math PhD from Berkeley or a PhD in computer science from MIT — the traditional top dogs in academ
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Introduction: Rohin Dhar writes: The Priceonomics blog is doing a feature where we ask a few economists what they think of the the institution of tenure. If you’d be interested in participating, I’d love to get your response. As an economist, what do you think of tenure? Should it be abolished / kept / modified? My reply: Just to be clear, I’m assuming that when you say “tenure,” you’re talking about lifetime employment for college professors such as myself. I’m actually a political scientist, not an economist. So rather than giving my opinion, I’ll say what I think an economist might say. I think an economist could say one of two things: Economist as anthropologist would say: Tenure is decided by independent institutions acting freely. If they choose to offer tenure, they will have good reasons, and it is not part of an economist’s job to second-guess individual decisions. Economist as McKinsey consultant would say: Tenure can be evaluated based on a cost-benefit analysis. How
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Introduction: As a New Yorker I think I’m obliged to pass on the occasional Jersey joke (most recently, this one , which annoyingly continues to attract spam comments). I’ll let the above title be my comment on this entry from Tyler Cowen entitled, “Which Americans are ‘best off’?”: If you consult human development indices the answer is Asians living in New Jersey. The standard is: The index factors in life expectancy at birth, educational degree attainment among adults 25-years or older, school enrollment for people at least three years old and median annual gross personal earnings. More generally, these sorts of rankings and ndexes seem to be cheap ways of grabbing headlines. This has always irritated me but really maybe I should go with the flow and invent a few of these indexes myself.
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Introduction: When you say that somebody else screwed up, you have to be extra careful you’re not getting things wrong yourself! A philosopher of science is quoted as having written, “it seems best to let this grubby affair rest in a footnote,” but I think it’s good for these things to be out in the open.
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen quotes Robin Hanson: If your main reason for talking is to socialize, you’ll want to talk about whatever everyone else is talking about. Like say the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. But if instead your purpose is to gain and spread useful insight, so that we can all understand more about things that matter, you’ll want to look for relatively neglected topics. . . . One advantage of having this blog on a lag of a month or two is that I can post things, knowing that when my discussion finally appears, it will no longer be topical. Indeed, this post is an example.
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