Procrastination is a strong predictor of academic performance

I believe that perseverance and timeliness are the secret to success, and foremost so in school. And I believe these are the qualities that brought me to where I am now, and I hope these qualities have also transpired on this blog. But ,y belief may not be general wisdom or even scientifically established. Thus, I am happy to report on a study that confirms at least part of my credo.

Marco Novarese and Viviana Di Giovinazzo use data on how promptly astudents have enrolled for university to forecast their future academic performance, and the forecast is quite good. Of course, promptness likely correlates with plenty of other positive student characteristics the authors cannot measure. And of course, the result is not too surprising. But I feel comforted in my belief and my bias in selecting studies that confirm my prejudices is thus reinforced.

The lack of sleep of American school children

Children need sufficient sleep to grow and learn well. But every parent knows how difficult it is to get the children to get that sleep, especially sending them to bed while mom and dad are still up. And once children are in their teens, this becomes even more difficult, even though they still need that sleep time. In the United States it is even worse, as school starts earlier for older children and they sometimes have long school bus trips before that. So it is not uncommon for children to wake up at 6. With 10 hours of required sleep, calculate when they should have gone to bed...

Jay Stewart uses the American Time Use Survey to determine the factors of sleep time for children. First, when school is in session, and when it is a school day, they go to bed 38 minutes later and wake up 72 minutes earlier. This lost half hour accumulates quickly through the week and leads to sleepy heads by Friday. Second, while child development often depends on the mother, in this case sleep patterns during school are not influenced by maternal labor supply.

Then, who is to blame? It is certainly not school homework, of which American school children get little. Is it TV? For sure, it is difficult to drag the children away from the monkey box when the parents are glued to it. Is it over-emphasis on school sports? For many children and parents, sports have priority over academics (even in college). Maybe cutting down on those many hours of daily football training would do the children some good (and besides, there are still more academic scholarships for college that sports ones).

Most US students do not care about the academic quality of their college

The attitude of students towards college choice is starkly contrasted across continents. While I certainly tend to over-generalize in the following lines, let me highlight a few differences. In Asia, students are very aware of the ranking of universities and strive hard to pass entrance exams to the highest ranked institutions. After that, students do not work much towards learning. All that matters is the signal that you got in. In Europe, students typically go to the local university and are left to fend for themselves. Attrition rates are high, the surviving students are quite good, and there is limited variance in student quality across institutions. In the United States, students are willing to travel far to study, and the selection of the institution depends on reputation, cost and amenities. Having a nice campus, quality dormitories, extra-curricular activities and especially college sports is deemed very important, aspects that do not matter at all in Asia and Europe. Why?

Brian Jacob, Brian McCall and Kevin M. Stange try to offer an hint of an answer by looking at the demand side for colleges. They use detailed data from high school classes in 1992 and 2004, match this with college characteristics and estimate a discrete choice model. The results are more damning than my ramblings above. Except for the top students, high school graduates do not care about academics at all. All they want is excellent "college consumption amenities." And this likely explains why they learn so little while in college. Their focus is on the university as a consumption good, not an investment good. And colleges have responded by devoting to amenities half the resources they devote to academics, producing a generation of well-entertained know-nothings.

Do state scholarships keep graduates in the state?

Many US states provide special study scholarships reserved to state residents which be applied to any in-state university, including private ones. This goes beyond the lower tuitions at state universities for state residents. The idea is that students tend to stay for work (and pay taxes and improve human capital) where they studied, thus you want to get them to study in-state. If every state does this, the macroeconomic impact is zero on work location, no matter what the mobility, and negative on state budgets. But this is a game hat states play, like they do with tax competition, thus it is interesting to see whether a state gains from playing this if all others already do.

Maria Fitzpatrick and Damon Jones find that the impact of these programs can be found, but it is quite small. That money is thus mostly going to either students who move out-of-state after their studies or to students who would have stayed within state boundaries anyway. This result is obtained by looking at the expansion of these program in 15 states from 1990 to 2010 and how they impacted residential patterns. It would of course be better to have information from the students themselves (and a control group), but you got to start somewhere.

Resit exams are a bad idea

What should be the best design for important exams? One attempt and you are out? Resit allowed once? Twice? Maximum number of attempts over all exams? If you ever have to go through a meeting about this type of rules, you will be surprised how opinionated people are about this. I do not think it is because they can base their views on hard evidence, but rather that they like the system they (successfully) went through themselves in their studies.

Peter Kooreman asks whether allowing students to resit on failed exams within the same academic year makes them learn more, the ultimate objective of an exam. His exercise is theoretical and looks at a student who does not like working but wants to pass. The probability of passing an exam depends on the effort. If there is only one exam, the student provides more effort than for the first exam in a set of two chances. For the second exam, the effort should be equivalent to the lone exam. Thus with two exams, the probability of passing is higher. Effort is lower, and likely much lower. After all, some students get through the first exam with luck and little study while the others get seriously about it only one the second exam.

This short study misses a couple of important ingredients, though. The first is that it assumes that students are risk neutral. My casual empiricism tells me that students are quite nervous about exams, indicating quite a bit of curvature. Also, students have a clear preference for passing exams earlier than later. Risk aversion increases the distance between the two exam schemes. Impatience reduces it and could change the ordering. Finally, it would be great to see some empirical evidence. But the latter is likely asking for a bit too much here.

How effective is a moral appeal in discouraging exam cheating

Several programs have introduced honor codes, especially MBA programs. Students promise not too copy, plagiarize or otherwise cheat, and in response the program administration does not put much in place in terms of surveillance. Simple game theory tells you that if there are few controls, this cannot work. And given that students try to cheat even when they are checked on, imagine what happens when there is no one to watch them. By the way, what influences cheating?

Michał Krawczyk looks at an experiment where students were told cheating was wrong and then took at test. Statistical analysis is then used to figure out who still cheated, which is preferable to notoriously unreliable self-reports. It turns out that a one-time appeal to moral values is not a good deterrent. Also, self-reports of cheating, about the current experiment or in the past, are highly unreliable. Finally, the boys cheat more. No surprise here.

On the difficulty of targeting financial aid to students

With the cost of education continuing to rise, financial aid to student becomes more important to help those with merit but little means (or borrowing constraints). Identifying whether financial aid actually helps bright students go to university is of course the most important question.

Loris Vergolini and Nadir Zanini study this in the case of Italy, where they surveyed students before and after university entrance, in the context of a generous financial aid initiative targeted towards bright low-income students. The results are sobering. it does not appear to have motivated more students to go to university. Those who were going anyway now are willing to move farther, presumably to potentially better programs. But this program was only recently introduced and could not have an impact on the school effort of those about to graduate. One can hope that its existence will motivate younger cohorts to excel in school to be eligible and make it to university.

Why encourage more students to choose scientific careers?

Everyone is calling for more students to go for diplomas in the sciences, with the idea that why need research and development to promote growth. Everyone is also lamenting that today's students are not prepared for such careers because they are lacking in mathematics skills. So it becomes a real struggle to get students interested in those fields, especially women. It is one thing to get students to take one such studies, it is a different struggle to keep them there. For one, it is a tough field to study and many abandon and go for easier topics. Those who end up graduating in sciences must be seriously dedicated to become scientists.

Not quite. Surveying British graduates, Arnaud Chevalier finds that half works outside of scientific fields within three years. Worse, having a science degree bring no wage advantage outside of sciences. In other words, they endured and persevered through science studies for no visible advantage over those who when through business, political sciences or psychology. This raises the question why everyone is pushing so hard to channel students to the science fields. There does not seem to be a market for them after graduation and/or many to do want to work in the scientific field anyway, as satisfaction studies seem to be revealing, including this one.

The impact of poor scheduling of international football tournaments on English GCSE results

For every big sports event, there are two types of economic studies that make the news: the ones about the economic impact, which essentially add up all the expenses somewhat related to the event (sometimes applying a multiplier), never mind the fact that all this could have been spent on something else, and the studies about productivity losses because people are sleepy or distracted at work. I remember from school days that these events would also have a tendency to fall on exam period, which was a serious drag on exam preparation. How much? Someone finally figured it out.

Robert Metcalfe, Simon Burgess and Steven Proud exploit the fact that every two years a major international football tournament overlaps with important exams at the end of compulsory schooling in England. And their results are not pretty: male students as well as disadvantaged students suffer disproportionately from the competition for their attention. From them, exam scores are reduced by 0.2 standard deviations, which substantial, and as the authors note as large as some policy interventions. Just rescheduling those exams could be more effective than pouring money into some school initiatives.

Which childhood sport is more promising for labor market outcomes

Which sport should you encourage your child to adopt? My guess would be cross-country running, swimming and rowing, which have all the important characteristic of encouraging perseverance and long-term planning. They also make your child hang out with the "right people" as these athletes feature prominently among the best students. But these are just my impressions, let us see what can be done with more than anecdotal data.

Charlotte Cabane and Andrew Clark look at US schools, although not quite at the level of athletic detail I would have wished. Healthy students are more likely to participate in sports and later be successful in life. But those participating in sports are also more likely to be healthier. The direction of the causation is not clear. But of interest here is whether participation is sports is an important determinant in latter outcomes. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which looks at students who were in grades 7-12 in 1994-95, they can track how the students are doing as late as 2008. In the end, participating in team sports once a week as a student increases the hourly wage by 1.5%. Not a lot but still significant, especially as this for adults in their thirties, and gaps tend to widen later on. Individual sports seem only to have an impact for adult outcomes of girls.

Why are school counselors so bad?

Recent news articles following up on the Occupy X movement have focused on youth unemployment and student debt. One aspect of this that strikes me are the absurdly bad choices students make. And from discussions with undergraduate students I ahad over the years, school counselors shares share part of the blame.

For one, they keep sending students into supposedly easy majors, even if job prospects are slim. If a student cannot handle the rigors of a serious university education, he should not be in university. He is less likely to get grants, more likely to take longer to graduate and then be in debt, less likely to get well-paying jobs there after and thus will face students debts for many years. Also, students with ambitions in better majors are told to switch to easier majors when they face difficulties, instead of helping them to overcome these difficulties. This is in particular the case for ethnic minorities and women, and one then wonders why they are underrepresented in science and technology. The problem is that counselors perpetuate or even amplify prejudices. An example is Neil deGrasse Tyson who was told that as a black he should go to basketball, not physics, and was not offered the help white students were getting when he struggled with classes, when blacks are not expected to excel in physics.

Also, counselors seem to obsessed with finding the "right college," which often an obscure little university where every major has only two or three faculty, and turn out to be expensive. The usual explanation is that the students needs small classes. This seems like another case of someone who is going to be highly in debt for a long time. And to come to Economics, the major is filled with undergraduates who did not get in or got kicked out of the business school, most often for failing on business mathematics and statistics. And what do counselors tell them? Get into a similar major, like Economics (or Psychology), ignoring that those quantitative skills are even more needed.

Why do counselors give such bad advice? I do not have an answer beyond wild guesses. But my casual observation tells me that the best psychologists or education professionals do not espouse this career, and for a good reason: on average the entry salary for a graduate of a Masters program in school counseling is an astounding US$33,000. In some sense, this is the bottom of the barrel that is trying to give advice to people on how to avoid falling to the bottom of the barrel. That is hardly inspiring. Schools should hire at least a few people who had successful careers to show how it is done, for example retirees.

Why top MBA programs do not disclose grades

I have always been puzzled by the policy of many top MBA programs not to disclose the grades of their students. Even more puzzling is that they by and large manage to enforce this policy even from their top students, who should obviously want to signal that they are at the top of their class.

Daniel Gottlieb and Kent Smetters wondered about this as well. Such policies are voted by the students (who in the US own the grades) on the argument that it allows them to take more difficult classes without adverse consequences. Yet the evidence is that they learn less when such a policy is in place, which explains the general opposition to it from faculty. So, one can conclude that students are lazy (nothing new here), but is such a policy limited to top MBA programs? Why not in lesser programs, or other professional schools?

Gottlieb and Smetters point out that students have two signals for potential employers: their grades and the selectivity of the program. They are also risk averse, and at the start of their studies do not know how well they will do. In top schools, the selectivity signal is very strong and the students rely on it, while the "average" grade is superior in expected terms. In lesser schools, the selectivity signal is much weaker, and hence students try to distinguish themselves on the labor market in other ways, for example with grades.

To some extend, the same is happening on the Economics PhD market. When you look at the recommendation letters form the top schools, all candidates are the best in a generation in their field (I am exaggerating on a little). Thus the letter looses a lot of its value, and all that remains is the entrance selectivity of the PhD program. Lower ranked programs are much keener to differentiate their students and push the particularly good ones.

Individual characteristics are more important for academic success in university

What makes a good college students? Looking at the admission criteria of universities can be insightful. Public universities in the United States basically just look for high school grades and standardized test results, with some adjustment background characteristics (race, high school characteristics), if any. European universities in the end just care about grades, in most cases that a student was above some level. And US private universities look at a large array of characteristics, with extracurricular activities and personal essays being of particular importance, grades in some cases being even ignored. While these different types of universities have obviously different motivations, ultimately they are looking for potential in students. So what determines academic success?

Martin Dooley, Abigail Payne and Leslie Robb use administrative data about a dozen entering cohorts in four Ontario universities to explain what makes students stay longer in tertiary education and have better college grades. It turns out that the high school grades are pretty much sufficient. At least for Canada, it is reassuring to see that individual performance matters more than where you are coming from. Of course, one could wonder whether all the other characteristics that private US schools consider would matter here. But this kind of data was presumably not available, as Ontario universities, all public, do not ask for such information during the application process. Also, there is no record in the study about individual standardized test results. Including those would only reinforce the results, but may have important policy implications: imagine they do not matter. Then it opens the door to grade inflation in high schools, and the grade signal gets diluted. And then admissions officers need to find something else to rely on, such as some of the characteristics that matter less.

Teenage achievement and the house price bubble

The general economic context of where and when you grow up matters. Think, for example, of those raised during the Great Depression in the US or World War II in Europe who are likely to be very careful with their spending, never through anything away and finish their plates. In this regard, what should we expect from those reaching adulthood in the past years?

Daniel Cooper and María José Luengo-Prado study the impact on teenagers of the house price boom before the current crisis in the United States on educational outcomes. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), they find that a 1% higher house price at age 17 leads to a 0.8% higher income as adult if the parents owned the home, 1.2% lower if they were tenants, after conditioning for socio-economic characteristics. These are big numbers. They can be justified by the observation that higher house prices allows more collateral to borrow for education. Indeed households with a below median non-housing wealth saw even a 1.6% boost in their child's future income. To explain the impact on tenants, I suppose one can explain it with higher tuition in reaction to larger loans, which tenants cannot afford as well.

The consequences from the recent house price crash are daunting in this context. And given that state are disengaging themselves from financing their public colleges, leading to even higher tuition, the outlook is even worse.

On the value of liberal arts education

I find a recent opinion article on CNN by Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, on the value of liberal arts education rather upsetting. I can understand that as the president of a liberal arts college he wants to defend this particular type of education. But his arguments ring particularly hollow, and I would have expected better from someone leading on of the best liberal arts colleges.

His selling points are the following. 1) A broadly-based education is better then professional or technical expertise. 2) Liberal arts develop critical thinking and creativity. 3) Focusing on science and engineering is a serious mistake. 4) Effective implementation of new technology requires social and economic understanding. 5) Scholarship in humanities increasingly requires scientists. 6) Flexibility is important on the job market.

I agree that an education can be too narrow. But the US liberal arts way of doing it is a waste. Undergraduate students spend less than two years worth in their chosen major, and most end up being functionally incompetent in their major as they graduate. I realize this is largely due to the fact that high schools failed to give them this broadly-based education as they water down requirements. But there has to be a better way. Send those who have not yet mastered the general education requirements to community colleges, for example.

If the US is the bastion of liberal arts, as Michael Roth claims, then he cannot claim it favors critical thinking. I am continually amazed how US students woefully lack in this regard, with few exceptions of course. They are not interested in what they are studying or the world outside. They are very passive and minimalist students. This is favored by the "anything goes" attitude that liberal arts favor.

The reason why the US is a world economic leader is that it has a scientific and technological edge, and that is has economic policies that provide good incentives, at least better than the rest of the world (and that Americans are obsessed with working). That edge is waning because other countries are catching up on the scientific and technological front and have already surpassed the US in several areas. Michael Roth apparently thinks it is wrong to try to keep that edge, and that one should focus more or social sciences, humanities and fine arts. He got the causation wrong. One can afford this when one is rich, but it does not make you rich.

I think he right on the fourth point. It is useless to engineer better crops if you cannot find a way for people to adopt them. But one does not need more liberal arts majors than scientists to achieve this. His fifth point actually shows liberal arts needs science, so science should not be discouraged.

I also agree with his sixth point. That is why one should have sufficient time to teach not just the recipes of a field, but also where they come from. This allows a student later to come up with new solutions to new problems. But the 3-4 semesters in a major do allow this. The result is that in fields where this is not sufficient students are not competent enough and end up with jobs outside their major and with low pay. Just look what pay is across majors. Liberal arts majors are consistently at the bottom, also due the fact that there are just too many of those students.

No, we should not encourage liberal arts education. This should be done in high school and community colleges. Let universities concentrate on the teaching of the core and produce truly competent professionals.

Students hate good teachers

Teachers often find student evaluations rather frustrating. They are contradictory, short-sighted and sometimes insulting, especially when students did not put much effort in the class in the first place. Student evaluations are also biased towards teachers who are physically more appealing. And students, with their lack of experience and expertise, are not in a good position to evaluate an expert. What more could be said against student evaluations?

Michela Braga, Marco Paccagnella and Michele Pellizzari find that better teachers get worse evaluations. The way they measure teacher effectiveness is by looking at how students do in subsequent classes. They find that teachers matter, and substantially as the teacher can explain 43% of the standard deviation in subsequent grades. But the good teachers get a worse student evaluation, which is frightening, because administrators are getting the wrong message.

From the tables, I gather that higher ranked faculty teach better, but older and researchers with higher H-indexes do worse, which is rather contradictory. I wonder whether taking into account the obviously high correlation between some of the independent variables would take care of this, or other controls, like the attractiveness mentioned above.

Marginal returns of education policies

It is well-known that the returns to education are high, higher than financial returns in fact. Especially for primary education, estimation of Mincer equations has yielded returns over 12% a year, returns that decline somewhat with additional years of education. These are personal returns, that is, how much one's wage increases with an additional year of education. This indicates that one should choose more education than less. From a policy point of view, it is, however, not clear that one should try to stretch as much as possible education. Indeed, higher education is more costly and its returns may differ by individual.

Pedro Carneiro, James Heckman and Edward Vytlacil address this heterogeneity by estimating returns from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1979. They are certainly not the first ones to do so with this dataset, but the innovation is in the use of instrumental variables. Indeed, they identify a serious shortcoming in interpreting the latent (Corr: local) average treatment effect because the people induced to go to school by a change in an instrument may not be the same that are induced to go to school by a given policy change. As a consequence, the returns for the two types of people can be quite different, and they are in this case. They improve the estimation technique by identifying what sections of an economically interpretable mean marginal benefit surface are identified by different instruments.

Carneiro, Heckman and Vytlacil conclude from their analysis that returns of higher education differ indeed from individual to individual, and in a way that is highly predictable by both the econometrician and the individual. In other words, people who sort themselves into higher education are those who have already experienced high returns and are likely to experience high ones in the future. This indicates that with current policies the right people go to higher education, and that encouraging more to go to college would not yield returns as high as for those who already go there.

Today's students are lazy

I find it quite frustrating to teach undergraduates, as they seem to have difficulties grasping simple concepts and often exhibit a disturbing lack of drive to learn. I may say this is due to my teaching, but my sentiment has been echoed by many colleagues, at my place and elsewhere. In addition, this frustration is fueled by the difference I see between undergraduates today and those from my times as a student. That view may very well be biased, as I was a rather good student, thus I am looking forward to some objective measures of student effort and performance.

Philip S. Babcock and Mindy Marks use time use surveys of students in 1961 and 2003. They notice that the time spent studying has been reduced from 40 hours a week to 27. This is not a small change. And this cannot be explained by any composition effect, as it appears no matter how you slice the data. There is some non-measurable way in which students are different.

One thing is that they rely much more on textbooks, thus they need to do much less note-taking and transcription, or trying to understand what they wrote. This would be positive for outcomes, probably. But universities pamper students much more with social activities that distract them from studying, on top of all the dispersions TV and the internet now offer. And finally, students find much less of an urge to do well, as they have the impression, which is not wrong, that they will be doing fine anyway. They do not need a work ethic to succeed any more.

Economists are less generous, but not by indoctrination

From many experiments, it is known that economists are more selfish than others. the interesting question is whether selfish people select themselves into Economics, or whether Economics students get indoctrinated by the material they are covering in classes.

Yoram Bauman and Elaina Rose use data from students at the University of Washington to elucidate this. There, students can donate to social programs each quarter. This is tracked along with their taking Economics classes. While Economics majors are indeed less generous, this does not appear to evolve over time. One can thus conclude this is a section effect. However, non-majors become more selfish once exposed to Economics. In other words, economists are quite convincing.

College fraternities and the labor market

I have always considered college fraternities to be a nuisance. They appear to be mostly about drinking and making a mess on campus, although they also organize some activities for the public good. As any social club, there may also be some value of being a member beyond the socializing.

Sergey Popov and Dan Bernhardt build a model of two-sided selection of fraternities and its members. Candidates may differ by ability, and membership in a fraternity may be viewed as a signal of ability by employers. The paper shows that anything can happen in terms of equilibrium: informative, uninformative, good students, bad students or no students in fraternities. But using data about student grades at the University of Illinois, Popov and Bernhardt show that the following equilibrium is most likely: The best students shy away from fraternities while the worst ones do not get in. Fraternities only have students with medium abilities. But would these students have better grades if they did not spend significant time in fraternity activities?