A look at faculty workload

A common complaint about teachers is that they have too much vacation time. Such complaints are even louder for university faculty, as the academic calendar specifies even shorter teaching times, and on top of this the weekly class room hours are ridiculously low. These complaints emerge because teaching is the only face time university faculty have with the paying public. We do a lot of other things that the tax payer does not see and in particular does not realize how much time it takes. But how much do university faculty actually work?

Manuel Crespo and Denis Bertrand have analyzed surveys distributed to faculty of a "Quebec research-intensive university." Using results from 130 tenured faculty who agreed to spend significant time thinking about there use of time, the average workweek is 57 hours. That takes into account that there are parts of the year where workload is lighter (summers) and other times where there more to do. Only about a third of the time is dedicated to research, which I find surprising as this is supposed to be a research university. 44% of the time, or 25 hours, are dedicated to teaching, a surprisingly low 3 hours a week to administration and 9 hours a week to "public service" (would my blogging count?). The report goes through more details, some of which I want to highlight: only 10% of time related to teaching is actually in the classroom. The rest is mostly preparing for classes, face time with individual students, and grading. Time spend on teaching has increased over a decade, attributed foremost to increasing class size (I do not think there is much value to this result, as faculty also got older and in some cases tenured). And there are very few gender differences in time allocation.

Textbooks do not matter

I have complained before, and I am far from being the only one, that textbooks are too expensive. But we still use them because we think they are useful, or because we are too lazy to come up with class material ourselves. Beyond the benefit for the lazy teacher, do textbooks actually bring something to the classroom?

Maria Kuecken and Marie-Anne Valfort looks at a case where textbooks are sometimes simply not available, classrooms in 11 Sub-Saharian countries. And it turns out the availability of textbooks does not matter, whether owned by each pupil or shared. It is only in one case, the richer kids, where there is a noticeable improvement in school achievement for shared textbooks. So it looks like teachers manage to adapt well to the absence of textbooks. And I think there is virtue in working without them: students have to listen to the teacher, learn to take notes or absorb material on the spot, and they are more active in the classroom. I wish I could go without textbooks, but unfortunately rules are rules. And publishers also need to make a living, right?

The perpetual lag of macroeconomics teaching

When it comes to teaching, nobody likes revamping lecture notes and reforming a curriculum. This is especially true when one is oneself not really conversant in the new material. While I think a Economics PhD should be able to teach almost any undergraduate Economics class, one is still drawn to the path of least resistance and teach only what one knows, even when this is outdated. One consequence of this is that undergraduates get to learn what the profession discredited sometimes decades ago. Nowhere is that more true than in Macroeconomics, which went through a transformation in 1970's and 1980's that to a large extend shelved IS/LM, yet the latter is still the core of undergraduate teaching. The fact that those teaching this today were taught IS/LM is the prime reason, and the textbook writers accommodate this.

Some have called current macroeconomic theory wrong with the current crisis and thus there would be the need to a change in research paradigm and thus also teaching. I am not sure about this claim, I would rather call macroeconomic research before the crisis incomplete rather than wrong. As to the teaching reform, that will take ages. One way to the someway fix the broken IS/LM model to make it more amenable to current events, like Peter Bofinger tries by introducing involuntary unemployment that does not necessarily come from wage rigidity. There have been other such attempts, but frankly, they just make the model even less believable and impossible to teach. The true reform should be to drop IS/LM entirely from the undergraduate classroom, except for History of Economics classes.

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.

Are hot teachers better teachers?

It is well known that beautiful and tall people have better lives and are better paid. This is especially thought to be true in activities where skills are relatively unimportant. What about economics professors?

Anindya Sen, Marcel Voia and Frances Woolley use the hotness indicators from student evaluations at ratemyprofessor.com in Ontario and find hot economics university professors are paid a whooping 10% more than their less attractive counterparts. Not only is this a large number, it also runs counter to previous results that such effects are limited to unskilled professions. This effect is especially strong for men and not present for women, Indeed women who negotiate hard are not deemed attractive.

In addition, hotter teachers also get better student evaluations, even after controlling for all what the authors could put their hands on. For other indicators of professor productivity, it turns out that hotness affects positively women for citations, although this could be due to a few highly cited women (citation counts are always very skewed). But neither men nor women publish significantly more when hot, but they tend to attract more co-authors. I really need to be careful with my appearance.

The strange dynamics of faculty merit pay

In many US universities, faculty performance is rewarded with merit bonuses or increases, the initial idea being to prevent other universities from poaching the best performers. But seeing how this is approached in a very heterogeneous way across institutions, one sometimes wonders whether the merit process is done optimally.

Finn Christensen, James Manley and Louise Laurence had access to much relevant data in a large public university. There, merit pay is distributed in each department by a committee of tenure faculty. The outcome is that about two thirds of all faculty reach the highest merit scale, three fourths among tenured faculty. Now this outcome could be justifiable with additional data, which the authors have for a particular college in this university in the form of various output measures that should matter for evaluation. It turns out that untenured faculty is as productive, but still gets less merit pay. Even worse, it appears that the output measures explain about 10% of the variation in merit.

What is going on? Christensen, Manley and Laurence show theoretically that given the institutional structure, one should not be surprised by these results. I can believe that, and this is probably compounded by compression: as new faculty commands higher pay than old, the old compensate with higher merit. The authors find little evidence of this. Internal politics also certainly play a role, as you want to avoid offending someone who may be determining your merit later. But what is clear is that there is, at least at this place, very little transparency in merit attribution.

About the state of European higher education

A week ago, I opined about the state of higher education in the United States. My outlook was rather grim. Europe looks better, but still faces challenges and they are largely of its own doing.

Let us first look at what Europe is doing right. Of course, each country is different, but there is a general sense that universities need reform to open up and become more competitive (both in the sense of becoming better and competing more). The most visible part of this reform is the Bologna process, that makes studies comparable and will thus increase competition. Also, as European universities are mostly publicly funded, they tended to be controlled tightly by the main funders. They have gained significant autonomy in several countries, notably Italy and France, allowing to recruit faculty better adapted to their needs. Some countries, notably Germany, have also introduced more flexibility in hiring and pay scales, which has made it possible to hire more "star" faculty who had better conditions in the US.

European universities do not face the fluctuating income of their US counterparts. Funding is pretty much guaranteed not matter what the economic conditions are, which allows for good planning. That said, overall funding is still rather low, as there is little tuition income that can give a university that extra edge for resources.

But European universities have still issues. They are still overcrowded. They are still a far cry from US universities in terms of research, at least in Economics. They try to emulate American universities, but in odd ways. One is that more and more four year undergraduate programs are created where three years would be sufficient. US students still need two years of general education before tackling their major. European students come much better prepared from high school and can specialize right away.

Also Europeans try to emulate the competition between US universities by means of evaluations. It is a good-hearted attempt to make funding depend on performance. But as so often, nothing beats the market system. US universities attract the staff that is best for them, and that is not necessarily measured by the number of publications or citations. For example, faculty that are very good at attracting and advising students carry a market premium that cannot be measured otherwise. And the sad part it that this European evaluitis is expensive and eats a substantial part of the funds to distribute. The solution is to give even broader autonomy to universities. They can hire whoever they want, at the price they want. And they need to deliver a product, education and grants, that is also allocated by a market. That means in particular that the government is also not in the business of allocating students.

PS: a recent development that worries me as well is that technical schools now also get the university label in Europe. That is again imitating the US, and this will drive up the proportion of the population that is university educated. That looks good on paper, but does not change anything in terms of outcomes, except for fooling people that all degrees are equal.

Is live or Internet instruction better?

University administrations are big fans of instruction over the Internet, because it is a big money maker. There is virtually no limit to the number of students in a class, one does not need a class room, and the class can be repeated at will once the initial investment is made. Faculty are less enthralled, because they think the classroom interaction is crucial, they fear of becoming expendable and they get sucked into a technology they are not familiar with. But, of course, one should first have an idea whether this is a teaching technology that works as well as the standard classroom.

David N. Figlio, Mark Rush and Lu Yin have performed experiments with a microeconomics class, where students were randomly assigned to Internet or classroom lectures. It turns out live learning works slightly better, in particular for Hispanics, male and otherwise low achieving students. At least for the latter two groups, from my experience these are the once that have a lower attendance record, and it looks like watching lectures when it best suits you is not an advantage, it seems rather like people postpone indefinitely and learn less. Unfortunately, the study says nothing about the on-line viewing habits. It would be interesting to see whether on-line instruction encourages absenteeism or tardiness in covering classes, something live lectures clearly prevent.

With the considerable influx of students in US public universities, whose resources keep decreasing, teaching on-line has been at the forefront of solutions to prevent overcrowding. While it does not seem to be a better solution in terms of learning, it certainly beats starting to offer classes at 6:30am.

About the state of US higher education

Yesterday, I gave some pessimistic outlook for higher education in the United States. Let me give here some more thoughts about it. Let me start by characterizing the current situation. US universities have a strong focus on research, neglect undergraduate education, and are very strong in graduate education. Professors are the best paid in the world and undergraduate students pay the highest tuitions in the world.

Inherently, there is nothing wrong with the best being paid the most, and students paying for their education by borrowing against future income. But are they really paying for an education? Most students do not care for their studies, they go to college for the "social experience." They do not go to class, work little for their courses, and learn little, in particular in their major. Faculty are complicit, accommodate this with few failing grades and could not care less. They only care about research, put as little effort into undergraduate education as possible, and delegate whenever possible such teaching to graduate assistants. Effort into graduate education is much higher, and the results show. The world's best students flock to the United States, which happily accepts them for lack of substantial local talent.

But is all this sustainable? While the current crisis will be over sooner or later, it will have a longer lasting impact on higher education. The reduced availability of credit and in particular the reduced willingness of households to take on debt while make that parents will question more the return they get for their university investment. Currently, in the past, they have been willing to pay for a substandard education because of a myth that a diploma is all that matters, and employers followed along. But they will (or at least should) realize that some people should simply not go to college or they will require much more from faculty. This means that the days of high pay and little time spent on teaching are over, because of lower enrollments and higher accountability.

I realize that the mission of a university is not only to teach undergraduates. Research is very important, but it has become too important, and at least in social sciences and business, with not much gain for society. The best that could happen is that graduate education and research will be concentrated among top institutions, where faculty will be able to justify teaching reductions. For the rest of us, reality has to settle in that we are here to teach undergraduates at reasonable pay.

How long will it take for these "predictions" to happen? In a sense, they are happening now. Even before the crisis, government support has been drastically cut. Some state universities get no state support. Government research grants are not going to be sustained given public debt. And tuition raises will soon not be sustainable anymore.

Ironically, Europeans are trying to emulate US higher education. It is ironic because European universities do a much better job at their mission for a lower cost. European undergraduates are much better educated and do not need graduate degrees to hold jobs in their field. Graduate degrees are not as strong as in the US, but that could easily change with some better structures. And in many cases, universities pool resources to create very decent doctoral programs. Once some European faculty return from the US, they will be competitive.

Does faculty quality matter for PhDs?

A reason people are obsessed with department rankings is, for graduate students, faculty quality reflects the quality of their education, and for faculty, it determines the quality of the students they will attract. The presumption here is that there is a strong correlation between quality of faculty, as measured by citations or article placement, and quality of students, as measured by potential or job placement. This correlation is, however, not that close to one, I can think of several top programs whose students turn out not to be that great. The student placement ranking by Rabah Amir and Malgorzata Knauff unfortunately does not compute such a correlation.

This introduction is a little bit of a stretch to the paper by Fabian Waldinger that looks at a stark natural experiment: the massive exodus of top mathematics faculty during Nazi Germany. Some top departments, the best in the world at the time, lost over half of their faculty within a year, giving us very clear identification. Measuring the likelihood of doctoral students to publish in top journals before and after the exodus, he finds that a one standard deviation in faculty quality, as measured by citations per faculty, increases the probability of publishing the dissertation by 13%. It also has a similar impact on the probability to become full professor, and gives 6.3 more lifetime citations (for an average of 11). One conclusion that Waldinger reaches is that few top departments with top faculty should concentrate on conferring doctoral degrees.

What could be the implications for today? The United States is now the most vibrant arena for doctoral studies in most fields. But the success of US universities is possibly not sustainable, which could lead to an exodus of faculty, a watering down of top doctoral programs and thus an important reduction in the quality of graduate education. Under such circumstances, the only way to save the preeminence of the US is to close many doctoral programs and concentrate the top researchers in the remaining programs.

Make good grades costly to teachers

As a teacher, who has not faced this dilemma: you want your students to make an effort and learn, but you also want them rewarded with good grades so that they do well on the job market or with college applications. If your grading practices cannot be observed by outsiders, there is no reason for you to give bad grades, and students will not study hard.

Robertas Zubrickas rationalizes all this with a principal-agent model where the teacher cares more about the learning and the students more about the signaling. Teachers offer a contract to students, oberserving perfectly their performance and rewarding it with good grades. The problem is that issuing good grades is costless. Of course, what really matters are relative grades, but if the market cannot observe the grading rule or the grade distribution, all that matters are the "nominal" grades. The result: everyone gets the best grade, and there is complete pooling. And it is empirically observed that schools with laxer grading standards achieve lower SAT scores.

And how can one prevent this poor outcome. Either make the distribution of grades available, thus making grades "real" instead of "nominal." Or make it costly for teachers to give good grades (instead of making it costly to give bad grades by asking for extra administrative steps for those). For example by imposing a distribution or an average grade. I would certainly welcome this, as some of my colleague are clearly free-riding and giving good grades to everyone.

How to avoid academic deadwood

Everybody who has ever worked in an academic environment has complained about academic deadwood: tenured professors who do not contribute to research and often do not contribute much to anything else as well. The tenure system is often blamed, as it makes it very difficult to fire someone for underperforming. But even if there is an incentive structure, like merit increases in pay, they clearly have less bite for old faculty who will benefit from them for a shorter time.

I have always been on the lookout for a solution to this academic deadwood problem, thus when I stumbled upon this paper by Yu-Fu Chen and Gylfi Zoega, I was very hopeful. They draw a life-cycle model with unobservable research effort, while administration and teaching are observable. The paper comes to the conclusion that only the senior professors who enjoy research will do any, and thus heterogeneity in research keeps increasing with age. Nothing new here. Where a model becomes really useful is with policy prescriptions: how could the incentive structure be changed? Is is better not to have a tenure system? But none of that. How disappointing.

Here is my take at it, but without the benefit of having worked out a structural model. 1) Tenure needs to be weakened. While it was instituted to preserve academic freedom when research could not be evaluated, we have now plenty of metrics fro research performance. Doing poorly on those should be punishable. 2) Merit raises for good performance need to increase with age to counter the fact that older faculty benefit from them for a shorter time. 3) There needs to be much more flexibility and heterogeneity in teaching loads for senior faculty, so as to balance total effort.

The fuss about retirement plan choices in academia

When you start with an academic position at a US state college, you usually get a day to acquaint yourself with local authorities and procedures. You hear from a lot of important administrators, sign a lot of forms, and try to understand what you got into. One of those forms determines which retirement plan you chose to contribute to: the state defined-benefit plan for all state employees, or the alternative defined-contributions plan with TIAA-CREF for teachers. Not knowing really what each plan delivers, you typically go for the second one, as you may not get tenured and value the fact that TIAA-CREF is also available in other states. But that decision was not well-informed, rushed and, most importantly, irrevocable.

Over the following years, as you learn more about the retirement plans, you wonder whether you made the right choice. But you were fine with it as long as the stock market was doing well and your retirement funds were accruing nicely. Now is a different story, given the big losses on the stock market. At several universities, faculty are remembering that they did not really make a choice when they selected their retirement plans and are asking for the opportunity to switch plans, and in some cases to buy contribution years in the state plans.

This sounds like a case of trying to game the system to obtain a better retirement package. This is particularly true as those complaining the most are now tenured, thus ex-post it is optimal for them to be in the state system. But if they were truly making ill-informed decisions when they signed up, they may have a point. But try to prove it.

Where they may be more successful is when the state will realize that these faculty will now retire much later as their retirement account is now worth much less. If fact they may never retire. This means that faculty will become much older and expensive relative to new hires. Administrations may actually view offering state retirement packages as a cost efficient way to renew faculty. Or they may use golden parachutes to essentially replenish the depleted retirement accounts. Thus, faculty may not even need to complain...

Free textbooks

I have reported before about what a rip-off textbooks are. The obvious solution is to teach without one, but today's students insist on them. But help seems to appear on the horizon, in the from of Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher that sells hard copies, at lower prices than the competition, and offer the PDF files for free. This is quite an interesting commercial strategy, which has also been adopted by some open access journals that provide print-on-demand services at some cost but otherwise keep the journal free. In economics, Theoretical Economics comes to mind.

Hattip: Against Monopoly

The case against student evaluations

It is time again for student evaluations and the biannual ritual where students are given the authority to judge how well they were treated in their classes. While I agree that it is useful to have some indicators about the quality of teaching, I do not think students are the best people to ask about this.

As Walter Bossert argues, the facts that students are obviously no experts in the taught material, that they perform the evaluation anonymously without having to justify their marks and they have no guidelines on what the marks are worth makes this a highly dubious effort. Imagine if teachers were evaluating students this way!

From my own experience and from pouring through others' evaluations (a sad exercise), students reward those who make it easy on them. Just look how students discuss their teachers on Professor Performance or Rate My Professors. A committed teacher who wants her students to really learn and pushes them to work hard is doomed.

Then, how should teachers be evaluated? By their peers, and by students who have graduated. These are the people that can best evaluate how the teacher masters the material and how it has an impact.

What faculty spend their time on

A popular complaint by faculty is that they do not have enough time for research and spend too much time on teaching and administrativa. A common complaint of the general public is that faculty do not spend enough time teaching. While it is difficult to say what the optimal time allocations are, one can study what they currently are.

Albert Link, Christopher Swann and Barry Bozeman do this for science and engineering faculty using a survey a US research universities. The survey has a drawback that it uses recall, asking how much time the surveyed faculty member spent on various tasks over a typical week of the last term. There is plenty of evidence that such questions elicit inaccurate and, especially, biased responses, which is why I will not report on the number of hours.

Rather, I want to discuss on how the time allocation evolves over an academic career. First, the number of hours per week is remarkably stable over a career. The allocation varies significantly, though. Take teaching (including preparation time and student advising), which starts very high for the two first years. Given that new faculty typically have a lower teaching load, it is surprising to see how it still does not compensate for the additional prepping for new classes. Teaching time then steadily declines, presumably because prepping time decreases with experience, but then increases for associate professors who where not promoted to full professors. As they did not make it to higher level in terms of research, they are presumably asked to take more teaching responsibilities. Or they lie about the time spend on prepping. Or they are simply less efficient.

For time devoted to research, again there is a peak in the two first years, then an almost steady decline for those staying on as associate professors. Full professors, however, maintain research time steady from the point of promotion. Grant writing time, important in the sciences and engineering, does not fluctuate much over the career. However, time dedicated to "service" (committees, consulting) increases steadily, without much difference between titles. Other remarkable findings: non-tenured faculty works 2.5 more hours a week, women 1.2 more.

Would these results pertain to Economics faculty? I can only relate to my anecdotal evidence (and that of a few others I called about this). It seems that the research hours actually decline over their career. They get plenty of opportunities in consulting, especially for full professors, or they just stop doing research, especially long-term associate professors. For the latter, I have not noticed any additional time devoted to teaching, so I conclude their total hours must be declining. Readers may correct me if my observations are truly anecdotal.

PS: Thanks to the Geary Behaviour Centre blog for alerting me about this article.

Teaching without textbooks

Classes have started, students have bought the assigned textbooks, and they have thoroughly complained about the cost of the textbooks. It is the same at the start of every term, yet publishers manage to exploit their market power without much of a challenge. Yet there are ways out.

I reported about one, POeT, which encourages comparison shopping by faculty while they select a textbook. There are cheaper, even open-access textbooks available. But there is even better: teaching without a textbook.

Why do we need a textbook? It is convenient for a teacher to have ones course structured by someone else, with ready-made teaching material like slides, exam questions and exercises. For students, it reassures them that they have a backup in case they did not understand what was going on in class.

It is, however, my experience that once there is a textbook, students start slacking off considerably: they do not pay attention in class, do not take notes or do not even show up in class, because "there is a textbook." One striking consequence is that the average student nowadays in incapable of taking notes beyond what is written on the board. Also, they are lost as soon as lectures deviate slightly from the textbook.

The logical consequence is to do away with the textbooks. While it may not be popular at first, it forces students to think and take notes while in class. One should keep in mind the original purpose of a textbook: support the teaching in class. Unfortunately, it has become the opposite: the teaching is supposed to follow a textbook. If this were the goal, one could in fact do away with the teaching, simply assign a textbook and then test people on it. Wait, this is already done with correspondence and online courses.

I put a lot of blame on the students, as they follow what they believe is the easier way by requesting a textbook for every class. But teachers are to blame as well. They often also take the easy way by choosing a textbook that is easy to teach from, but not necessarily easy to learn from. I have had colleagues select textbooks on the basis of the powerpoint slides alone...

Mankiw on textbook costs

I have already posted twice about the excessive cost of textbooks, but today's post by Greg Mankiw needs a reaction.

Greg Mankiw, probably the economist that makes the most money off textbooks, and I suspect by far, argues that there is nothing wrong with the cost of textbooks. He claims that this is a market with free entry, and if the price is too high, others would enter and drive prices down with the increased supply. That would be correct if the market for textbooks would satisfy all the canons of perfect competition. But it does not.

First, students are a captive market. They have to buy the textbook the teacher assigns, a teacher who generally is unaware of the cost of the textbooks available. Also, the teacher is constantly courted by representatives of the publishers. Also, once you have prepared a class, there is little incentive to change it. This makes it remarkably difficult for a new publisher to enter the market.

Second, as the PoET website shows clearly, textbook prices show remarkably little variance, at least among the "mainstream" ones. That really looks like (open or tacit) collusion among publishers.

Third, the textbook market is twisted in a particular way: teachers tend to choose the textbooks that are easy to teach from, either because the teacher gets all sorts of teaching material, or because the material is (too) simplified. Mankiw's textbooks are a perfect example: There are lots of definitions and descriptions, but little substance in terms of intuition, and that substance is outdated (i.e., from when the teacher learned it). That is why they are so popular. The modern textbooks (the newcomers), however, struggle. That does not look like free entry to me either.

Campaign for affordable textbooks

Just a short note this evening to encourage everyone to sign this petition and commit to using open textbooks when available. As mentioned before, textbooks have become far more expensive than can be tolerated.

Hat tip to Against Monopoly.

Scaming lecture notes to students

I am rarely upset by academics, but the post on Against Monopoly about University of Florida faculty making big bucks selling their notes and then supporting a suit against a note-taking service enrages me. Academics are working for the public good, they are vying to disseminate knowledge, they have ideals of public service. In the case related here, a professor is selling lecture note on a CD for US$80 a disk to large captive audiences. And it is required. Students have already paid tuition for the privilege to listen to him, they should not have to pay again. From what I can infer form linked articles, it is common practice on this campus. Disgusting.