The value of undergraduate education in public universities

High school seniors in the United States are now sending their applications to universities and they will soon face the problem of choosing between public and private colleges. This year seems to be different from others, as student loans were apparently among the first ones to suffer from the current financial crisis, despite being in many cases guaranteed by the government.

As private universities have typically suffered heavy losses in their endowments and are thus not expected to offer the level of tuition support of past years, students are expected to be more likely to accept offers from public universities. In fact, the latter already report much larger admission submissions than previous years.

At the undergraduate level, there is not much difference between public and private universities in terms of value added. Having taught in both, the variance of students is high in both, and I saw no notable difference in motivation. Teachers are better in elite universities, whether private or public, as teaching and research qualities are positively correlated.

Is it worth going private if one did not get into a public school? I would say no. Lower ranked private universities are not worth the price and the student debt. If a student could not make it to public university, he should not go to college at all, as I have argued before.

The quality of students in public schools may actually significantly increase for next year "thanks" to this crisis. And universities may want to accomodate this with increased enrollments. It would not be a good time for state governments to cut support to their universities.

Change I can believe in

Now that elections are over, here are a few things the new president could take to his heart and change for the better:

• Introduce direct democracy. In particular, have a referendum on abortion and close the issue.
  
• Deal with Social Security and Medicare reforms.
  
• Promote annuities to soothe the consequences of inevitable social security cutbacks.
  
• Remove incentives for legal corruption.
  
• Auction carbon credits, do not give them away.
  
• Tax fossil fuels, do not subsidize renewable energy.
  
• Do not rely on self-regulation.
  
• Drop tax deductibility of mortgage interest.
  
• Scrap agricultural subsidies.
  
• No more tax rebate stimulus package.
  
• Get retailers to include taxes in their prices.
  
• Get rid of pennies.
  
• Replace the dollar bills by dollar coins.
  
• Go metric. Only Myanmar and Liberia are sticking with the United States.
  

Show leadership!

Advice for first year graduate students

About now, most graduate Economics programs are starting. Time for me to give some advice on how to survive this first year.

The first year is going to be a grueling experience. Never before were you so challenged. You may have flown through your classes before, you may have been the first in class. Not anymore. Within a year, you are supposed to be literate in economic research, within a second year ready to contribute to the frontier of research. This is a very short time that will require substantial commitment. Be prepared to spend long hours studying. Do not fall behind. Work with fellow students, not against them. Look beyond the technical aspects of your classes and build up your economic intuition. Attend seminars. Seek contact with faculty beyond the classroom. Do not worry about thesis topics during the first year, but keep an eye open.

The most difficult time is probably going to be in December, where you will be doubting why you are getting into such a stressful adventure. Everyone goes through such a depression, and it is only those who manage to work past this episode who will be successful. So be aware that you will have doubts. Grow over them.

If you are married or in a relationship, it will suffer. Foreign partners get bored of neglect and should seek contact with other spouses in such a situation, or look into taking classes of their own. Still set aside some social time, even if it is just with fellow students. Graduate programs are very multicultural, it is great to learn about other cultures (and foods).

But not everything is stress, doom and gloom during the first year. You will learn exciting stuff, meet exciting people and build relationships that will last for a lifetime, both personal and professional. This is an exciting year where you are building the foundations for decades to come. Make the most of it!

Where to go for graduate school

It is about the time now where student have to decide where to go for graduate school among the programs that accepted them. Let me add my grain of salt in this decision, assuming one is interested in pursuing a PhD in Economics.

Financial considerations are obviously an important matter, but academic ones are more important. A fellowship with no teaching assistant obligations is not necessarily better. Indeed, many graduates will ultimately be hired to teach, and teaching experience, especially an extensive one, is valued by many schools when it comes to hiring. We are obviously not talking about the top research universities, but while they are very visible and the dream job of many, they constitute only a minority of the market. So be realistic, most jobs are in teaching colleges.

Going for the top program can also have drawbacks: it is more difficult to pass the exams, classes are larger, and professors are less accessible than in the second tier programs. Second tier programs can still provide a world-class education. The top graduates from the top programs are those everyone talks about, but those coming after them are not getting top jobs just because they come from a prestigious program. While this certainly opens doors, especially in business schools and some foreign universities, gone are the days were any candidate from Harvard University was better than any candidate from, say, the University of Oklahoma. Many hiring departments are looking arbitrage opportunities (excellent candidates from lower ranked programs), including looking at job candidates from outside the US, the UK and Canada. So do not focus just on top US schools.

Geographic preferences should not be important at all. Studying for a PhD is not tourism, and an attractive place can be a distraction. Possibly the only exception is Washington, with many internship opportunities on location.

Finally, check that the professors you are interested in working are actually still going to be there once you arrive. Turnover is quite high, especially in the top programs.

My latest Microsoft rant

No, it is not about the Yahoo takeover bid. Rather it is about Internet Explorer. I have been traveling quite a bit lately and on occasion had to use Internet Explorer. It just reminded me how poor a product this is.

Slow to start, it just would let me type in an address until it finished loading. Then navigation is excruciatingly slow. I do not think it is because pages load more slowly, it is because they are displayed only once the upload is completed. Default search is on MSNsearch, which is either poor or the browser cannot find it.

Looking at the readership of this blog, 23% use IE 7 and 14% IE 6, which is much less than more general statistics indicate. The readers of this blog are thus wiser than the general public. Let us drive down these IE numbers and enlighten the remaining ones to Firefox and Opera. Mac user are typically doing just fine with Safari. From the Wikipedia comparison of web browsers, Firefox and Opera have the advantage of having embedded spell checkers, incremental finding (no need to type whole words to search in a page), tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking already in early versions, and much fewer security issues. Despite all these features, Firefox and Opera are much leaner, which makes them work much faster. Also, they adhere to established standards (Microsoft has this tendency to create its own standards), which makes the life of webmasters much easier (no need to write special code just for IE). So make that little effort to install either of them, and you will not be looking back...

PS: And for the light moment, Minesweeper, the Movie.

Use LaTeX, not Scientific Word

After my rant against Microsoft Word, let me vent against another abomination of the text editing world, Scientific Word.

Published by Mackichan Software, it is supposed to provide the best tool for scientific writing, in particular for writing mathematical equations. It is true that Microsoft Word is absolutely horrendous in this regard, so Scientific Word is an improvement. But a costly improvement, listed at US$630 for commercial use and US$525 for academic use. Students still pay US$180.

I could vent about the price, but the real problem is that there is a price. It turns out that Scientific Word is just a collection of pull down menus with a LaTeX engine in the back. Note that LaTeX is absolutely free, very powerful, very well maintained, backwards compatible, in other words, perfect. With one drawback, it may take a day to learn to use it, as it is not WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get), you need to compile the text before viewing it. Scientific Word with its pull down menus removes the tremendous flexibility LaTeX has. And people pay for that.

Worse, one may argue that having a nice interface must be worth something. Wrong, LyX also provides such an interface, for free. I cannot understand how educated people can be scamed so openly by MacKichan Software.

Do not go for the most prestigious job

Now that soon to be PhDs are flying across the continents to impress audiences and will in a few weeks ponder which offers to accept, let me give some little pieces of advice:

• Do not go for the most prestigious job. Your advisor may really want you to take this top school job to have one more medal on his chest, but think about yourself. What quality of life do you really want? The higher ranked the department, the more stressed you will be, and the least likely you are to get tenured.


• Think not just where you want to work, but also where you want to live.


• Listen to your spouse. The divorce rate is too high among assistant professors, or many end up moving anyway as they finally listen to their spouse.


• Industry jobs are more lucrative, but they are also more stressful, and much more constraining in terms of topics and hours.
• Consider it: you may like teaching.

In summary, think more about the life you want to live, and less about the work you want to work.

Please stop using Microsoft Word documents!

I just do not understand why so many people insist on emailing in a Microsoft Word document a text that could have just as well be cut-and-pasted straight in the message subject. Why make everybody's life more complicated?



The problem is the following: Word documents are coded (intentionally?) in such a way that often only a version equivalent or superior to the one that wrote the document needs to be used for reqding the document. The problem has been exacerbated with Word Vista, which saves documents in an entirely new format! If you want to be able to reqd all the documents sent to you, you always need to have the latest version on your computer.



Why would Microsoft make its customers endure this? Word is a product that fundamentally does not need updates, thus would generate minimal sales now that everyone has it. So Microsoft adds some gimmicks, calls it a new version, and then makes its format in some way incompatible with previous ones. The incompatibility seems subtle, as the conversion success rate seems to decline the larger the difference between versions. This just looks like a scheme to fool people into buying more recent versions of Word bloated with useless features.



The policy recommendation: never send Word files. Convert them to PDF (or text) first. Or much more simply, do not use Word at all.