Seth's Blog

In this post, Bryan Caplan says (again) that college is vastly overrated. Like me, he says that the only thing college professors know how to do is be professors and that is all they can actually teach. Graduate school, where professors teach students who want to be professors, makes sense. Undergraduate school, where almost no students will become professors, does not. Like me, he ridicules the idea that professors teach students “how to think”.

He omits half of my criticism. It isn’t just teaching (“how to think” — please!), it’s also evaluation. Professors are terrible at evaluation. Their method of judging student work is very simple: How close is it to what I would have done? The better you can imitate the professor, no matter what the class, the higher your grade. This is one size fits all with a vengeance because there is no opting out. Sure, you can choose your major. But every class is taught by a professor. What if your strengths lie elsewhere — in something that your professors aren’t good at? Tough luck. Your strengths will never be noticed or encouraged or developed.

At Berkeley (where Bryan went and I taught) and universities generally, the highest praise is brilliant. Professor X is brilliant. Or: Brilliant piece of work. People can do great things in dozens of ways, but somehow student work is almost never judged by how beautiful, courageous, practical, good-tasting, astonishing, vivid, funny, moving, comfortable, and so on it is. Because that’s not what professors are good at. (Except in the less-academic departments, such as art and engineering.) To fail to grasp that students can excel in dozens of ways is to seriously shortchange them. To value them at much less than they are worth — and, above all, to fail to help them grow and find their place in the world after college.

At Berkeley, I figured this out in a way that a libertarian should appreciate: I gave my students much more choice. For a term project, I said they could do almost anything so long as it was off-campus and didn’t involve library work. What they chose to do revealed a lot. I began to see not just how different they were from me but how different they were from each other. One of my students chose to give a talk to a high-school class. This was astonishing because she has severe stage fright. Every step was hard. But she did it. “I learned that if I really wanted to, I could conquer my fear,” she wrote.

One of my Tsinghua students recently asked me: “Are you a brave man?” (She wanted to give me a gift of stinky tofu.) I said no. She said she thought I was brave for coming to China. Perhaps. I have never done anything as brave as what my student with stage fright did. I have never done something that terrified me — much less chosen to do such a thing. Her homework hadn’t been very good. When I read about her term project — conquering stage fright — I realized how badly I had misjudged her. How badly I had failed to appreciate her strengths. I saw that it wasn’t just her and it wasn’t just me. By imposing just one narrow way to excel, the whole system badly undervalued almost everyone. Almost everyone had strengths the system ignored. And it’s a system almost everyone must go through to reach a position of power!

This is related to what I call the hemineglect of economists — they fail to see that innovation should be half of economics. Diversity of talents and interests is central to innovation because new things are so often mixtures of old things. By rewarding only one kind of talent, colleges suppress diversity of talent and thereby reduce innovation. (It’s no coincidence that Steve Jobs, whom we associate with innovation, didn’t finish college. He saw his talents wouldn’t be valued.) Psychologists are also guilty of this. Many psychologists glorify IQ. Somehow having a high IQ is crucial to success . . . somehow a society that doesn’t encourage people with high IQs will do badly. And so on. In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray showed that high IQ scores correlated with other measures of desirable social outcomes (e.g., income — people with higher IQ scores made more money). Like many successful people, they failed to see the possibility that the whole world had been shaped to reward the things that the people in power (i.e., they themselves) are good at. Not because those talents work (= produce a better economy). But because they are easy to measure (by college grades). The glorification of IQ has had a solipsistic aspect and has ignored what should be obvious, that diversity of talents and skills promotes innovation. Without a diverse talent pool, any society will do a poor job of solving the problems that inevitably arise.

The first paragraph of an article by Anthony Grafton called “Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?” contains this:

At every level of the system, dedicated professors are setting students on fire with enthusiasm for everything from the structure of crystals to the structure of poems.

Grafton means this as praise, of course: Wow, these professors are doing a great job! I disagree. I think there are a million things in the world to be enthusiastic about — the structure of crystals and the structure of poems are two examples, no better or worse than the rest. I also think it is fundamentally foolish for a professor to try to make every student in his or her class as enthusiastic about X as the professor happens to be. It is foolish because it ignores human variability, which is great along these lines. (I think diversity of interest and enthusiasm is large because such diversity helps produce diverse economies.) It would be much better for the students if the professor were to help them develop their own unique enthusiasms.

I suspect Grafton has never considered this possibility. In discussions at Berkeley that I attended about how to be a good teacher, including special seminars, it never came up. Yet I taught a class at Berkeley (Psychology and the Real World) where I did just that: I allowed students to do volunteer work off-campus about almost anything they wanted. They chose the work, not me.

At Tsinghua University, which is like a Chinese MIT, I am teaching a small class (25 students) called Frontiers of Psychology. It is required of freshmen psychology majors. There are a few students from other majors. So many of my students do brilliant work that it is hard to keep track. For example, two classes ago I started having presentations (short talks related to the reading). In the very first one, a student talked about her dysmenorrhea and self-experimentation to stop it. Later, during a discussion of how to give a talk, another (female) student said, “I could not have given such a talk.” “That’s a compliment, right?” I said. “I don’t know,” she said. Which is only to say what a radical and stunning talk it was.

For this week’s class I assigned several readings, from which students chose one. The shortest and most popular paper, by Joshua Knobe, a Yale professor of philosophy, was about judgments of intentionality. Knobe showed subjects various scenarios and asked them whether the side effects of a action described in the scenario should be considered intentional or not. Changing one word had a big effect. Knobe concluded that we tend to see bad side effects as intentional, good side effects as unintentional. I assigned it because the effect of changing one word was large and I liked the source of data (“Subjects were 78 people spending time in a Manhattan public park”).

Here is one student’s comment:

When I was in primary school, we had a very kind English teacher who was quite close to me. After she left school, she sent some photos to me and I found it a great honor to deliver them to my classmates. Later on, a math teacher got married and she gave another pupil some sweets to deliver the class. I felt unpleasant since not every student could get a sweet. I thought it unjust.

However, in both cases, photos and sweets, there weren’t enough for the whole class. The only difference was who passed them out. When I did, the main issue I cared about was “I’m the one to deliver them”; in the other case, “Why can’t everyone get one?”

She titled her comment “We are the Heroes, They are the Villains”. Her point was that Knobe’s results could be explained by the idea that we slant our judgments of others and ourselves to make them look worse and us look better — an explanation that Knobe didn’t consider.

Knobe isn’t the only one who didn’t think of it. Other students proposed other plausible explanations. But I think the “we are heroes” explanation is quite plausible because three other students made the same point in other ways. One of them repeated a story from a test preparation book:

A teacher had a student do ten math problems on the board. Then she asked another student to describe what he saw. “Two of the answers are wrong,” he said. “What about the eight correct answers?” said the teacher.

Not a true story but surely based on actual events. Another student told of the time her teacher had made her push her fellow students to exercise for an half-hour per day. The students complained to her about their loss of time. Later, however, her class had finished first in a physical competition — much better than usual. Her classmates did not give her any credit for this.

To emphasize how unobvious this idea is, here is what two professors make of Knobe’s results:

This asymmetry in responses between the ‘harm’ and ‘help’ scenarios, now known as the Knobe effect, provides a direct challenge to the idea of a one-way flow of judgments from the factual or non-moral domain to the moral sphere. ‘These data show that the process is actually much more complex,’ argues Knobe.

My students disagree. Their proposed explanations, such as the “we are heroes” idea, were not “much more complex”.

I believe they have noticed a broad truth about human nature that has escaped many psychologists, not just Knobe. In this excerpt from his new book, my former colleague Danny Kahneman describes what he calls “the illusion of validity”: personality judgments were considered more predictive than they actually were by the people who made them. Could this be another example of “we are heroes”? The “we are heroes” idea also explains the Lake Wobegone Effect: Most people consider themselves above average. The technical name for this is illusory superiority. The Wikipedia article about illusory superiority does not mention the Knobe Effect and vice-versa. In this important aspect of human nature, professors (including me) have had trouble seeing that the trees make a forest.

China has hundreds of colleges. Tsinghua and Beijing University are at the top (top tier), followed by perhaps 20 colleges considered second-tier. A friend of mine attends a third-tier school. In all of her classes, class consists of the professor reading the textbook. Word for word. (Which, by the way, doesn’t happen at Tsinghua, I checked.)

Perhaps you grimace. I think this is a great thing. It means students can easily skip class — any sensible person would. Being able to skip class frees them to do internships, visit the National Museum, explore the off-campus world however they want. My friend took advantage of this to do three internships. At Berkeley I told students to take as few classes as possible and take as many internships as possible. I taught a class called Psychology and the Real World whose sole purpose was to help students learn off campus. When I was a freshman at Caltech, the school had an unintentionally similar feature: all freshman grades were pass/fail. This made it much easier to skip class, which I did most of the time. Even better than the Chinese system, I no longer had to study much. I used my abundant free time to explore my own interests, which included reading Veblen and Freud. I taught psychology to under-privileged eighth-graders. The freedom provided by pass/fail grading allowed me to explore my own interests and started me on the path to becoming an experimental psychologist. I am not kidding: this is a great hidden strength of Chinese higher education.

By the same twisted logic am I glad that American colleges are becoming insufferably expensive — because then fewer people will attend them? Not yet. I think most American high school students think not attending college is dangerous. Reading the textbook at home and doing an internship isn’t dangerous.

• Reclamations. Essays by University of California students about the harm done by student loans.  Via Boing Boing. Being taught “how to think” (as many college professors claim they do because the details of their class are obviously useless) is fine when it’s a choice. (I support the study of esoteric seemingly-useless stuff — when it’s a choice.) When it’s required (to get a decent job) and very expensive (due to tuition), there’s a problem.
• The Cobblestone Conservative: How Jane Jacobs saved New York City’s soul.
• Robin Hanson surveys his students. “[Their] opinions [about "random policy questions"] strongly tend to support the status quo – mostly whatever is, is assumed good.” Same thing at Berkeley. Most of my students, for better or worse, were very conformist. My conclusion, which I imagine Robin agrees with, is that the reasons we give for our beliefs have roughly zero correlation with the actual reasons and shouldn’t be taken seriously (e.g., argued with). Professors who claim to teach their students “how to think” (e.g., lines of argument) are shutting their eyes to what Robin shows is right in front of them: the lack of importance of “thinking” in the determination of belief.
• Edward Jay Epstein on Michael Milken. Great journalism.

Thanks to Ryan Holiday. If you send me a link that I post I am happy to link to your blog or website.