The Holistic First-Year College Course - A Non-Solution

Elementary education features students having a single teacher, somebody who puts the students through spelling, reading, handwriting, arithmetic, painting, and a variety of other subjects, while learning about the personalities of the individual students and showing them a modicum of affection in the process.  Most of the teaching and learning takes place within a single classroom.  The approach offers an all-in-one solution and is what I mean by a holistic course in my title.

The alternative approach is to have specialized instruction - teachers concentrate on specific subjects and students get matched to specific courses.  In our current way of doing things, the holistic approach dominates the early years of school.  Then the specialized approach follows in two distinct steps.  Middle school features students in lockstep, so they are with their classmates in most of their classes (foreign language and art/music may separate the students some).  High school then completes the transition to specialized instruction.  The students are no longer in lockstep, each has an individualized program of classes.

For reasons I don't understand, though I suspect this had little to do with student intellectual development, the switch points from holistic to specialized instruction were pushed up when I was going through the process.  (I did do a Google search on the question and found this piece, which gives some interesting history on the issue, though I think it pretty weak on causality behind the reforms.)  Perhaps for this reason, while I've read numerous pieces about education reform, the thought of moving to holistic courses in the later years of school has never come up in what I've read, even as a remote possibility.

So why bring it up here?  I've experienced a holistic learning environment in an adult education setting, both as a participant (I was part of the 2003 cohort in the Frye Leadership Institute) and as one among a team of instructors (for the Learning Technology Leadership Program 2007-09).  The experiences were very intense and created a strong bond among those in attendance.  Whether they also created durable value, it is harder for me to say.  I believe they did for me, which is one reason why I'm disposed to think about this sort of environment.

But my interest here is undergraduate education for residential college students, not adult education for mid-career professionals.  Does the suggestion make any sense in that context?

* * * * *

Let me describe the issues that I see in teaching my one Econ course each fall, a course which is targeted at juniors and seniors.  The big issues are with student commitment and student preparedness. Yet describing the issues in an abstract way doesn't really get at what such a holistic first-year course might look like, nor does it get at why the holistic course might do better for the students than the current arrangement. So I'd like to give my conception as if I were teaching such a class.  I hope that this depiction conveys the idea better.  Among the larger goals would be to create a sense of intensity in the learning without conveying that the subject matter is hopelessly over the heads of the students.

Structure-wise I envision the class to be in a seminar format with no more than 20 students.  We'd meet Monday through Friday from 8:30 AM till noon.  That way the live class session sets up the rest of the day.  Each day we'd cover only one or two topics, so that we can get into a topic with some depth.  And I imagine that the same topic will be covered for at least a couple of days and maybe several days, so we can sustain with it rather than jump from one subject to the next.  Once we got going, at least one of the topics for that day would be something that was a holdover from the prior session.

The first week would be critical for setting the tone during the rest of the semester, so I want to describe it in some detail.  I maintain a reading list for a (until now hypothetical) course on learning and leadership.  It is idiosyncratic to me and reflects pieces I've read over the years and thought highly of.   I would make extensive use of materials on that list, especially early on in the course.

Monday morning would begin with introductions.  I would replicate the practice that happens at meetings I used to attend, where everyone gets a name tent that they hand write out - first names only.  Preferably we'd use those names in our discussion and with repeated use we'd get to know one another well enough to immediately recognize the person and do that fairly quickly.  We'd use introductions for some assessment of student aspirations and expectations.  This is meant to be their first college course.  What do they want to get out of it?  What hidden fears might be articulated in such a conversation, assuming the students can relax enough to open up in the discussion?

Following this there would be some discussion of the game plan, mainly for the first week, where specifics would be described, while for the remainder of the semester a more vague structure would be mentioned but not hammered out.

Students would have two sorts of readings.  On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at 11 AM, the students would be given an essay or short story to read in class.   If an hour is not sufficient to finish the reading, my hope is that they could finish it before they go to lunch.  In any event, they should do that reading under my watch.  That afternoon, outside of class, they are to write 600 words minimum about what they read.  Half of that should be a summary of the piece.  I mean for this to apply the understand level in Bloom's taxonomy.  Given the length of this piece they will be instructed to describe their key takeaways from reading the essay.  They will be told to get at the gist of the essay.  They will also be told to ask the Why? question.  Why is the essence of this piece important or indeed is it important?  The second part of the essay is meant to be more speculative and give the student freedom to find how the essay ties either into their prior high school experience or into their aspirations for college.  The particular readings I have in mind are:

Monday - What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? by Paul Tough
Tuesday - Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
Wednesday - Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Students would be told that their essays are due at 5 PM, no exceptions for late submissions.  This is so I can read them and comment on them all.  We'd discuss the pieces and what the students wrote in the next class session. I actually do something similar in my Economics of Organizations class, though I haven't used these readings and the time from giving the prompt to having them write a post on it to my reading and commenting on it to our then discussing it in class is one week.  So here I'd be compressing that time from one week into one day.  That is intentional to contribute to the sense of intensity.

These first readings you might say are about character and the shaping of character.  The other reading would be chapters from Ellen Langer's book, The Power of Mindful Learning.   This is a short book which the class would read in its entirety, but do so outside of class, in the afternoon or evening.  Students would be encouraged to write up their thoughts on what they read, either during the reading or afterward, but none of what they wrote would be collected by me.  This reading is meant to get the students to consider in some depth what learning is actually about, to get them to reflect on whether they really were learning or not in high school, and especially if the answer to that is not really whether they want to start being mindful in college.  I am not neutral on this point.  They should opt for mindfulness, no doubt.  But they may not be very good at it, for lack of practice, and they may very well fear failure.  This should tie the character part to the learning part quite well, or so is my hope.

On Thursday the students would write a different sort of essay - a critique of their experience from the first few days.  They should discuss the workload and how their efforts compared to the workload in high school. They should discuss the difficulty level of what they've read and what we discussed in class.  They should talk about their likes and dislikes in this.  They might also offer up any suggestions they have for modifying our approach.  In advance, they will be told that Friday will be a time for review and recalibration of the course and that during that session we will write the syllabus for the rest of the class, based in part on their input.

I don't know ahead of time how that will turn out but let me discuss various potential contingencies.  On the essays the students produce, particularly the first three of these, part of my objective is to learn whether students can make good meaning from what they were to read.  It has been my contention for some time, for example this is expressed most recently in my post Defining the fundamental learning issue for average students, that many of the students I see are not good readers of generalist writing, because they haven't spent much time doing that in the past.  If the bulk of the class seem to be in this situation, then some type of adjustment will be necessary regarding the difficulty level in the reading assigned as well as in the volume of what is to be read.  If only a few seem to be in this category, then the adjustment might mean individual coaching for those students who are struggling with the reading, while keeping to the pace and difficulty level in these first few selections.

On the work level, which I expect most students to say is substantially more than what they were used to from high school, there is the added issue that if such a class were done as a small experiment within the first year experience (we typically have upwards of 7,000 first-year students on campus) then the members of the class would very likely be in a dorm or other campus sanctioned living arrangement occupied mainly by students who are taking classes as they are offered now.  Their social life is important to them, no doubt, perhaps more important than their classes.  If the outside of class work in the holistic course is seen as creating a conflict with their social life, that might then be perceived as a big negative by the students.  They might then consider dropping the holistic course in favor of a more normal class schedule.

This issue can be anticipated.  It therefore should enter into how the class is marketed before students enroll in it and then will likely appeal to certain types of students - introverts more than extroverts, kids who don't want to drink or smoke dope, students who would have preferred to go to a small liberal arts college but who couldn't afford to pay tuition at such a place, and possibly other relevant dimensions that don't occur to me now.  Even with that, the class may seem a jolt and the reaction may be - I want out.  Therefore, students need to agree ahead of time, preferably in writing, that they will stick it out. 

One of the particular questions I'd want to get at in our discussion on Friday is how the reading of the pieces done in class compared to the reading of Langer's book done outside of class.  Was the effort level the same or not?  If the effort level was different, why was that the case?  I'd then want the students to envision that it was their parents taking this course rather than them.  Let the students speculate as to how their parents would answer these questions.

This would serve as my introduction to microeconomics, which the students would learn is fundamentally about incentives.  The readings in class were monitored, both directly by watching the students in the classroom, then through the essays they wrote, and finally through class discussion the following day.  The reading done outside of class was also monitored, but much less.  Only the class discussion piece counted in that case.  Does the difference in monitoring intensity matter for the effort level students put in?

The reason for doing the hypothetical about their parents is to get at the issue of maturity and whether that matters in different incentive regimes or not.  These students, after all, are making decisions for themselves without direct parental intervention, perhaps for the first time in their lives.  They understand that much.   The question about their parents is aimed at getting to the students' then current perception of how adults who are experienced make decisions.  Are they fundamentally opportunistic or fundamentally responsible human beings or somewhere in between?

None of this discussion about microeconomics would be foreshadowed, partly to not induce bias in the experiment that the students are performing, and partly because the surprise that I hope the students will experience when they reflect on what they've been through earlier in the week should  make for richer learning in this Friday session.

I will then switch gears and bring the focus onto me.  Even if they very much like the approach we've been taking, I will let them know that in some ways we need to lighten up because my time commitment to the class has been too great and is not sustainable at this level for the entire semester.  (I don't really know this ahead of time but I surmise it is true.  I'm basing this judgment on how much time I put into my current class, which meets twice a week for 80 minutes per session. )  I will discuss this in the context of creating a bond among members in the class.  Early intensive efforts are necessary for that.  My hope in sketching this first week is that it would produce a reasonably good bond among the class by that Friday.

The part of the syllabus I would want the class as a whole to produce would be the nature of the work going forward - how much of it should be done and how it would be assessed - and how student performance should translate into course grades.  Again, I don't want to presume how this might turn out, but I do have my own biases here so I want to articulate them.  My first year experience was at MIT and there were no letter grades then, only a written evaluation, one given mid semester and another at the end of semester.  This was to take the pressure off students, too many of whom had ended up going over the deep end before my cohort arrived.  Would such an approach make sense for the holistic course as a way to encourage the students to learn to fail but persist in their efforts?

I would ask the class, can there be sustained intensity of their effort without letter grades and without intensive monitoring on my part?  From there my hope is that we'd first discuss the underlying issues and then go to something that is workable.

I also have in mind telling them that we'd start meeting ensemble at 9 AM and use the 8:30-9:00 slot for one-on-one meetings with students or perhaps with small groups of them.  I am guessing this would be agreed upon without exception and thereby would enable me to have 'required office hours' either for all students in the class or targeted specifically at those students who really seem to be struggling.   There is some research I'm aware of that argues school should start later.  Whether that is because adolescents are fundamentally nocturnal or if it is because their social lives happen at night I can't say.  As I mentioned previously, the selection into this class might mitigate the adverse consequences from students staying up to the wee hours of the morning and getting very little sleep during the week.  A shared living arrangement among class members would further help in this regard, but it is beyond what I think necessary to pull off such an experiment.  Pushing the class starting time a half hour later seems a reasonable first step at compromise along this dimension.

* * * * *

When I originally started to think about teaching this first year course I envisioned something that speaks to my disciplinary strengths, mainly microeconomics and calculus in combination.  That many of my students don't learn the math they are taught has bothered me and I thought I might make some headway on the math by teaching it situated in the economics.  Truthfully, many of the students I see don't have a good command of analytic geometry and  algebra, which they presumably get taught in high school.  So I'd want to reteach that, but eschew trigonometry, which is not relevant for the economics.

I like to dual track the economics.  One track is more formal and is steeped in math modeling.  It is how I first learned economics.  In this way it is conceived as a purely abstract subject.  The other track is story telling about economic issues in actual situations.  It is this second track which suggests using writing as a tool to learn the subject matter.  So my early thinking was to include the first writing course as part and parcel of the economics and math and that would be the package.

But then additional issues crept into my mind.  One of those is that somehow students need to read a newspaper or some other periodicals to stay informed and do so on content that is not polemic but instead is balanced, well argued, and considers the available evidence.  This is partly a question about what sources fit these requirements and partly a question about whether students have the wherewithal to do this sort of thing.  Focusing on the latter, to the extent that the students are lacking, part of the solution is to motivate the students to remedy this situation for themselves.

It's this line of thinking that encouraged me to think of the students' own learning as itself an object of study and to make good meaning out of generalist writing and to enjoy good reads of this sort as the focus of that study.  To further tie that to the rest, one needs to observe that learning requires some discipline (like economics) to situate in, so it is natural to couple the investigation into the student's own learning with an investigation of some specific subject matter, in this case the area where I do have disciplinary expertise and why I'd be the one teaching the course.  Conceivably, if the approach otherwise made sense, it could be replicated with the same sort of goals but with a different discipline as anchor and then taught by an instructor with expertise in that area.

How the course would be structured after the first week I have not fully thought through and it might very well depend on how that first week turned out.  Consider, for example, whether school should be an object of study, as a way of getting at the economics and related social science issues.  School, now I mean high school, might be the single institution of which every member of the class will have intimate experiential knowledge.  A question that would seem to follow from our first week experience is whether school encourages or discourages mindful learning.  If a good chunk of the class concluded that school was mainly a discouraging influence, it would really help in the students developing a healthy skepticism as they learned the economics.

A big message of that first microeconomics class is that markets work.  (There is Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, which the students are apt to be familiar with ahead of time, and something called the First Fundamental Welfare Theorem, which probably would be new to them.)  If the first real institution that students get to know is school and if school seems to retard real learning, how can they trust what the economics is teaching them, more broadly considered?  This, it seems to me, is a good and appropriate way to learn specific subject matter.  Uncover its precepts, but also beware of its limitations.  When one immerses in a subject matter it is easy to be co-opted.  A more critical view is helpful, and should further differentiate college from high school in the way students go about their learning.

Beyond that I won't speculate much.  Some time ago I wrote a post, Excise the Textbook, which suggests that I'd prefer a much more open ended approach, though for the calculus and math modeling of the economics parts that needs to be more structured.  Other than that, the one thought that occurs to me is from occasional coaching of students who are struggling with the math in my class.  They have memorized their way through their prior math classes.  I would insist on thinking it through in my class.  It would be a slug, no doubt.   Failure would be very likely indeed.  What could be better for building the student's character?

* * * * *

In this concluding section, I want to talk about why this is a non-solution and about whether any alternatives that might be solutions could possibly deliver on the goals I've articulated above.

The last time I taught a course for the Campus Honors Program, a version of it was also made available to satisfy the Advanced Composition General Education requirement, which I learned was a necessary step to get some CHP students to take the class.  The two prior times I taught it was Econ 101, also for CHP students.  That course satisfied part of the Gen Ed requirement for Social Sciences. 

So one should ask what Gen Ed requirements this holistic course would satisfy and also ask how many credit hours it would grant students.  If the answer on the Gen Ed requirements is none, so as to be least burdensome regarding how the holistic course is structured, then I'm afraid there would be no student demand for taking the class, because doing so would lengthen students' time to degree. Alternatively, if the course satisfied several Gen Ed requirements, then the departments who normally 'own' those courses that fulfill the requirements would have to give permission that the holistic course provided a satisfactory alternative.  Why would they give such permission?

If they perceived it as a potential enrollment threat down the road, they clearly wouldn't.  Gen Ed enrollments translate into dollars in the department's budget.  With every department hungering for additional revenue, none will tolerate such a budget threat.  Since in this case the various departments likely to be involved all are within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, some headway might be made if there were a champion for the holistic course within the Dean's office in LAS.  Such a champion could run interference in the same way that the Director of CHP obtained permissions to count my 2009 offering as satisfying the Advanced Composition requirement. Absent that sort of leadership, the idea would never see the light of day.

As to credit hours, I've scratched my head a little about whether the holistic course would have to be mapped back into component regular courses already on the books and if the holistic course would then be assigned credits equal to the sum of the component credits.  This is a very all or nothing approach and might really not align very well with what the holistic course is about.  Instead it might take bits and pieces from several courses and it might also do things that are not in any current courses.  There is an independent study number, LAS 199, that when attached to a rubric can qualify for credit if an instructor is willing to support a student in doing so and then if the department grants its approval.  This enables special topics as a stand alone.  Since LAS 199 can have anywhere from 1 to 5 credits, it seemingly provides a lot of wiggle room.  But its description doesn't contemplate the offering as a piece of a holistic course.

An alternative that would seem safe is to simply assert 15 credit hours - from the 9 till noon meeting times during the work week.   But the seat time model really doesn't do justice to what is at issue here regarding the intensity of the way the course should work.  One or two additional credit hours would seem appropriate to signify that.  I don't know who would give the say so on this.  I do sense, however, that there could be quite a bit of administrative blockage to be able to deliver the right sort of message on this score to the students.

Let me turn to the next reason why this approach can't work.  It is far too labor intensive from the instructor's viewpoint.  In essence, it makes a full time job out of teaching a single seminar class.  Regular instructors can't do this, as they have other obligations that occupy them.  Retired faculty, like me, might have the requisite time available.  But would it be worth their while?  I would be willing to try it once, if I got paid at the same rate that I currently get paid for teaching my current course, The Economics of Organizations.  But in this case my willingness would stem mainly from my curiosity about how such a course would play out for the students enrolled in it.  And if that matter seemed settled a few weeks into the semester, it is possible I'd burn out from having 'volunteered' in excess of my capacity to do so comfortably.  (In general, instructor burnout in the midst of teaching a holistic course is a possible different source of failure.)  At a higher rate of pay, which might better rationalize the instructor effort, one needs to ask why the department (or departments) paying the salary would be willing to do so.  What are they getting out of the bargain?

For these reasons, I started to think about possible alternative approaches that would replicate the holistic approach in some respects but be more do-able.  It occurred to me that a middle school like approach might be feasible, where students took classes in lock step that are taught by different instructors who do coordinate their lesson plans and talk with one another on occasion about the students.  The component classes of this lock step offering would have to be taught as an overload, in addition to regular teaching responsibilities.  That is feasible, although it clearly will limit the time and intensity each instructor can bring to the endeavor.  Nevertheless, if the instructors are sufficiently like minded regarding goals and if it were possible to have a 'hell week' to produce some of the bonding that needs to happen to make the holistic course work,  perhaps a similar consequence might be achieved.

Let me close with this bit, from a post I wrote called Facsimiles, composed immediately after returning from the first Learning Technology Leadership Institute where I was a faculty member, back in 2007.  In that post I referred to myself as a dodo-head, faculty in a former life who have moved on to becoming learning technology administrators.  At the time there were many early adopter faculty types who had become campus leaders, but the field was growing rapidly and with that the administrative positions were becoming professionalized.  My career path was dying out, ergo my colorful label.  This is the last paragraph of the piece.

I believe the institute’s main impact was cathartic rather than intellectual. It was intense while it lasted. For the institute to have a lasting impact the attendees must now spread their wings and fly from the nest and not have big birds on the brain, extinct or otherwise.

What if the first semester on campus created a catharsis for newly entering students?   Would they then spread their wings and fly?  Even if it's not possible to deliver a holistic course, I have the itch to ask about what it would take to achieve such catharsis.

Why Do Conservative Pundits Insist on Telling Democratic Candidates How to Run for Office?

There is a notion called truth in advertising.  It should be applied to political punditry.  Any time the pundit writes a column about the Presidential election the column should be preceded by first, the pundits own voting preferences and then second, a disclaimer that the pundits preferences may very well influence the analysis that went into writing the column.

I am reacting, in particular, to today's column by Ross Douthat, The Tempting of Bernie Sanders. It makes two fundamental points, both of which I view as suspect.  The first asserts that Hillary Clinton is ethically challenged.  This appears to be conventional wisdom among traditional Republicans, for example consider this piece, also from today's Op-Ed section.   I asked myself, how much of this is actually true and how much of it is Conservatives repeating it over and over again till it seems true.  My prior is that there have been vile lies spread about President Obama since he took office, so this is the nature of the beast.  It goes with the territory of being the Democratic front runner.

Nonetheless, I wanted to know what "reasonable people" think about Mrs. Clinton in this dimension.  (This is not meant as an objective descriptor, but rather is meant to allow my own sense of reasonableness to be brought out.)   So I Googled "Hillary Clinton Ethical Issues" (without the quotes) and found this piece by Stephen Gillers called Hillary Clinton's Ethical Issues.  It is worth reading.  Gillers divides the issue into two parts - the reality and the perception.  On the reality he writes:

But today, as in 1994, criticism of Hillary’s ethics is a reaction to the rise of women in political and professional life. A lot of people still have a problem with powerful women. Hillary’s opponent will exploit that indirectly. As president, we’ll be reminded, Hillary will be able to make decisions that benefit donors to the Clinton Foundation. How can we know she will not? Seeking to influence her, others may pay Bill huge sums to show up and talk. How can we know it won’t work?

If we follow the logic of these rhetorical insinuations, often only one member of a two-career household will be able to occupy high office free of rumor and suspicion. And guess who that will usually be. Criticizing Hillary for practicing her profession in Little Rock implies that all women in two-career marriages are ethically challenged. Criticizing her today because of Bill’s public life is as unfair as it was 20 years ago.

On the perception, Gillers criticizes Clinton for not managing things well.  I think that criticism is fair.  Especially on the email thing, however, since the former Chancellor on my campus, Phyllis Wise, did essentially the same thing and ultimately got burned by it, I consider it an issue about savvy regarding information technology, not about ethics per se.  People will have closed door conversations on sensitive matters.  If they can do it face to face and outside the range of any recording device, then there is no record of the conversation.  The need to get this done quickly sometimes precludes taking the appropriate precautions.  And sometimes asynchronous communication (email) trumps synchronous communication (phone call), especially when all the participants are very busy and juggling many different things.  I wrote a post about this not too long ago, Discussions behind closed doors that aren't really closed.  I stand by the analysis I gave there.

Let me move onto Douthat's second point.  Bernie Sanders has run a campaign where he has taken the high ground - no smearing of Mrs. Clinton whatsoever.  Taking her on about her policy positions is fine.  That's fair game.  Getting into a huff about her "damn emails" is something he has refrained to do, quite the contrary in fact.  This approach has served Sanders well so far.  Douthat argues (in this I found him completely unconvincing) that Sanders needs to change tack.  In Douthat's view, Clinton's views on the issues are inextricably wrapped up in her being bought out by one constituency or another.  In other words, her ethical challenges drive her policy positions.  That being the case, they're fair game and part of the political fight Sanders should wage.

Douthat doesn't mention this, which is partly why I found his piece so galling, but it seems obvious that the clear winner from a Sanders campaign that went negative would be the Republican nominee.  It would give cover to the Republican attack machine to do likewise to Mrs. Clinton.  (Of course, they are doing that now, presuming that she will be the nominee.  They would be even more unrestrained, if Sanders took to following Douthat's advice.)   And if Bernie Sanders secures the Democratic nomination, then going negative during the primaries would open up Sanders to negative campaigning by the Republican attack machine during the election.  They could say - he brought it on himself.  If, however, he continues to campaign as he has been doing, he will maintain the moral high ground.

It is disturbing to me to see a pundit argue that one candidate on the other side is ethically challenged, while another candidate who is not ethically challenged should abandon his position, because that is the only way he can win.  

Since pundits are paid for producing words, we'll probably never see an entirely blank column.  But really, that would have been an improvement over the piece that appeared today. 

Page Turners: Fiction and Non

Last week I read Dan Brown's latest, Inferno.  I wouldn't recommend it, too formulaic and dependent on plot gimmicks.  I'm probably cured from wanting to read any more page turner fiction, at least for the time being.  But it does raise some questions that people should ask themselves once in a while.  In a bit I will discuss some of those.  Yesterday we went to see The Big Short, which though the story is preposterous and at a macro level already is completely familiar based on the events of the last decade, is mainly true and a fairly compelling, if disturbing, tale.  The book by Michael Lewis on which the movie is based is non-fiction.  This movie also raises some interesting issues, especially if you ask whether any of those apply outside the financial arena.  I will get to those as well.  In the process, I will try to connect the stories in the issues they raise.

Without giving away any of the plot, Inferno has as its basis the issue of overpopulation and whether the imperative taught to us in Genesis, "Be fruitful and multiply" is no longer applicable because we've reached the limits implied by the Malthusian Hypothesis.  Indeed, we may already be beyond those limits.  The question is whether individuals and their families being fruitful is consistent with the species, homo sapiens, being fruitful.  If you took the species perspective, of if you prefer the perspective of future generations beyond our own and our children's generation, what view of population would you hold?

The naive Malthusian Hypothesis has a more modern day counterpart in the Simon- Ehrlich wager.  Ehrlich, as people my generation will remember, authored The Population Bomb.  Simon was actually on the faculty in the Economics Department when I started at Illinois.  He is also well known for encouraging airlines to overbook their flights and then pay people to take a later flight when in fact there are more passengers at the gate than there are seats on the plane.  In the bet with Ehrlich Simon's argument is that substitutes would emerge, so that Hotelling's model of extraction of a non-renewable resource would not give an accurate prediction of real-world resource prices.

If I can add my own little bit of analysis here, none of these arguments tell us how long it should take to observe these consequences of scarcity, nor do they tell us how macro-economic business cycle effects should be accounted for in this discussion.  OPEC scared everyone in the 1970s, so people were prone to embrace the Ehrlich argument then.  But the second oil price hike, coupled with Volker's tight money policy to wrest inflation out of the economy induced a recession, certainly in the U.S.,  perhaps worldwide.  That reduced demand for all non-renewables near term.

In any event, I think it better to consider the issue more one of demography than overpopulation per se and thus consider many different dimensions of the issue.  These include the age distribution of the population, the geographic distribution of the population, and the income distribution of the population, among other possible dimensions of the issue (literacy seems to me to be a big one, the religiosity of people another big one).   With this one can begin to ask whether we as individuals can modify our behavior in ways that will improve the welfare of the species and what sort of modifications that would take?  Alternatively, we might posit that each of us is so wrapped up in our own little universe that it will be impossible to expect that sensible changes in our behavior will emerge and that quite the contrary should be predicted.

This is a good point in my piece to segue to The Big Short.  It is first and foremost a story about venality and utter disregard for our fellow human beings.  This is then coupled with cluelessness or not-so-benign neglect.  The story is about the workings on Wall Street and its relationship with the housing market.  It is a story which confirms that money is the root of all evil.   As I've written about the macroeconomics previously in a post called Comments on Inside Job, let me talk about what is fundamentally new in Lewis' book.  The people who discovered early on that the housing market would fail are the ones who played the big short.  In other words, they capitalized on their knowledge by making a financial killing, as the overall market and the economy as a whole completely tanked.

At issue is how these people were able to learn these things early why policy makers remained completely in the dark, or if not that, why the policy makers did essentially nothing to ward off the disaster ahead of time.  Related to this is how the big banks, motivated by greed, exacerbated the problem to such a degree as to push the system beyond the brink.  Alternatively, banks took such a hands off approach with their own traders that they couldn't insulate themselves from colossal bonehead investments.  In the movie version of the story, the few people who played the big short successfully did so because they looked at the situation for what it was and disregarded the conventional wisdom when it clearly ran afoul of reality.  In contrast, most people simply trusted the conventional wisdom, ultimately to their own detriment.

One wonders why that was, more generally why contrarians seem to be so few in number, and what it might take for it to be otherwise.  In the movie, the contrarians were motivated by two things.  First, they wanted to make a lot of money by playing the market, if they could.  Second, they were armed with a fundamental belief that sometimes the market misvalues assets.  Those instances, if they can be identified ahead of time, are where a lot of money can be made.  (This is true on average, not in each particular instance.  The trick is to find low downside risk high upside return situations and play those repeatedly.)  These two, in conjunction, provided the impetus for looking.

I have done this sort of looking twice in my career as an administrator.  The first time the task was hoist upon me.  The SCALE grant had promised that ALN (elearning) would raise retention (meaning how many students who start a class end up completing it).  It turned out that my campus was not a good place to test this proposition, because retention was already quite high.  Alas, I only learned this after SCALE had made this promise.  So there was a bit of eating humble pie there.  But at least we didn't subsequently devote resources to evaluation work on the retention issue.

The other time was when I was associate dean in the College of Business and I encouraged the college to purchase room scheduling software, in advance of moving into the new Business Instructional Facility.  I wrote about that experience here, so I won't belabor it now.  But I do want to point out how it differed from the prior experience.  With that SCALE project we had to put in a special request to the campus data stewards to be able to look at the issue.  With the COB project, all the data were publicly available for anyone to see.  They just weren't in a very usable form as they are normally presented.  My contribution was to download the data and enter it into an Excel spreadsheet in a way where it could be usefully aggregated.  Indeed it turned out that each department had this sort of data already in this format at the departmental level.  But nobody thought to do the same thing at the college level.

So in this case, which is the one I want to focus on, there was some effort in the looking and some intelligence (not a lot but some) in organizing the data in a way where it made finding things more evident.  This latter bit is potentially a teachable skill, but to my knowledge we don't do that.  The one example that I can recall from high school is learning about the Periodic Table.   Mendeleev's representation is a stroke of genius.  But at the time it was treated as an isolated inspiration.  I did subsequently learn about the 'method of successive differences' which can be used to predict the next number in a finite sequence of natural numbers, a useful skill for doing standardized math tests though probably not otherwise.  Otherwise, I don't recall learning about pattern recognition and the course where you might think this happens, statistics, doesn't do the trick.  When Freakonomics originally appeared it did create a craze for a while, but that seems to have died out.  (Ironically, the copyright year for Freakonomics is 2005, the time when the events in The Big Short first take place.)  My sense is that most people don't try to look for patterns in data, even when the evidence is right in front of them, because they don't know how and/or they implicitly prefer the narrative they are currently operating under rather than have that narrative challenged by the available data.

This is not a happy thought on which to conclude, but then again The Big Short makes no pretension about giving us a happy ending.  All the root causes that created the housing bubble still seem to be in place.  There is now, of course, Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which may be viewed as progress.  But The Big Short makes clear that both private sector regulation of the financial sector via the ratings agency and public regulation of the financial sector via the Securities and Exchange Commission became non-functional during the previous decade.  If there is no will to do the right thing or to enforce the law greed will rule and likely in quite a destructive way.

I wish I could find some other sector of the economy where it seems to go the other way, that people do look carefully at the evidence and care about that rather than about following the crowd.  But I don't see it.  The field that I knew best while I was still working, educational technology, seems to me guilty of quite a lot of groupthink.  There are those who satirize the ed tech universe (for instance, consider this post by Roger Schank) but such commentary does nothing to change the direction of the field itself.  The inertia is so great that it seems only a true disaster will force reconsideration of what is being done, and maybe not even then.

We are not ostriches.  Once in a while we should be thinking about issues like this.  I appreciate the page turners for forcing me to do that.

Do people reporting the news get this distinction?

This is a piece from 11 years ago, so itself is definitely not news.  But I think it is useful in helping people consider a message delivered, which might be thought of as news but otherwise might be viewed as gossip, and whether the person delivering the message should be judged harshly or benignly based on that distinction.

Fox News is mentioned explicitly by Randy Cohen in this NPR segment.  Though you can't see his face when he says this, it is not hard to imagine that he was rolling his eyes at the time.  Fox News has a reputation for blurring the distinction between gossip and news.  (My friends reading the previous sentence will likely say to themselves, "that is the understatement of all time.")  But what of other news organizations?  Do they err in this dimension as well?

Let me separate PBS news from the rest for the moment, to make the following argument.  The remaining news organizations operate in a for profit environment.  Many people are attracted by gossip.  The profitability of any one news organization is proportional to the size of its audience.   While a news organization's credibility is tied to the accuracy of its news reports and presumably in the long term the size of the audience will depend on accuracy in reporting,  in the near term there is pressure to expand the audience beyond its long run equilibrium level.  That pressure encourages the news organization to run gossipy pieces and/or to include gossip within otherwise straight news articles.

The story with PBS is a little different, though they are certainly not immune from the type of pressure mentioned in the previous paragraph.  Given the mixed funding model they operate under  (grants from the Federal government, gifts from non-government organizations, and gifts from individuals) they must give the appearance in their reporting of being balanced, meaning not favoring either political party.  This mandate for balance gives cover to politicians who can then manipulate the story in ways they deem beneficial.  In other words, an unintended consequence of the need for balance is to sometimes produce lack of objectivity in the reporting.

My argument here is that for commercial news, a different unintended consequence is that the news has become more and more gossipy.  This gives the politicians and their spin doctors a different way to manipulate the story.

In theory, the market for news breaks up into segments, partly along a left-right dimension and partly along a difficulty level in the reading/viewing of the news, with the easier access outlets lacking subtlety in how their stories are reported.  The easier access outlets are more prone to conflate gossip and news.  Given that, it is possible to imagine some segments of the market that refrain from gossip altogether.  When I was a kid and the Herald Tribune was a viable competitor to the New York Times as morning papers in New York City, that was my impression of each of them.  I had the same impression of the Sunday morning news shows, which I watched with regularity.

Things change.  I will mention only the more obvious changes.  Many viewers now utilize entertainment/satirical programming, e.g., Last Week Tonight with John Oliver or The Daily Show, as their sole source of news.  The ethical constraints with which I led off this piece don't apply to such programming for, after all, these shows are meant as entertainment.  There is, in addition, the consequence of social networks, which on the one hand can be viewed as crowd sourced generation of the news and on the other hand can be viewed as crowd sourced diffusion of the news from other sources.  Social networks do the same things for gossip.  And then there is a third, generational and/or cultural change, where when I was a kid reading the newspaper was considered an important social obligation.  Now it is not.

The news organizations had to adjust to the environment or fade into extinction.  I recall when Clay Shirky's piece Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable came out that it caused quite a stir.  It seemed then that newspapers would die out as a species.  That was eight years ago.  Many big newspapers then are still around.  Ask yourself, what adjustments have been made to the reporting itself in those news organizations that enabled them not to fail (in a commercial sense)?  Has one of those adjustments happened along the gossip-news dimension, in favor of treating more gossip as news?

I have tried to write this piece in a flat way, not picking on either party or mentioning any one politician's name.   The reason for doing that is to ask the following questions.   Is there a kind of market failure for news, where gossip crowds out real news, something akin to Gresham's law or The Market for Lemons?  If there is such a market failure for news,  is our politics degrading a necessary consequence of this market failure getting worse, as a consequence of the changes mentioned above?

Doing the ethical thing can be commercial suicide.  It would be nice if it were otherwise in this case, but suppose not.  What then?

Defining the fundamental learning issue for average students

A few years ago, I had a student who was kind of quiet in class but who had a certain intensity about him.  He was a middling student, ultimately ranking 12th out of 17 students in total.  Because this was the semester that my shoulder got infected, which caused me to stay 5 days in the hospital and then miss a couple of class sessions in the process, I was more lenient with the grading than I otherwise would have been.  This student was given a B+.

The student expressed an interest in doing an independent study with me.  We talked about it and ultimately we agreed to do a readings course.   It was the only time I've taken on a student for an independent study who didn't get an A first in the regular course.  Below is the description of the independent study course that we needed to provide to the Econ department to get approval for the offering, suitably modified to protect the student's identity.  Note that descriptions for some of the readings can be found here. 

This will be a readings course in behavioral economics and public policy. Initial readings will be taken from Arvan’s Behavioral Econ course taught in spring 2011 but no longer offered as well as pieces from the Economist’s Voice. Further readings will flow out of the early work.  The student, P, is currently enrolled in Arvan’s Economics of Organization class. Students have been blogging on a weekly basis in that course about their readings. This method will be continued in the independent study. P will post at least weekly on new readings. Arvan will make comments about how ideas might be extended or on further readings that might be tried. P will write a response and in that will be embedded the future direction for the readings. In some cases it is hoped that P will find works that neither he nor Arvan have previously read and they read and discuss those together. Face to face discussions will occur bi-weekly and/or as weather permits. (Arvan has an aversion to come to campus in icy conditions.)

The student read just one paper and made just one blog post.  (More on that below.)  I was very unhappy with what he had written.  He trashed the paper.  It was one of my favorite essays and was among those listed at the link above.  The way he trashed the paper showed he didn't understand what he was reading, yet the piece was intended as generalist writing for an educated audience.  Mainly in his blog post, he did not grapple with the ideas in that essay at all.  Instead he simply moved onto something he was already familiar with that he thought relevant.  I thought otherwise. Alas, the blog which this student wrote has been taken down, so his post and my comment on it have vanished into the ether.  I do still have email I sent him about this that accompanied my comment to his post.   (It is reproduced below.)  Upon getting that email he decided to drop the course, as was his prerogative.  That was that.

I am belaboring this story because it is illustrative of what I take to be the key issue with average students. Such students can't make good meaning from text that should be accessible to high school students.  There is the further matter that even when the student can understand the sentences and paragraphs in the text, the underlying ideas might very well require the student to puzzle over them for some time to really make sense of what the author is saying.  Those speed reading tests on standardized exam that students take to measure reading comprehension do a disservice this way, because these tests implicitly communicate the notion that the meaning from reading text is always discernible immediately.  That is simply not true.  Ideas that run counter to our prior beliefs take time to digest, even if those ideas are explained in a simple and straightforward way.   The average student often doesn't perceive the necessity of this sort of reflection.

There might be several possible explanations for why average students lack this capacity.  The explanation I believe best explains this is lack of practice.  For average students, pleasure comes from other sources than reading.  Absent the experience of pleasure reading and getting into the story for the fun of it, such students are at a loss for how to make meaning from text in those few times when they must do so.  Such students will often shirk on assigned readings for courses and/or memorize the instructor's lecture notes on those readings, in lieu of making sense of the readings directly.

Let me return to the example with this student, P. The first paper he read was The Streak of Streaks by Stephen Jay Gould, a piece I would recommend highly if you haven't already read it.  I found a Web site called Readibility-Score.com that allows you to paste in a piece of text and it spits back a variety of measures of how difficult the text is.   Below are the results from the Gould piece, which seem to indicate that this essay should have been accessible to the student.

But I don't think this is the full say on the matter, so I want to illustrate the issues further.  This is one paragraph from the essay.  It happens to be easier than the essay as whole, at least according to the Readibility.com metrics.

Of course Larry Bird, the great forward of the Boston Celtics, will have more sequences of five than Joe Airball - but not because he has greater will or gets in that magic rhythm more often.  Larry has longer runs because his average success rate is so much higher, and random models predict more frequent and longer sequences.  If Larry shoots field goals at 0.6 probability of success, he will get five in a row about once every 13 sequences (0.6^5).  If Joe, by contrast, shoots only 0.3, he will get his five straight only about once in 412 times.  In other words, we need no special explanation for the apparent pattern of long runs.  There is no ineffable "causality of circumstance" (to coin a phrase), no definite reason born of the particulars that make for heroic myths - courage in the clinch, strength in adversity, etc.  You only have to know a person's ordinary play in order to predict his sequences.  (I rather suspect that we are convinced of the contrary not only because we need myths so badly, but also because we remember the successes and simply allow the failures to fade from memory.  More on this later.)  But how does this revisionist pessimism work for baseball?  

In order to make sense of this paragraph, one has to understand where the 0.6^5 number comes from.  (Apologies for use of the carat to indicate exponentiation.  Doing that was easier than figuring out the html for exponentiation and it was unclear whether Readibility.com would recognize the html tags or treat them as part of text.)  One has to make meaning of the phrase "causality of circumstance" and explain the sentence where the phrase appears.  One also needs a prior understanding of Occam's Razor and that Gould is implicitly relying on it when he says there is no need to appeal to causality of circumstance.  

In other words, reading this paragraph carefully suggests that a sequence of questions arise while doing the reading.  Does the student pose those questions?  If so, is the student able to supply good answers to those questions?  Making sense of the paragraph, and of the essay in its entirety, requires this sort of question formulation and answering.  For somebody already conversant with the subject, that may happen en passant during the reading and therefore seem effortless.  For the novice, this more careful type of reading probably requires much deliberation and effort, even if the grade level of the text is not beyond high school.  

There is a further matter with many average students - a complete disconnect with the professor regarding what is expected about student performance.  Many faculty I knew in the economics department 20 years would say that students don't put in sufficient effort, when we would discuss undergraduates over lunch.  The undergraduates, in turn, are dumbfounded about how they might illustrate to their instructor that indeed they are putting in substantial effort.  

Doing this is context specific, on the course in question and how the instructor goes about teaching it.  In this particular case, the student already knew that I write a blog and that I occasionally write on matters that are relevant to my economics teaching.  So imagine that the student, trying to walk the extra mile, goes to my blog and does a search on the Gould paper, The Streak of Streaks.  If he had done so, he would have found an essay I wrote called Small Samples, Hot Hands, and Flow, which gets at many of the issues in Gould's essay.  Reading that would illuminate what the professor thought about the subject.  This student, P, clearly did not go to this length to understand the Gould essay. 

Is it obvious that the student should have done such a search?  Clearly it was not obvious to this student.  I have had other students who have done this sort of thing.  Why it occurs to some to do this but not others is a puzzle, but in my observation it is the better students where I'm more likely to observe this sort of behavior.  In the background of this piece, the question to keep in mind is: what would it take to get average students to behave like better students?

Below is the email message I sent P after commenting on his blog post.  The highlighted paragraph comes the closest to echoing what I've argued above.

Subject: RE: First Post

I made extensive comments on it this morning. You should have a look. In addition to statistical inference, we should talk about inference in communication – you may remember our discussion of signaling in 490. There has been signaling going on back and forth between me and you, some it intended, some of it inadvertent. But I’m afraid good inference isn’t being made.

Let me give a relevant example so you understand what I’m getting at. You initiated communication on this independent study. It seemed to me at the time you were a little reticent about asking me but genuinely interested in doing something that was not so spoon fed in the learning, here referring to your other Econ classes.

I gave you a recommendation of where to start on the readings, by having you look at the page from my Behavioral Econ course. I actually thought you might read a few of those during the Winter break. I know that holiday was shorter than it’s been in the past, but still if you’re at all like my kids, there was plenty of free time. In any event, it’s clear I was wrong in that expectation.

Further, my pointing you to that Web page was an endorsement of the papers linked there. You might then infer that I expect you to “like” the papers there, not the way you like an ice cream cone, but the way you feel when something fuzzy in your thinking becomes clear. It was my expectation before you started that you’d “get” that message.

Apparently you didn’t. If you got the message but nonetheless disagreed with the points Gould makes, you’d have respectfully disagreed. That’s not how the post reads, not at all. You did communicate both indirectly and directly that you’ve been somewhat overwhelmed so didn’t put in much time in this. But, in my opinion, you also communicated that you didn’t understand what you read. The question is why. Is it too little time input, or something else. I had a similar feeling in 490 on occasion reading your posts, but then I wasn’t in a one-on-one situation with a student. Now I am.

Since I’m not time constrained at present, my thought is if you’re not getting it what can be done to change the situation? If you re-read Gould slowly, perhaps a couple of times, do you still hold to what you wrote in that first post? Or does some of what I say in the comments begin to make sense. Think of the part about Linda, which isn’t on the streak at all. What’s that about? How does it tie into the rest of the piece. It does take a while to figure this stuff. It’s not immediate. You have to work it through.

Let me make one other point here. It is easy enough to do a Google search on Linda the Bank Teller or on The Streak of Streaks and get lots of links back, some of which you might investigate – see what other people think of Gould’s essay. You’re free to make your own judgments but you should be somewhat aware of how others think of these things. That might include explanations for why they agree or disagree and why they like or dislike the piece. Doing that should help you come to your own judgments.

Prof. Arvan

It seems to me the fundamental issue is whether a student can make good sense of generalist writing aimed at a well educated audience, on a subject matter where the student has little prior exposure.  One big part of this is attitude.  If the initial reaction to the piece is curiosity, that will go a long way.  In contrast, if the initial reaction is boredom - somebody else must establish for the student that devoting time to reading the piece is time well spent - then the battle is already lost before it has begun.  Another big part is recognition of how limited the rest of the student's education will necessarily be if the student lacks this ability.  A third part of this is essentially ethical.  How is it possible to prevent an enormous amount of cynicism from creeping into the student's mind, if so much of his so-called education is non-functional?

On New Year's eve, I had a discussion about this with my host and good friend, who also cares intently about undergraduate education on campus.  He pointed out that there is a big difference between College of Business students and LAS students (the Econ majors I see are in LAS) regarding their incoming ACT scores.  Statistics on this are given here.   I have no way of knowing how much of what I'm ascribing to average students can be predicted from their ACT scores and how much of it is explained by something else, perhaps an attitude regarding hard work at learning a la Carol Dweck.  (I also don't know how much those two are correlated.)

If there were some agreement about this being the fundamental problem, then maybe we could also generate some agreement that we need to be more knowledgeable about the causes.  In subsequent posts, I will speculate about solutions, though absent this knowledge about causes such speculation can at best serve as motivation to get that knowledge.  There is a tendency in all organizations to sweep bad news under the carpet.  With this inquiry, I'm hoping that this time around we can keep these matters out in the open.

How Intelligence Is Depicted In Some Recent Fiction

What makes for an interesting story?  It is an age old question.  Perhaps the answer has changed over time.

One sort of story that I've seen a couple of times recently depicts a solitary 'genius' who stumbles into his role but once there hatches an incredibly audacious scheme, which if it works will yield an enormous payoff.  The solitary genius actually has a co-conspirator or a team of co-conspirators, but at the outset their partnership isn't apparent.  (In contrast, in the movie The Sting the audience is made aware of the conspiracy early on, though there are still some surprises at the end of the film.)

Indeed part of the scheme is for the genius to overtly blame the co-conspirator in a way that ultimately forces the co-conspirator into a painful confinement.  Enduring such confinement is something that no sane person would willingly submit themselves to.  Going to this extreme is a necessary misdirection, so that those for whom the scheme has been concocted don't suspect the duplicity going on.  Ultimately the co-conspirator does get free from confinement, to enjoy the fruits when the scheme pans out.

Along the way there are some unanticipated risks that might derail the plan.  Nobody, even our genius, has a crystal ball to foresee all eventualities.  Unanticipated difficulties will invariably crop up.  But these risks provide momentary drama only.  They are soon overcome.  They don't derail the plan.  For the plan is brilliant in its conception and as parts of it get executed, it becomes more apparent to the viewer/reader that this is so.

The remaining big issue with the story telling is when the reader/viewer learns about all the elements of the plan.  Does that happen only when the story nears conclusion?  Or does it happen sometime earlier, so that part of the drama is witnessing the execution of the plan, with the reader/viewer informed as to its aim?

The stories I'm referring to here are The Racketeer by John Grisham and Homeland Season 3, the Showtime TV drama.  Their plots are otherwise unrelated.  Indeed, they differ in that in The Racketeer the protagonist is the genius while in Homeland the protagonist is the co-conspirator who endures the painful confinement. 

But they did both come out in 2013.  It makes you wonder if these sort of stories are the product of our times, in their structure as much as in their plot.  We seem to be living in desperate times, searching for a way out but not finding one.  These stories give some hope.  Necessity is the mother of invention and some genius who is out there will find the way out.

If only reality followed fiction.

Interesting Geographic Patterns of Acces to My Blog

These are for the past week.  I normally don't look at this sort of geographic information, but I do track access and there is some geographic information in that.  What I was seeing was odd to me, so I looked a bit further.    This first table is from the Stats tab for my blog in Blogger.  I believe that tracks both Google+ access and Web access to the site.  While the overall volume is not that great, look at all the Pageviews from Russia.  There are quite a few from France as well. 

This next table is from StatCounter, which I use more than I use the Stats page in Blogger to look at access.  The Russian access is completely missing here, so I assume that is all via Google+.   I can't explain why the numbers for France are higher here, but one reason to use multiple counters is to address this sort of discrepancy.

The double-edged sword we refer to as 'high expectations'

This is from Chickering and Gamson's Seven Principles.

Good practice in undergraduate education:

.....6.  Communicates high expectations.  

This appears unambiguous as stated.  Complexity, hence ambiguity, comes from considering what the verb 'communicates' actually means.  The following passage is from Peter Drucker and illustrates the issue nicely. [Drucker, Peter F. (2009-10-13). The Essential Drucker (Collins Business Essentials) (p. 262). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.]  (My emphasis added.)

An old riddle posed by the mystics of many religions—the Zen Buddhists, the Sufis of Islam, and the Rabbis of the Talmud—asks, Is there a sound in the forest if a tree crashes down and no one is around to hear it?

We now know that the right answer to this is no. There are sound waves. But there is no sound unless someone perceives it. Sound is created by perception. Sound is communication. This may seem trite; after all, the mystics of old already knew this, for they too always answered that there is no sound unless someone can hear it. Yet the implications of this rather trite statement are great indeed. 

First, it means that it is the recipient who communicates. The so-called communicator, the person who emits the communication, does not communicate. He utters. Unless there is someone who hears, there is no communication. There is only noise.

We can push this metaphor a bit.  For taking Drucker's meaning literally in the last paragraph, it is hearing that is at issue.  But really, hearing is not the crux of the matter.  The issue is understanding.  What is it that the recipient understands?  How does that relate to what the communicator intends?   If there are discrepancies between the two, does it mean that the communicator did a poor job? Or might something else explain why the communicator and the recipient don't end up on the same page?

One possible explanation for persistent discord is that prior expectations are so divergent and those expectations sharply influence both the form of the message, on the one hand, and how the message is received, on the other. A different explanation is that our prior education impacts us in what counts for relevant evidence on which to base a decision.   This fascinating piece by Malcolm Gladwell, The Engineer's Lament, illustrates the issue in a profound way.  The topic of concern in the piece is traffic safety and with that to determine the proper social policy to promote traffic safety.  A horrific accident can trigger public alarm as to the accident cause, possibly ultimately generating a recall of the vehicle type that was involved in the accident.

A single sufficiently graphic episode focuses the attention for most of us.  Engineers, however, are different in this regard.  Their training has told them that instead to focus on the statistical data about accident history.  For the rest of the population these data are dry, possibly incomprehensible, and don't trigger an emotional response that creates a call to action.  In contrast, traffic safety engineers understand there are tradeoffs implicit in taking any costly action to promote public safety.  They want bang for the buck, which in this case means they want to move the statistical averages substantially with their recommendations for safety expenditure.  As it turns out, the recalls chronicled in Gladwell's piece fail in this regard.  They may satisfy the emotional need to "Do something!" after a terrible accident.  But the changes made to the vehicles that have been recalled typically don't end up doing very much, statistically speaking.

The traffic safety engineers' view is that a much bigger return on investment could be had by influencing driver behavior in the direction of safety.  Typically, this means getting people to drive slower.  Two sorts of investments are discussed in the piece.  One is cameras that measure driving speed and where those measurements are made known to drivers as they are driving.  The other is additional highway patrol officers and police cars.  Both serve as effective deterrents to speeding.  Both are simple and non-sexy solutions to the traffic safety problem.  This is where leverage is to be found.  (Leverage in this sense, equivalent to bang for the buck, is discussed in Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline.)  This sort of thinking brings to mind Atul Gawande's famous essay, On Washing Hands, which caused an observable and substantial change in how health care is provided.

With this as background I want to return to context of teaching and learning and ask: what sorts of behaviors and messages communicate high expectations?

* * * * *

I first wrote about the issue not quite ten years ago, where unlike now I taught only classes for the Campus Honors Program.  I framed the issue in a particularly graphic way in a post called Killing The Puppy.  (The link is to a capture of my blog at archive.org from near the time of the post, which produces the look of the site then.  Ironically, I found this by some typical meandering on the Web, this time on George Siemens' old elearnspace.org blog.  Once upon a time I read the posts at that site quite regularly. Apparently, some of that reading was reciprocated.)

Puppies like getting petted.  The metaphor I had in mind was to students who care a lot about their grades.  They like being told how well they are doing and that their work merits an A (or even an A+).  The problem with praise of this sort is that real learning involves failure, lots of failure.  Or, if you prefer, real learning involves awkward early performance that typifies the novice learner.  Further, college students operate somewhere in that gray zone between being a child and being an adult.  What to say to a young child who is learning, whether to treat the kid like a puppy or not, I really don't know.  But for a near adult learning, a virtual patting the kid on the head early on is dishonest.  My title in that post from ten years ago was meant as a call to move away from the pat on the head sort of praise and replace it with something else, more frank and better situated in the actual experience.  With honors students, certainly, this is the way that the instructor communicates high expectations.  In this setting there is a decent chance that the communicator and recipient will converge and that an ongoing conversation will ensue that accompanies the student learning.

Since I've retired I've not taught honors students.  Part of that is lack of opportunity.  Another part is a judgment on my part that teaching regular students is the right thing to do.  The goal here is to learn how to produce real and substantial learning for ordinary students, something I would argue has been outside the mission of the university as it was traditionally conceived.  I made the argument a few years ago in a post entitled, The business and ethical dilemmas of undergraduate education at public R1s.  The traditional approach offered a lottery to students, the winners of which would get the real learning opportunities.  Given the resources available, this was probably for the best.  But the lottery favored the elite students and the real go-getters among the student population.  Opportunities for learning were far more limited for more ordinary and shyer students.

My argument is that this needed to change to where outcomes, not just initial opportunities, were more democratically distributed, as a consequence of the much greater reliance on tuition as a source of revenue for the university than has been the case historically.  So while teaching my classes since retirement, the background question that has been driving me is whether producing real and substantial learning for ordinary students is possible and, if so, how instructors should go about doing this.

The first time I taught after being retired I had two classes, neither of which I currently teach.  That was spring 2011.  Since then I only teach The Economics of Organizations.  Apart from the initial offering of the class, which was in the spring, each subsequent offering has been in the fall.  This is my preference under the assumption that the seniors in the class will be less distracted than they would be in the spring.  I thought I had been making progress on addressing the background question until the most recent offering of the course, which just concluded.  This time it was a real struggle for me and I probably took at least a couple of steps backward in feeling I had some answers.  It is trying to make sense of the recent experience which motivates this post.

First and foremost is the question whether ordinary students are willing to endure the frequent failure that is necessary for real learning.  Two reasons why they may not are: (1) potential damage to the GPA in so doing and (2) potential damage to the student's ego from feeling embarrassed by being awkward in front of others - classmates and especially the teacher.

As to (1), real learning takes as long as it takes.  On the other hand, exams happen at times scheduled well in advance.  One explanation for why students memorize in advance of exams is that it seems a more reliable approach for readying oneself against the vicissitudes of the exam, while containing the readying activity to a manageable time period. In turn, such students then grow to expect the instructor to teach to the test, so when such expectations are confirmed memorizing the lecture notes ends up indeed being good preparation.  There is also that this becomes a learned behavior (in the sense of habit formation) so even in those circumstances where the instructor offers up questions on the exam that follow only indirectly from the lectures, many students will still prepare as they have in their other courses, for lack of a viable alternative.

The above is an indirect argument that grades are pernicious in encouraging real learning with ordinary students, as too many of them will opt for the self-protection described in the previous paragraph, when the grade consequences are sufficiently severe.  Alternatively, it can be taken as an argument in support of grade inflation.  If students are convinced they will do reasonably well grade-wise as long as they attain a minimal performance standard - e.g., showing up and being counted - then they have less need to self-protect via memorization and might be more willing to go through the steps it takes to produce real learning.  This gets us to (2).

If a student is not self-conscious, then it is possible the student will be oblivious to the risk of failure.  In turn, that lack of self-consciousness can lead to deep learning as the student gets fully absorbed in the subject matter.  It may be the honors students differ from regular students mostly in this lack of self-consciousness and hence in their ability to concentrate. For a student who is self-conscious and who does fear failure as a consequence, a different approach is needed if the student is to engage in real learning.  The student must be convinced that failure is no big deal.  Failure is just an ordinary part of learning, necessary early steps if you will. The way to convince students of this is to create a safe space in which students are encouraged to fail and fail often, all as part of the larger process.

In other words, this is the obverse of the argument made a couple of years ago in a piece called Inside the Box:  People don't actually like creativity.  I don't doubt the empiricism that is the basis of this piece, but I question whether what we observe is human nature in action or if, instead, it is some pathology because we have become prisoners to our own fears.  On this I keep going back to Eric Hoffer.  The following is from a passage I wrote several years ago: 

I didn't have my fill of Hoffer and looked for more of his writing. Ultimately I found Between the Devil and the Dragon. The Library has a copy, which I checked out. The Dragon, we learn immediately, is the symbol of our struggle with nature, a concept that is earlier than the Devil, which he attributes to the Hebrews. They were the first group to see man as living above nature. God made nature, but God made man in his own image. 

I regard this in a completely areligious way, simply as an affirmation that creativity is part of human nature.  Hoffer later argues that most people are not creative, which is consistent with the argument made in the Slate piece that I linked to.  It is only the weak who are creative in Hoffer's view.  They are driven to creativity to transcend their current lot in life, which is untenable.  But in Hoffer's description, whether one is weak or strong is a matter of circumstance.  The capacity for creativity is in all of us.  It is just that many of us choose not to use that capacity. My argument then is that students should get exposed to that capacity in themselves while in school. Whether that will cure the pathology of fear I don't know.  At a minimum, it should alert each student that there is a choice to be made.  To reach that level of awareness, students need a safe place to try things out and see for themselves how they perform in that safe setting.

None of the intellectual content of my course, such as 'transaction costs' or 'transfer prices', should make students uncomfortable by threatening personal identity.  Students may very well find the subtleties in these ideas difficult to master, so there are learning challenges for them, to be sure.  But economics courses are unlike courses where matters of race, religion, or sexual orientation come to bear.  The topics of my class are, in that sense, far less controversial.  Yet my call for a safe space where students can do their formative learning without concern of the consequences from failure, is eerily similar to the call some have made for safe spaces in these more emotionally challenging courses.  Consequently, I want to defend my ideas further.

The starting point is that ordinary student for the most part do not engage in real learning in most of their courses.  Among others who make this point is Ken Bain in his book What the Best College Students Do, where he argues that most students engage in surface learning only.  If we are to substantially change what is now a majority practice, we must change the environment in in a way that is conducive to the majority wanting to alter their behavior on their own.  In other words, I am making a fundamentally positive economics point.  I will readily admit that the jury is still out on whether in creating such safe spaces that is sufficient for encouraging the real learning we'd like to engender.  But there is no doubt about the agenda.  The program I'm operating under can be described as a search for such environments that will positively impact student learning, based on a model of the learner that jives with current experience.

In contrast, those who argue against such safe environments, and there are many such people so here I won't try to single out any one in particular, seem to me to take a fundamentally normative economics approach to the matter.  In other words, the ideal is for us to be producing highly resilient and adaptable students who can make the necessary adjustment to the environment, however harsh it may present itself.  While I concur with this normative goal, I think there is then a conceptual error made from a positive perspective.  The error is the belief that providing a safe environment lessens the chance that the normative goal will ever be attained.  (Implicit in this is perhaps a Darwinian argument about successful adaptation coupled with a view that for those less successful in adapting, they must suffer so the stronger members of the species thrive.)

There is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that in the absence of a really safe environment, students will self-protect and that self-protection will block the resilience in students that everyone wants to see.  As I said above, there is still an unknown of whether in a safe environment if students will grow sufficiently that eventually they no longer need the protections the environment provides.  And even if this is true, there is the further matter of how long this is likely to take.  Admittedly, I don't know the answers here.  It seems to me, however, that is what we should be trying to learn.  That is the crux of my argument.

* * * * *

Now I want to add a further complication to this story and in the process take myself on in the argument I made just above.  The issue I'd like to bring in is prejudice, in this case the teacher's prejudice against his students.  In this I'm aided by a recent Opinionator column by George Yancy, Dear White America.  Yancy argues that the system is inherently racist (for which the evidence seems abundant; Yancy trusts his readers to be aware of that evidence).  White America, at least those who in the main embrace the system, must therefore be racist as well, even if from time to time they try to confront that racism.  It is an argument that I'm still scratching my head about.

In the meantime, here I want to appropriate Yancy's argument and use it for my own purposes.  Where Yancy says White America, make the substitution 'professors' and where he says Black America make the substitution 'students'.  Even though I purport in wanting to see my students engage in real learning, am I prejudiced against my students?  If that is so, how does this prejudice manifest and ultimately limit the learning of the students?

It is hard not to vent here, but I will try to avoid that as best as possible.  Instead I will ask, what is that the instructor enjoys in teaching and what is it that the instructor detests?

On this score it is much more enjoyable to teach a course for the Campus Honors Program than to teach a course aimed for regular students, the majority of whom are Economics majors.  On core issues of how motivation manifests, like coming to class, CHP students are much more inclined to do so than ordinary students.  In my Economics of Organization class I tell students at the beginning of the semester, "I don't want to be your mother."  That typically brings out a chuckle from some of them.  But by mid semester, for many I'm playing the role of their mother and urging them to get their assignments in on time.  Why that is necessary is anybody's guess.   Here I simply want to assert that it is the norm to have some students who are serious about the course work, meaning they come to class and do their assignments diligently, and many other who are apparently merely going through the motions.

Some might argue that the solution is to have strict rules and then enforce those, letting students live with the consequences.  But one of the themes of my course is that organizations which operate under strict rules typically limit productivity by not creating a sense of ownership in their employees.  Employees who follow the rules do so out of fear of losing their jobs, but then they won't have the passion for the work necessary to do an outstanding job.  If we're going to talk that talk in class, we should also walk the walk, or so has been my thinking in how the class is structured.  Yet the lack of motivation evident in too many students defeats this message from really getting through. Or, put differently, if I got to recruit students for my class from among those who wanted to register for it, a novel thought that I'm sure would put a smile on the face of other instructors were it suggested at a faculty meeting, I would reject a good fraction of those who do sign up for the class because they don't bring enough to the table.

A second issue is whether students seem open to new ideas.  As a teacher, it is much more encouraging to see a student whose own world view is flexible enough that it can be modified when confronted with a new and interesting idea, one the student hadn't previously considered.  Students who are more of a closed book, and therefore who are harder to reach, are less fun to teach.  I don't mean here students who are skeptical.  Such skepticism would actually be a welcome thing, as the students who challenged what they are being taught would then have to find intelligent arguments to support their prior beliefs.  Bringing such arguments out in the open would be a very good thing.  When I talk about students being a closed book I mean they are instinctual and not reflective in generating their own views.  (Another instructor might say that for such students their critical thinking skills are weak.)  Getting such closed minded students to be more open in their thinking presents a challenge to the instructor.

A third issue is whether students have adequate prior preparation.  Here, I don't mean whether students have had the prerequisite courses.  The issue is how much of the prerequisites the student has internalized in a way where that knowledge can be repurposed in my class.  My class is an upper level course meant for juniors and seniors.  If I must continually go back to square one to produce understanding, we can't get very far in covering the subject matter of my class.  Alternatively, in my class we end up going through the surface learning charade that I am desperately trying to avoid.

When I was a teen, the Stephen Stills song Love the One You're With was quite popular.  It might serve well as the mantra for current day college instructors.  Yet instructors are human beings and sometimes they are unable to live up to the standards they set for themselves.  When the challenges mount and the successes are few and far between, it is all too easy to become first frustrated and then eventually to become exasperated.  When those emotions overtake the instructor the tone of the message being sent is apt to change.  Students will hear the irritation in the instructor's voice or see caustic criticism in the instructor's comments that are a response to some piece of student writing. What the instructor originally meant as a gentle nudge toward better student performance gets heard by the student as rebuke.  This might completely discourage the student's earnest participation.  When this happens the safety of the space has then been shattered.

Two different stories can be told here, each describing the same outcome.  In the first, the students are not hearty enough.  They are unable to shrug off some negative feedback they receive.  They have made a mountain out of a molehill.  In this story the project to get ordinary students to learn in a deep way is doomed to failure because the students are too brittle.    In the second story, the instructor is not patient enough.  The instructor lets his demons get the better of him and dissipates his opportunities for providing useful feedback by instead venting during these times.  The instructor is Doctor Frankenstein who makes his own monster, because he is so hell bent on dramatic improvement from his students that he ignores the small real steps of progress that students make when they are learning.

Let me close with the following observation.  The results are not uniform in my class.  The shattering of the safe space (or not) happens not for the class as a whole but for each individual student, taken one at a time.   That is worth keeping in mind as we consider what progress looks like.

The system that is aimed at producing learning doesn't.

Tests
Pests.

Assess
Confess.

Afraid
Degrade.

Hope?
Nope.

Can't we do better than this?

Learning by thinking things through (reading) --- Non-learning by testing

One of those unfortunate necessities with school is that in the early grades spelling is learned by rote, at least a first, and likewise for arithmetic.  If a kid gets past rote pretty quickly, primarily through reading, later perhaps also by writing or through other means of expression, then those early lessons by rote have done their job well and the kid can move onto more mature approaches to learning, which entail understanding narrative produced by others and then by producing narrative himself or herself.  What happens when a kid doesn't get past rote, neither through the later grades in elementary school, nor in middle school, nor even in high school?

At this juncture in the writing, I stopped for quite a while.  There is, of course, much narrative provided by TV and the movies, also by video games.  Given that, one needs to ask: does reading nonetheless hold a privileged place in the kid's learning?   I wanted to claim that it does, but I also wanted some evidence to support that claim, so I proceeded to look for that evidence.  I first did a Google search on "the difference between reading and watching TV for learning" but without the quotes.  I looked at a few links from there, none of which I found satisfying.  So I did the search again, this time using Google Scholar.  (I love that when on the campus VPN, a Google Scholar search suggests where the piece can be accessed from a database the Library has provided.)  The very first hit is a remarkably interesting piece by Neil Postman called The Disappearance of Childhood.  (Readers who don't have access to ProQuest will find the link takes them to a login screen.  For that reason, I've reposted the article, so everyone can have access.  It is a definite copyright violation, but I doubt anyone will lose sleep over this.  Not too many people read my blog and Postman's piece is pre-Internet.  His devil is TV.  But that helps make his piece such an interesting read.)

Postman makes a very large argument.  He asserts that the concept of childhood itself was a consequence of Gutenberg's printing press, which democratized literacy.  In the Middle Ages, there wasn't  a period of life known as childhood.  Adulthood immediately followed infancy, around the age of 7.  By that age everyone had learned oral communication skills, which we humans are hard wired to acquire.  That was all the education necessary.  So a 7-year old could start working.  Once reading was deemed a necessary skill, one that requires education to acquire, there needed to be a period of time for that education to occur and a dedicated place (school) for the learning to happen.  In Postman's view, school and childhood are two sides of the same coin.   This is a period of slow and steady maturation, intellectually and about how the world works.  Students learn through their play as well as through their schooling.  

Postman then asserts that television undoes this separation between childhood and adulthood because TV programming is accessible to everyone (meaning the content is lowest common denominator sort of stuff, since only that will have a wide audience) and the skills required to view TV and make sense of shows and the commercials are already there in young children.  (Ten years ago there was a piece that made the opposite argument, arguing that audiences were growing more sophisticated by virtue of TV.  Mainly, however, it was making an argument that for DVDs watching the same show multiple times was necessary to rationalize the purchase.  Thus, that sort of programming had to provide stories where new things came across in a second viewing.  In turn, that meant the stories had to be intellectually challenging.)  What is most interesting in Postman's critique is the consequence he draws from this undoing on the larger society.  If you buy his argument, it is very easy to cast the current Republican race to be the Presidential nominee as a product of trends Postman identified more than 30 years ago.  It also suggests that mobile devices aren't the cause of the problem with lack of attention, as many now assert.  The problem was already there in TV's dominance over print.  My generation, which as kids or perhaps as teens witnessed the transition from black and white to color TV, lived at the cusp of this transition.  That is useful to bear in mind.

TV viewing and book reading can co-exist in a way where the latter provides intellectual nurture and the former provides entertainment.   (And some TV viewing might provide intellectual nurture as well.)  That's how it was for me and indeed how it must have been for Postman as an adult (he was 24 years my senior), who in the piece I've linked to comes across both as well educated and as someone who watched a lot of TV.  At issue is whether this sort of duality is the norm or if instead one mode comes to predominate.  And here it is worth distinguishing the mechanics of reading, on the one hand, from the habit of reading, on the other.  Every kid who goes to school gets taught on the mechanics of reading.  But reading requires effort, especially for the kid who has not yet acquired the habit. Watching TV is easier.  That much, Postman's piece and the next one at the Google Scholar site, Television is "Easy" and Print is "Tough"... make quite clear.   When the kid is out of school and chooses which to do, what drives the choice?  It is not hard to imagine that if the reading habit doesn't take hold at a fairly young age, then it doesn't take hold at all.  Postman writes:

Alongside all of this, the Europeans rediscovered what Plato had known all along about learning to read; namely, that it is best done at an early age.

Now I want to get back to the persistence of rote.  My conjecture is that it happens primarily in kids for whom the reading habit is weak or not present at all.  School has two different jobs.  The first job is to teach students.  The second job is to assess what students have learned.  In the ideal, these two jobs are complements.  Teaching obviously feeds the assessment of learning.  In a virtuous cycle, the assessment, in turn, feeds subsequent teaching.  But there are unintended consequences, particularly on the student's ego.  Nobody likes to perform poorly when tested.

For kids who are reading regularly, the entire process that begins with the list of new words to learn (when I was a kid that was on Monday) and culminates with the spelling test (likewise, when I was a kid that was on Friday) with practice in between indirectly is a prod not just for reading, but reading at a certain level, where at least some of the new words are likely to appear in the story.   In this way the reading embodies the lessons learned from spelling.  Likewise, if a kid can figure out a new word from the context of the reading passage, then reading is a way to practice spelling, by seeing it in print before confronting it on a list.  But for kids who don't yet have the reading habit, spelling tests themselves may be the culprit.  Each week there is more stuff to memorize, yet the stuff is not used in an interesting way.  School becomes synonymous with memorization.  Rote then has hardened into the way students prepare for tests.

If this story that I am telling makes sense, then the key question is what might be done to get the reading habit more widespread among kids.  Comparing now to when I was a kid, there are so many other temptations now.  And measured by "special effects" those other temptations are vastly superior now to the TV we had when I was a kid.  This is the issue in upper middle class households, where the kids may be doing well at school test-wise, but where they are not really learning because they prepare for their tests by rote.

When I was in 6th grade (still elementary school then) my teacher was also the school librarian.  He had me work in the library a good part of each school day.  Some of that was real work - putting the plastic covers onto the book jackets of newly acquired books to protect the books from wear and tear.  Much of that, however, was free time that allowed me to read some of those books.  If every kid had that opportunity that sustained for an extended period of time, would each develop the reading habit?

Here I took my second break in the writing, but this time for not so long.  I did a search on "getting young kids to read" and found several pieces that said more or less the same thing.  Having shared reading experiences counts for a lot.  I know there are volunteer programs for mentoring school kids, but are there volunteer programs that encourage shared reading?  One of the pieces emphasized this as a parental responsibility, and I suppose in an upper middle class family with both parents residing in the household, it is a parental responsibility.  I'm guessing however that even in that setting surrogates for the parents will be doing some of the shared reading.  And in single parent households, an increasing reality, surrogates may be the only answer, even if it isn't a perfect answer.  The additional factors are for kids to select readings according to their then articulated interests.  This, in turn, requires having realistic alternatives from which the kid can choose.

Since I'm trained as an economist I tend to think of things from an opportunity cost perspective.  And what I'm wondering now is whether quite a bit of the effort and resource going into faculty development at college to improve pedagogy and facility with learning technology wouldn't be better spent on early childhood education, having more libraries, more books, and surrogates with whom the kids can read together in a comfortable environment.

Let me close by noting that in today's Inside Higher Ed, there is a piece about the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and funding technology mediated Personalized Learning.  I've got to wonder, why fund a lot of remediation at the college level instead of funding getting the kids on a better learning track when they are younger?  We who are in Higher Ed like to see funds coming our way.  But doesn't it make more sense to encourage these kids to be readers before they become adults, just as Plato suggested?

A suggestion for the new Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

While I'm sure there is a lot of thinking behind the scenes not reflected in this NY Times piece, so perhaps what I have to say here is already being considered, one gets the impression that this initiative is looking to make rather large grants (in the tens of millions of dollars range) so the money can be put to strategic use.  Such an approach is perfectly understandable from the viewpoint of the donors, who'd like to understand the consequence that results from their gifts as well as to steer outcomes in a more positive direction, when that is possible.

However, just as many commercial startup ventures are starved for capital, so too are many startup not-for-profit charitable endeavors.  These organizations have very dedicated and diligent founding members and a cadre of others who volunteer their time in the hope the organization can make a go of it.  Fundraising from small donations is the standard way such organizations try to meet their financing needs, which are typically quite modest indeed, and yet often go unmet.  Many of these organizations fail.  Some might fail even if the funding were adequate - their message doesn't hit the right chord.  But many others have a good message for which there is a real audience, yet will fail nonetheless because they can't raise the needed funds.

So my thought is that some small fraction of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative be devoted to small grants (in the tens of thousands of dollars range) but unlike other Foundation giving of this sort, which targets the areas that are candidates for funding, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative be unrestricted as to mission of the recipient organizations.  Likewise, I would suggest a fairly minimal application process for grant candidates.  Allocating the grant funds would not be a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack.  It is hard to see how that could make sense, as the costs of sifting through all the applications could end up swamping the benefits from the small grants themselves.

Instead, imagine that the grants were determined purely as a random draw from the applicant pool.  Given the high visibility of the Chan Zuckberberg Initiative, one might imagine that pool would be quite large.  Even if the success rate on the small grants was quite low, which I assume it would be, the conditions have been set to look at why organizations who receive grants nonetheless fail.  (The reporting requirement for grant recipients would be much higher than for initial applicants.  One prime reason for the Initiative funding of the grants is to study these recipients.)  One might hypothesize that many of these organizations make some basic mistakes that hamper their ability to succeed.  If so, and if those mistakes could be identified, future organizations could learn from this and thereby avoid these errors.

The leverage then from such a small grant program, even if it continued with random selection of recipients for funding, is that it might very well influence the behavior of all applicants, not just those that receive the grants.  In this way it could raise the success rates of all such startups and in so doing also attract other funders to support these organizations.

Let me close with one other point, which relates this sort of charitable giving to income inequality.  It may just be how the piece in the Times was written, but the impression created about the large grants already made is that the recipients were themselves pretty well heeled.  In other words, these amount to the uber rich giving to the very well off.  Good works will no doubt be done this way.  But it blocks many other potential recipients where good works could also be done - these among the poor, working class, and their friends, because they simply aren't networked in a way where they can raise sufficient capital to make them targets for a big grant.  These other potential recipients should not be left out in the cold.  This suggestion is a way to include them in the process.