State college tuition fact of the day

Tuition has doubled since 1988, but spending per student is flat. What accounts for the discrepancy? Economist Susan Dynarski, writing for the New York Times, explains:

In 1988, state legislatures gave their public colleges an average of $8,600 a student. Students contributed an additional $2,700 in tuition, which gets us to a total of $11,300. By 2013, states were kicking in just $6,100, while students were contributing $5,400; this gets us to a total of $11,500. 

As far as students are concerned, public tuition has doubled. As far as public colleges are concerned, funding is flat. 

At public colleges, then, the explanation for rising tuition prices isn’t spiraling costs. The costs are the same, but the burden of paying those costs has shifted from state taxpayers to students.

Library digital collection blues

My university's library is moving towards reducing its print collection and replacing it with a digital collection. I support this move, both because this will enable the library to use its space more efficiently (more room is needed for student study spaces, as these often fill up), and because the right sort of digital collection would be more efficient for research than a print collection. However, I'm concerned that the current incarnation of the digital collection is not as useful as a print collection, and I believe this is a common problem in libraries that are going digital right now. 

As I understand it, the library's e-books can be viewed online in .html format or downloaded in Adobe Digital Editions format. The former option seems to suffer from two drawbacks. First, it can only be accessed with an internet connection. Second, in the sample e-book I examined, Innovative Buddhist Women by Karma Lekshe Tsomo, the image quality (reflected in the clarity of the text) was noticeably poor. It's fine for reading a couple of pages, but seems like it would be a strain to try to read the entire book carefully, which is necessary for students and faculty engaged in research.

The download option has two drawbacks of its own. First, it seems that a book can only be downloaded for up to 7 days before it is scuttled by the publisher's software. 

Second, the process of downloading is not easy or simple. When I attempted to download the aforementioned e-book, I was first prompted to download Adobe Digital Editions. It is annoying to have to use a new piece of software when they are already a lot of common file formats out there (.pdf comes to mind). How many students will persist past this initial roadblock?

Third, after downloading the new software, the user is prompted to provide an Adobe Digital Editions ID. I have no idea what this ID is or how to get it. After deciding to view the e-book without the ID (which means, evidently, that I can only use the book on one computer or device and not share it between computers or devices, itself a problem), I was finally able to view the e-book. 

Fourth, while the e-book does share the same pagination as the print edition, which is necessary for research purposes, there is a serious problem with the fonts in this particular e-book. I assume these kinds of problems occur more generally, though, since the e-book is not simply a .pdf or other file type which captures an image of the print version of the book. With Innovative Buddhist Women, all of the letters in Sanskrit words which require diacritical marks are in a different, hard-to-read, and awkwardly sized font that doesn't match the rest of the text. In other words, the e-book version of this book is as difficult to read for long periods as the .html version which is accessible via the library's website, but for different reasons.

It appears I am not the only one to complain about the current state of many e-books available through university libraries. Bob Pasnau, of the University of Colorado, has made similar complaints about Oxford Scholarship Online. Pasnau also explains part of the underlying problem, which is that publishers are not putting as much thought and care into their digital editions as they are into their print editions.

I am not very confident that these problems will be solved soon. I wish they would be, because of the great potential of a properly designed digital collection.

The benefits of pre-testing

Science writer Benedict Carey makes the case for testing students before they are taught new material in a class as well as after.

Catnip for human ears?

Vice Motherboard reports on audiophiles obsessed with tuning instruments to 432 Hz, instead of the standard 440 Hz. They claim that tuning to 432 brings with it immeasurable aesthetic and spiritual benefits; some within the movement have even blamed tuning to 440 on the Nazis.

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin isn't buying it:

“We can fix pitches anywhere we want,” Levitin writes, “because what defines music is a set of pitch relations. The specific frequencies for notes may be arbitrary, but the distance from one frequency to the next—and hence from one note to the next in our musical system [the intervals we discussed earlier]—isn’t at all arbitrary.”

UC San Diego cognitive psychologist Diana Deutsch suggests simply resolving the dispute with a controlled experiment--but laments that there is no funding for such at this time.

Either way, it's a fascinating story, well told by Chris Hampton for Motherboard.

The psychology of pronouns

Psychologist James Pennebaker studies the psychology of word choice. Among other things, he has discovered that lower status people use the word 'I' more when talking to higher status people. Pennebaker illustrates this with an email that he wrote to a high-status professor before making this discovery:

Dear Famous Professor: 

The reason I'm writing is that I'm helping to put together a conference on [a particular topic]. I have been contacting a large group of people and many have specifically asked if you were attending. I would absolutely love it if you could come... I really hope you can make it. 

Jamie Pennebaker

 And here is the professor's reply:

Dear Jamie - 

Good to hear from you. Congratulations on the conference. The idea of a reunion is a nice one ... and the conference idea will provide us with a semiformal way of catching up with one another's current research.... Isn't there any way to get the university to dig up a few thousand dollars to defray travel expenses for the conference? 

With all best regards,

Famous Professor 

Rising income inequality

Income inequality has increased in the United States since the recession:

"The most striking finding is that the median American family earned 5 per cent less in 2013 than in 2010 after inflation even though the average American family took home 4 per cent more."

That was from Matthew C. Klein, who blogs at the Financial Times, in response to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances for 2013.

Klein further comments: "The discrepancy can be explained by the fact that only people in the top tenth of the income distribution experienced any real income gains since 2010."

The labor market seems to be increasingly divided between those with the most valued skills and everyone else (including, ahem, academics with 9 or more years of higher education under their belt...). (Note that this data is about income inequality, not wealth inequality, which is a separate issue.)

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

"Peter Thiel disagrees with you"

This is the title of an informative profile of Thiel, a gay Christian libertarian entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and would-be public intellectual.