Are Colleges Becoming Market-Oriented?
Someone once remarked to me that the college campus is the natural home of socialism. But it looks like even colleges are starting to price services according to demand rather than follow a simple uniform rule.

Major in some subjects? Expect to pay more.

Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing a major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates with other majors. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students $40 [more (?)] for each hour of class credit.

A typical engineering graduate can expect a higher starting salary than the history major. In the market, then, the engineering degree is more valuable to the student than the history degree. It's not unreasonable to think he should pay more.

Labels: Education

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The Cost of Regulation: Seen in Housing Prices.
No surprise here: government action has consequences. In this case, people are being priced out of the housing market.

Forbes reports on the least affordable U.S. real estate markets in its July 23 issue.

Some of the numbers are astounding:

"For example, in the first quarter of 2001, 42.3% of homes sold in Los Angeles were available to the median earning household. But in the first quarter of 2007, only 3% of homes sold there were affordable to those households earning the median income."

There are several factors at play, but one that cannot be ignored by policy makers is the role of restrictive laws and regulations:

ontributing to an area's unaffordability are local policies that jack up the cost of building new homes. This increases price pressure.

"A lot of it has to do with regulations and zoning," says Robert Bruegmann, a history and urban planning professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "The higher cost of doing business--and the uncertainly of business--in places like California drives up home prices. The cost of building isn't that different in Houston versus Los Angeles, yet L.A. prices are so much higher. ... One of the few variables you can look at is regulatory burden."

The article notes that of the top 10 "unaffordable" cities, 7 are experiencing net outmigration. So don't blame a boom in housing demand for rising prices. Far from it: soaring prices may be driving people out, both negatively ("can't buy a house") and positively ("let's cash out while we can").

Labels: Economic freedom, Economics, housing

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Union Industry Schools to Charter Schools: Come Join Us
Competition with charter schools for students has forced the traditional, union-rule schools to respond. Sometimes the response is outright hostility and obstructionism, such as when a district refuses to sell a surplus building to a charter school.

Sometimes the response is a little more friendly.

From the archives of draft posts that never got published, I noticed that the Boston public schools are trying to bring charter school employees back to the union shop.

Today, 550 teachers and principals in the city's 14 charter schools will begin receiving letters asking them to consider converting their schools, which are under state jurisdiction, to pilot schools, which are autonomous but fall under the Boston public school system. The letters were mailed by the Boston Teachers Union on Saturday.

I don't know what sort of reception this invitation received--when I put this item in the queue, it was well over a year ago--but I do see this as an interesting response of the traditional school systems to charter schools. At least it's better than trying to shut down those schools outright.

Where did these pilot schools come from?

Pilot schools, created in 1995 in response to competition from charters, have more autonomy than traditional schools but less than charter schools .... The school system has 19 pilot schools, which are popular among parents.

There's certainly public demand for shaking up the system:

In February, after a yearlong standstill, the system reached an agreement with the teachers union to create seven more pilot schools by 2009. Roughly 6,000 of the system's 58,600 students attend the pilot schools. About 4,300 Boston residents attend 14 charter schools.

Looks like something else for the "I ought to look into that" pile.

Labels: Charter schools, Education

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Education: Dollars and Cents; Apples and Oranges.
How much does your state on K-12 education compared with others? The U.S. Census Bureau has the goods.

Here's the home page for education-spending numbers, but you may need to head over to this page and then look for the text "Public Elementary-Secondary Education Finances" to pick from the annual reports. The reports, by the way, start in 1992 and go through 2005.

Since there's some production lag time, the numbers in the 50-state reports are typically a couple years old. But unless you have a full-time research assistant who can dig out the information for you, they're as good as it gets.

You can get the information in either PDF or Excel. You can also look at all states, or just a specific state, as the page for 2005 reveals.

Here are a few points that stand out from the 2005 edition, which was released in April, 2007:

Nationally, 47 percent of all public school revenue comes through state governments, 44 percent from local governments, and 9 percent from the federal government.

Only 85 percent of all spending is for current operations (the rest is on capital outlay and "other," which I think means debt). Of current operations spending, 55 percent is on "instruction," meaning that only 47 percent of all spending is actually on instruction.

The amount of money spent varies tremendously. In New York, schools spend $14,119 per student. Utah spends $5,257. (Utah, by the way, has much better student achievement.) The national average is $8,701, though that number was from the 2004-05 school year.

Dig into the spreadsheet version of Table 8, and you can figure out which states load up compensation with benefits, such as gold-plated health insurance and retirement plans.

There's always something to cherry-pick. Some people will turn to Table 12, which ranks states according to how much they spend on schools as a percentage of personal income. A state can rank high on the list in at least two ways:

- It has a high income and spends much more than average on schools

- It has a below-average income and spends an average or above-average amount on schools.

Of course, since we're dealing with the provision of services in an almost total absence of a market, it's hard to say what is the "right" amount of money to spend on schooling.

Labels: Education

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I'm from the MOB and I'm Here to Help You.
Yesterday the MOB brought new-style communications together with old-school schmoozing, at a classic Irish pub.

The MOB, in this case, has nothing to do with the underworld. Instead, it's the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, an informal group of people who share an interest in writing and reading blogs.

The setting for the annual event was Keegan's Pub, as usual. It was a great time to catch up with sometimes-forgotten casual friends and to meet people who share a common interest, or interests.

I was finishing up a conversation with Gabrielle (someone I had never met) when Mitch Berg came over to me and said "PolicyGuy, meet the Transit Geek." Alas, TG has no blog that I know of, but we did talk about the merits of street cars, trolleys, and bus service. Not your usual party fare, but there is a high geek-to-noise ratio in at least some corners of these parties.

Oh sure, I talked with a number of other people throughout the evening, including two former bloggers.

Speaking of blogging, yesterday's Wall Street Journal has an extended article titled "Happy Blogiversary." It proclaims that 2007 is the 10-year anniversary of the blog as an institution. (I believe that it is available free of the usual subscription requirements, but may be wrong.)

Some day I may crank out an essay on the social, business, cultural, and political implications of blogs, but given all that awaits me today, this isn't it. One quick thought is that there's really nothing new about blogging: it's another form of expression. The content, tone, and quality of the material all vary tremendously. The artifact of the bound volume includes everything from classic literature and insightful nonfiction to the vile and insipid. In the way that it's impossible to say that "the book" is good or bad, it's impossible to say that "the blog" is good or bad. It just is. (permalink)

Housekeeping Chez PolicyGuy.
A little housekeeping is in order here. A while ago I said that the PolicyGuy blog was going into retirement. Within a couple of weeks it was back--but with a more casual attitude towards the frequency of publication.

Since then, I've gone to what is roughly a weekly schedule. Most posting has consisted of taking drafts out of the basement, applying some modest editing, and sending them out to the world. That's going to continue until I run out of drafts. After that, perhaps some "best of" material that has been published elsewhere. Or maybe even some new material.

Perhaps in time I'll clean up the sidebar (many of the links have gone stale) as well as the archives, which aren't being properly stored.

Some of you came here via a Google search, and found nothing that resembles what you were looking for. Someone, for example, was looking for "Delphi buy-out tax planning," or something like that. I don't recall writing anything about that topic--I'm a policy geek, not a financial adviser--but it's likely that within a month's span at one point I wrote about Delphi, corporate buy-outs, and tax planning. All those terms showed up on the same page as far as Google is concerned, though the terms may have been spread out over 3 different posts dealing with 3 different topics. Such is the state of search engines these days. Anyway, I hope you found something interesting anyway. (permalink)

(Repeat)More Money for Schools Does Not Mean Better Performance: Stateline.Org
(Sorry for the duplication from yesterday if you're an RSS subscriber. I'm reposting this in hopes of resolving a technical glitch.)

If you think that the argument that increased school spending doesn't equate into higher student achievement is only one of alleged opponents of education, think again.

Stateline.org observed earlier last year that the connection between free spending on schools and student achievement is fairly weak.

"Maine," writes Kavan Peterson, "spends nearly twice as much on a comparable student population -- $9,300 a student vs. $4,800 in Utah. But fewer Maine fourth-graders improved their math scores -- and their reading scores actually declined in the past decade."

What's even more remarkable is that Utah earns plaudits for improving its scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), sometimes called "the Nation's Report Card."

So much for money being the answer. In fact, so much for any one fact in the current education mix being the answer. Says Peterson, "It's difficult to prove what actually makes one state outperform another. Key factors such as per-pupil spending and student demographics vary widely, even among top-performing states."

One possible reason why there's no strong link between performance and money: the number on spending is based on systems as a whole. There's little information on how much money actually goes into the classroom. In other words, there could be a lot of waste, which is what you would expect from organizations that have government-granted monopolies for specific geographic areas.

Labels: K-12 education

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More on Detroit's Decline.
The Detroit News provides another look at the sad state of Detroit.

Even as the city lost approximately 36,000 people since 2000, Detroit has "added new housing last year at its fastest pace in more than two decades."

That's not entirely encouraging news, because there is still little sign that people are choosing the city for the next generation. "Demographers say while families with children continue to abandon Detroit neighborhoods, many of the new lofts and condominiums downtown have been filled by single people or couples without kids."

This points out, again, the need to improve the range of school choice as a key to urban revitalization. People aren't going to stay in a city if the only schools can afford are the third-rate government schools.

(This is the latest of a series of posts in which I am cleaning out the archives. The information is dated and the link is now dead. But the trend line, I believe is the same.)

Labels: School choice

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