Education

In Mexico there is a government program named Oportunidades which gives families cash payments if their children go to school, get vaccinated, and have regular health checkups.  The program has been a success and similar conditional cash transfers (CCTs) programs are being run in Nicaragua, Brazil and New York City.

New York City?  Should the NYC government pay for local children to go to school?  On the one hand, this will likely increase school attendance and decrease the number of drop outs.  On the other hand, the government is paying residents to do certain actions which seems to be a very paternalistic attitude.

The Economist  reports (”When bribery pays…“) that CCTs have been used in other settings as well:

Offering cash to change long-term bad habits, such as smoking or over-eating, has not worked. But disbursements tied to short-term transactions, such as getting drug addicts to take treatments for tuberculosis or depressed patients to see their psychiatrists, have already shown promise.

While paying children to go to school is not in and of itself a bad idea, I am concerned that the government will continue to pay people to do things that it thinks are in its best interest.  If we want to decrease inequality in society, it would be much better to increase cash transfers to the poor and allow them to decide for themselves what they should do with the money.

As a teacher’s assistant at UCSD, I often see undergraduate students selecting courses based on how easy the professor grades rather than on the amount of knowledge they will be able to glean from the course.  Why is this?  Arnold Kling gives a four main reasons in his “College Customers v. Suppliers” post on the Econlog website:

1. The consumers are basically right. Most courses are not really worth taking for most students, so the easy A is the best choice. 
2. The course that offers the easy A still gives the student the option to learn something, but the course that requires learning does not give the student the option to earn an easy A. So the option value is always with the coures that offers the easy A.
3. Consumers are myopic, and their preference for an easy A is irrational. (This is the view that many professors hold implicitly.)
4. Grades are measurable, and real learning is not. Consumers think grades are more important than they really are, because what is measured and reported is more salient than what is unmeasured.

Is there a solution?  Kling suggests external examinations:

“I should note that one potential solution to a competitive race-to-the-bottom in terms of rigor would be to have external examinations. When I was a student at Swarthmore in the Honors program, our exams were written and graded by professors from outside the college…With the exam exogenous, my grade-motivated students would want my course to be rigorous rather than easy.”