Comments on: Perverse Incentives in Academia

By: Perverse incentives in academia « StrategyProfs.net

Perverse incentives in academia « StrategyProfs.net — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:57:35 +0000

[...] Via Karim’s Twitter feed – perverse incentives in academia. [...]

By: JeffE

JeffE — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:35:32 +0000

I’ve often thought the metric for undergraduate programs should be the net present value of the median graduate salary over a career. By that argument, we should train our students to be hedge fund managers and CDO traders. These metrics seem resistant to hacking. This sentence is true, Matt, but perhaps not in the way you intended.

By: regehr

regehr — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:25:58 +0000

Dr Clam — I like your summary. The best that most of us can hope for is a career where we’re the administrator of nothing larger than a grant.

By: Dr Clam

Dr Clam — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:48:31 +0000

In Australia it is the same. I do feel for administrators, though, since they don’t really have *any* incentives for us. Carrots? Only promotion to jobs that involve more tedious administration and less of the teaching and research that we like to do. Sticks? Once we have a permanent position, we need to be filmed strangling puppies or stealing the Vice-Chancellor’s parking space to suffer any real consequences.
The incentives we care about, in terms of grant money and recognition, are totally outside the university’s control.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:08:28 +0000

E E – the incentive to a graduate to take the higher-paying job for his(her) own sake is far stronger than the incentive to the graduate to take the higher-paying job to affect his school’s rankings.

The question is whether the point of subsidizing undergraduate education is to teach useful skills to allow students to obtain higher-paying jobs down the line, or something else. Given that our country did pretty well in terms of inculcating the values of democratic citizenship with kids who left school at 18 (or younger!) up through World War 2, I don’t believe the claim that college education “makes better people” is sufficient to justify spending tax dollars on it. However, a claim that it makes people more economically productive (or, even more crassly, that it raises their potential lifetime taxable income) does seem like sufficient justification (if provable) for spending tax dollars on.