When Education Becomes an Economic Burden

In their new book and in their prior work, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have convincingly demonstrated the enormous boost the U.S. economy received in the last sixty years from increasing investments in education. For the last two decades, anxiety has risen that the United States has reached some sort of education plateau or decline and that economic growth will accordingly suffer.

A new McKinsey report, highlighted by Thomas Friedman the other day, appears to prove that this is indeed the case. Had the United States kept pace with our own prior achievements and more recent stars like Finland and South Korea, our GDP today would be $1 to $2 trillion larger. That might seem like a drop in the bucket in a $14 trillion economy, but how much has the Federal Reserve spent thus far on its various firefighting moves? Oh, right, $1.2 trillion. And bailouts? Um, $1 to $2 trillion. 

OK, so what: surely we can make all this up through faster growth? Well, right, about that, see economic growth has become increasingly dependent on education over the past three decades. That knowledge-based economy everyone's always talking about? It's for real, and it requires concomitant investments in not just knowledge creation, but the ability of people to codify and, most importantly, use that knowledge. I just happened to be reading Dominique Foray's fabulous Economics of Knowledge when I ran across this McKinsey report. The juxtaposition is like finding out when McDonald's breakfast ends: "total mind blow." 

I'm not usually disposed to let one report or one apparent trend scare me, but considering the nature of knowledge in the abstract, the history of American education and growth, and the sorry state we find many of our schools in today--well, it's a tad daunting.

I make no claims to be an education expert, and I know I keep coming back to this, but I simply can't help thinking about the "high school movement" with regard to these issues. Goldin and Katz are again the authorities here. The nature of knowledge, in general terms, hasn't really changed in the last century, but it's economic importance, the way we use it, and the way we propagate it, have changed radically. This should have clear implications for our educational system.

What those are, I'm not in a position to say, but it becomes more obvious every day that we need some serious institutional innovation in the realm of education, akin to the rise of secondary schools that arose with the industrial economy. Technology has a role to play here; alternative models like KIPP, too.

Any brilliant ideas out there?

Comments

[Michael F. Martin]

I've been thinking about this a lot more lately as a new parent. It was interesting to read in a biography of Gouverneur Morris that even at that time educational reform was on peoples' minds, with people like Franklin pushing a more applied curriculum that emphasized science, including experimentation with electricity. But most of their educational experiments seemed to fail with teachers falling back on the Greek and Latin.

A core problem is that each student learns somewhat differently. So there are no economies of scale in matching teaching to students -- the bandwidth is limited by the cost of hiring teachers.

The marginal improvements that could be made would be to hire a wider variety of teachers to teach a wider variety of subjects. Each field has its own connections to all others. One can learn math and science from studying music or art and vice versa. In this regard, the people who want more rigorous math and science education are doing themselves a disservice because people don't generally develop an interest in those fields until they have a problem they want to solve. It is very unusual for a teenager to have a natural interest in pi.

In other words, there may be some cheap ways to encourage (or at least avoid killing) curiosity.

[ffffff]

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[John Graves]

Considering the success of Wikipedia and Facebook and mobile phones, one "brilliant idea" behind new approaches to education will likely involve sharing and communication outside classrooms. As difficult as it may be, try to think outside that box. And keep an eye on Khan Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/ Grockit http://grockit.com/ and the like.