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No one cared about my spreadsheets

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Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#81

Post by sgdjgkeirj »

lelandbatey wrote: post #73

Well, if you're going to throw down the gauntlet like that Mr. Caplan, how can I resist! I began by actually looking at this authors spreadsheets, then looking at their claims, and ultimately, I downloaded a copy of their book[0] to review what that book says. So here's the info: The fundamental claim of the book is that currently, the "western education model" is not (really) about skill accumulation or increasing t…

This is a good point. Caplan makes a huge deal about the fact that a students that drops out one semester before finishing the degree takes a huge penalty to their salary. This is what he calls the “sheep skin effect”. He claims that because such a student gets almost all of the education, their penalty must correspond to the signaling component.

But this is where his math runs against common sense. If you are an employer and see a student that dropped out of college without a very good reason, then that is a very strong negative signal. Even if you as an employer believe that education on its own provides valuable benefits to your employees, this does not mean you’d take a risk on someone that dropped out. There are sufficiently few of them that you can just not risk it.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#82

Post by renewiltord »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #69
renewiltord wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating to think that all you have to do is get 43 out of 100 people in South Africa degrees and it will be Finland.

Perhaps it would be. I don't find it at all silly to guess that if a critical percentage of everyone were made to confront more ideas and and generally be made more aware and thoughtful, that the eventual result is more civilized behavior between members. I certainly don't think it helps the situation to use the historical and current state of thimgs as some excuse not to bother trying. You can't create better civili…

Fascinating that Colorado right now is Finland.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#83

Post by Jill_the_Pill »

chasil wrote: post #80
joebob42 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a certain level I might agree. On the other hand, I think it's a reasonable point that if we disagree with him, go find the parameter he's chosen wrongly or forgotten, since it must exist somewhere if he's wrong. On the third hand, that's probably unfairly much to ask of your audience, since it requires auditing work that took a year.

Several years ago, I wrote against a local option sales tax for schools with some uncomfortable data. This particular referendum was lost, but the next prevailed. We do not allocate money to education intelligently. As an aside, the comparison engine provided by the Federal Education Budget Project appears to have been taken down. [My Illinois town's] Schools have again placed a sales tax increase before the voters f…

The comparison is meaningless without knowing the needs of the two districts. Are the students in the thriftier district from wealthier households, for example, needing less support from school? Are there more ESL speakers in the costlier district? More students requiring special education? Are the buildings older, requiring more expensive upkeep? Some expenses don't break down to per-student or per-teacher. It's nice to say "trim costs and increase performance," but if a constellation of needs makes improved learning more costly in that context, you're stuck with it.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#84

Post by rrherr »

sgdjgkeirj wrote: post #81
lelandbatey wrote: post #73

Well, if you're going to throw down the gauntlet like that Mr. Caplan, how can I resist! I began by actually looking at this authors spreadsheets, then looking at their claims, and ultimately, I downloaded a copy of their book[0] to review what that book says. So here's the info: The fundamental claim of the book is that currently, the "western education model" is not (really) about skill accumulation or increasing t…

This is a good point. Caplan makes a huge deal about the fact that a students that drops out one semester before finishing the degree takes a huge penalty to their salary. This is what he calls the “sheep skin effect”. He claims that because such a student gets almost all of the education, their penalty must correspond to the signaling component. But this is where his math runs against common sense. If you are an emp…

> If you are an employer and see a student that dropped out of college without a very good reason, then that is a very strong negative signal.

This is an argument for Caplan’s signaling theory, not against it. You literally said that whether or not a job applicant graduated is a very strong signal to employers.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#85

Post by bee_rider »

BurningFrog wrote: post #15

> Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations. I'm biased since I don't know spreadsheets at all, but I think Python code would have been far more reviewable.

With a spreadsheet you can see the result of each computation, and you can easily manually tweak values if you want to play around.

Programmers might have an easier time checking a program for bugs than a spreadsheet, but most economists aren't programmers, right? The stereotype I have, at least, is that the experts for this domain are happier in spreadsheets than python. And it seems to me that the main issue for this sort of think would come from economics rather than programming issues.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#87

Post by chasil »

Jill_the_Pill wrote: post #83
chasil wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several years ago, I wrote against a local option sales tax for schools with some uncomfortable data. This particular referendum was lost, but the next prevailed. We do not allocate money to education intelligently. As an aside, the comparison engine provided by the Federal Education Budget Project appears to have been taken down. [My Illinois town's] Schools have again placed a sales tax increase before the voters f…

The comparison is meaningless without knowing the needs of the two districts. Are the students in the thriftier district from wealthier households, for example, needing less support from school? Are there more ESL speakers in the costlier district? More students requiring special education? Are the buildings older, requiring more expensive upkeep? Some expenses don't break down to per-student or per-teacher. It's nic…

My district does have an influx of people from Africa, I will admit.

I rented one of my houses to such a family, but that is a story for another time.

...I will say also that our 8th grade scores put the other districts to shame (among the highest levels in the area), but the high school was our downfall.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#88

Post by taeric »

chasil wrote: post #80
joebob42 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a certain level I might agree. On the other hand, I think it's a reasonable point that if we disagree with him, go find the parameter he's chosen wrongly or forgotten, since it must exist somewhere if he's wrong. On the third hand, that's probably unfairly much to ask of your audience, since it requires auditing work that took a year.

Several years ago, I wrote against a local option sales tax for schools with some uncomfortable data. This particular referendum was lost, but the next prevailed. We do not allocate money to education intelligently. As an aside, the comparison engine provided by the Federal Education Budget Project appears to have been taken down. [My Illinois town's] Schools have again placed a sales tax increase before the voters f…

I'm at a loss for how trimming budget can ever really lead to increased performance. "Do better" is not a plan. And if you are behind, as in most areas of life, things are more expensive to catch up. I'm not aware of any case where this is not the way of things.

Such that, in large, I would expect areas that have poor families to, in fact, be more expensive to educate than areas with well off families. Many of the kids are literally having to catch up. Not just learn the curriculum, but catch up on a lot of learning they never had access to.

"Do better, or perish" is the way of small businesses. Where most of them fall into the perish scenario.

Re: No one cared about my spreadsheets

#89

Post by lancebeet »

This might be a knee-jerk reaction, but perhaps the reason nobody reported errors in the spreadsheets is because spreadsheets aren't easily auditable, which is one of the reason many dislike spreadsheets being used for this purpose.
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