Spending more money

In 2007, the United States fell behind eleven other nations in the percentage of adults, ages 25 to 34, with an associate degree or higher. The top four were Canada (55.8 per cent), South Korea (55.5 per cent), Russia (55.5 per cent) and Japan (53.7 per cent). America (40.4 per cent) slightly trailed Australia (40.7 per cent). The data greatly exercised many politicians, starting with President Obama. Their argument is venerable: the country needs more people with college diplomas because our economic future depends upon highly skilled executives and workers, able to compete in a global economy. In short: more diplomas, more cash. Higher education apparently has no higher goal.

Why have we failed to produce more college graduates with all those "necessary" skills? On the surface, it seems to be the fault of high school teachers. This year, nationally, only 24 per cent of the high school students who took the ACT college entrance exam had the skills to pass first year college courses. Composite scores have fallen since 2007. Many high schools now offer a core curriculum designed to prepare those going on to college by requiring four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies. Among those who took these special courses, however, only 29 per cent proved ready for college work.

Why not just spend more money on education? That's the emphasis of the Obama Administration. Well, how much is "more"? And where is the evidence that greater funding enhances test scores? Much of what Washington is now doing involves ties between Democrats and teachers' unions. It's a financial well that is never full. Just a few more billion dollars, the educators and politicos declare, and...and what?

It should be apparent that much of the problem facing high school teachers is social, economic, and moral. What can a teacher or a school do, for example, about students from broken homes, living in poverty, and swallowed up by the anti-intellectualism displayed in the media and by their peers? How can you raise the achievement levels of people who may well lack the basic intelligence to succeed in class? What can be done with those who would rather work off campus than study?
Increase teacher pay? Build larger, technologically sophisticated schools? Offer smaller classes? Inflate grades and lower academic standards to build student self-esteem? Harass or fire teachers who are not popular or whose students are not passing tests? Set state and national achievement goals? It has all been tried, and the results are abysmal.

Stephanie Banchero of the Wall Street Journal wrote recently, "there is still no solid evidence on how best to boost achievement." I would omit the word "best".

College professors are also under fire. A great many universities, colleges, and junior colleges in this country will admit students of any sort to bring in more money and boost the body count; in the American tradition, bigger is better. When large numbers of marginal students drop out or flunk out, the campuses are criticized for failing to meet the needs of young people and endangering the nation's future. Predictably, campus administrators assure state and federal government officials and private donors that if they only had better financial support more degrees could be awarded and all those "highly skilled" jobs of the future could be filled.

The University of Wisconsin System is a case in point. The system is huge, encompassing 13 four-year institutions, 13 community colleges, and a statewide extension network. Together they enroll more than 178,000 students and receive $1.1 billion annually from state taxpayers. Its leaders are requesting a budget increase this year of $86.3 million from the cash-strapped legislature. (The state faces a $2.5 billion budget deficit in the next two years, despite recent hikes in taxes and fees amounting to $5 billion.) To attract support, UWS floated a proposal in April to boost the number of degrees by 30 per cent over the next 15 years. The cost of the venture for the first two years is $22.6 million. In short, they are saying, Give us more money and there will be more diplomas.

System officials are vague about how they arrived at the $22.6 million figure and what exactly will be done to create a skilled labor force. We are told that the funds would pay for supporting more than 5,900 additional undergraduates, including more than 2,200 who would have normally dropped out after their freshman year. The proposal includes $10 million for grants designed to assist students from families earning less than $60,000 a year.

So, in some mysterious way, UWS top brass will admit more of the poor (many of its campuses already have largely open admission policies), retain dropouts, and see that almost everyone graduates. It sounds like a deal no one could refuse. Until you think about it.

One wonders how current academic standards will fare by admitting more people who are not currently attracted by higher education. An even larger mystery is how the campuses will make sure that such people get a diploma. Won't a larger number of silly courses and majors (e.g. turf management, film studies, mass communications, sports psychology) have to be created and expanded? And if that step is taken, how will it meet the future need for a skilled workforce?

Proponents of awarding a larger number of diplomas have nothing more sophisticated in their arsenal than the well-documented connection between college degrees and prosperity. They don't address the hard question about what majors are making the most money. (Will the new people study engineering or medicine?) They don't discuss the ability, motivation, and socio-economic realities of those who are to be recruited and retained. Nor do they want to talk about academic quality and grade inflation. Only about a third of the nation's faculty positions are tenure-track, meaning that underpaid graduate students and ad hoc professors, desperate to be popular and employed full-time, handle much of the teaching on many campuses. How eager will they be to flunk anyone in an environment that emphasizes a higher graduation rate?

In Wisconsin, the case for more degrees is especially weak, for the problem here is not that we are graduating too few but that too many graduates leave the Badger State to go elsewhere. From 1989 through 2006, according to education policy analyst Thomas G. Mortenson, some 506,000 bachelor's degrees were awarded in Wisconsin. But from 1989 through 2007 the state suffered a net-migration of 128,492 people with bachelor's degrees. Mortenson reports that only six states suffered the loss of more graduates than Wisconsin.

Today, 25 per cent of state residents have a bachelor's degree or higher. That's about two percentage points lower than the national average. Ah, but for only $22.6 million, the University of Wisconsin System will begin a project to grant more diplomas. How exactly? And if that is achieved, how will anyone keep the graduates in the state? And if they stay, how will we know that they are "highly skilled" and ready to boost the economy?

It's all so glib and cynical. Taxpayers deserve better from people with diplomas.

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Americans spend money

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February 10, 2008

Spend all my money

Drake Bennett has an interesting and nuanced article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on money and happiness. To make a long story short, money can buy us some happiness, but only if we spend our money properly. Instead of buying things, we should buy memories:

A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can - it's just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not.

"Just because money doesn't buy happiness doesn't mean money cannot buy happiness," says Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. "People just might be using it wrong."

Dunn and others are beginning to offer an intriguing explanation for the poor wealth-to-happiness exchange rate: The problem isn't money, it's us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences, ourselves over others, things over people. When it comes to happiness, none of these decisions are right: The spending that make us happy, it turns out, is often spending where the money vanishes and leaves something ineffable in its place.

Any attempt to put these findings into practice, however, has to contend with the subtle but powerful ways money itself channels our thinking, and the ways it plays on human attitudes about sharing and scarcity. Recent studies have suggested that merely thinking about money makes us more solitary and selfish, and steers us away from the spending that promises to make us happiest.

Why don't things make us happy? The answer, I think, has to do with a fundamental feature of neurons: habituation. When sensory cells are exposed to the same stimulus over and over again, they quickly get bored and stop firing. (That, for instance, is why you don't feel your underwear.) This makes sense: the brain is an efficient organ, most interested in the novel and new. If we paid attention to everything, we'd quickly be overwhelmed by the intensity of reality. Unfortunately, the same logic applies to material objects. When you buy a shiny new Rolex watch, that watch might make you happy for a few days, or maybe even a week. Before long, however, that expensive piece of jewelery becomes just another shiny metal object - your pleasure neurons have habituated to the luxury good. (Of course, your Rolex can become a problem for everybody else, since it raises the material expectations of all those poor souls wearing less expensive watches. These people now feel inferior, since their Timex has been devalued by the costlier item. [Such luxury items are known as "positional goods," since part of their appeal is that they signal your social position.] Multiply this same psychological phenomenon across a full range of consumer products - from clothes to cars, stereos to shoes - and you can begin to see the "hedonic treadmill" that afflicts people in developed countries. Not only do their brain cells automatically adapt to their state of wealth, but those same neurons are constantly being bombarded with a new set of expensive expectations. Of course, not everybody can afford a Rolex or a Lexus, which means that we are constantly being disappointed.)

That, in a nutshell, is why material possessions don't make us happy. As Bennett points out, however, investing in pleasant experiences is a much better alternative:

Money spent on experiences - vacations or theater tickets or meals out - makes you happier than money spent on material goods. Leaf Van Boven, an associate psychology professor at the University of Colorado, and Thomas Gilovich, chair of the psychology department at Cornell University, have run surveys asking people about past purchases and how happy they made them.

"We generally found very consistent evidence that experiences made people happier than material possessions they had invested in," says Van Boven.

Why? For one thing, Van Boven and Gilovich argue, experiences are inherently more social - when we vacation or eat out or go to the movies it's usually with other people, and we're liable also to relive the experience when we see those people again. And past experiences can work as a sort of social adhesive even with people who didn't participate with us, providing stories and conversational fodder in a way that a new watch or speedboat rarely can.

In addition, other work by Van Boven suggests that experiences don't usually trigger the same sort of pernicious comparisons that material possessions do. We like our car less whenever we catch a glimpse of our neighbor's newer, nicer car, but we don't like our honeymoon any less because our neighbor went on a fancier one.

Another virtue of experiences is that, while material things get diminished over time (we habituate to the pleasure, and then have to deal with the inevitable repairs), pleasant memories tend to become more pleasant. We forget about the delayed flights and jet lag but remember the lush rainforest hike, or the fancy meal in Paris. The vacation might be long gone but it's still making us happy.

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Earn money on youtube

YouTube is probably one of the most popular services online. But, how do you incorporate its use in helping you to make money online?
1. Add Premium Partners’ Videos on Your Blog or Site. If you have an Adsense account, log in and get the code for ‘video units’. You can create a YouTube Video Player and customise it according to various categories, key words, and content providers.
2. Run affiliate ads on YouTube videos. Chris on Making Money Scoop has some tips on how to do this using various tools.
3. Provide regular quality video content. Perhaps, you can become a ‘premium’ publisher and Google will split ad revenues with you.
4. Start a video blog or site that features various YouTube content. These blogs and sites can be anything from cute animal videos to craft tutorials. Then, run relevant ads and affiliate programmes on your blog or site.
5. Accept direct ads on your YouTube content. If you upload your own videos on a regular basis and you have a decent following, you might want to accept ads on your videos.
6. Enrich your sales using YouTube videos. If you sell an item on an online shop and you are able to compliment your listings with YouTube videos, then it will be useful. Also, you can link to your sales page on your YouTube. This might help bring video viewers to visit your sales page.

So, do you use YouTube at all in your online business? Can you think of other ways to use YouTube videos to help you to make money online?