Shots in the Dark

13 Responses

• Michael Mitzenmacher
  9/29/2009 11:03 am

  Kevin,

  Again, you don’t seem to get the point. I made no judgment as to whether you had a valid criticism — that Harvard should increase the size of its undergraduate enrollment. That’s an interesting question. I provided evidence to support your argument precisely because you seemed painfully incapable of doing so in your article. It was to point out how remarkably incoherent your argument was, that you offered nothing but a rant with no factual information to back it, and that if you had put some thought into it, perhaps you could have raised some actual points worth arguing.

  Now regarding specific points you make, point by point:
  1) Yes, to make Harvard “competitive with its peer institutions” was a problem. Harvard faces competition for its best faculty, as one would expect. A better sabbatical package at other universities makes Harvard a less attractive place for its faculty. To be clear, that’s my opinion, but as a Harvard faculty member, I can suggest that it’s probably a common one.
  2) There was inflation — inflation at universities, with a great deal of its budget in salaries, and including health costs, etc. is probably higher than the 66% you suggest. I notice uou also ignore other increased costs — more administration, those new buildings, the sabbatical package, increased financial aid, etc. that I specifically mentioned.
  3) We can certainly argue if Harvard should be more undergraduate-focused. I think it’s very undergraduate-focused, actually. Again, I’d love to hear a coherent argument from you on that point, rather than the one you gave, and in particular why increasing undergraduate enrollment is desirable in terms of making Harvard more undergraduate-focused.
  4) Regarding financial aid: I’d love to see you argue this factually. Again, the point of the increased financial aid was both to make Harvard more affordable, and INCREASE THE APPLICATION POOL of low-income students who apply. (They apparently can get scared away by the high price tag; by making it clear they can afford Harvard, the hope is to get many more to apply, so more quality students from that demographic can be admitted.) In both regards, my understanding is that it has been successful. For example, just look at basic news like
  http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=522754. Applications are way up at Harvard, part of that apparently due to the new financial aid programs. Quoting from the article:

  “As of now, over 25 percent of the Class of 2012 is eligible for Harvard’s old financial aid program, which eliminates tuition costs for families earning under $60,000.

  The average financial aid package this year is about $40,000, close to 78 percent of the total cost of attendance.”

  It would be more interesting to discuss this with you if you had a command of some basic facts such as these.

  I think it’s clear that Harvard has chosen to aim to admit more lower-income students, and the financial aid is being used, not by the children of wealthy alumni. It’s not clear that admitting more students would improve the situation; indeed, if it cut the average financial aid (as it would), it could make things worse in terms of attracting low-income students.

• Judith Ryan
  9/29/2009 11:31 am

  In response to Kevin Carey:

  The big problem with increasing the number of students at Harvard is the student-faculty ratio. Students learn best when they are in smaller classes and have a chance to test their ideas in discussion. From my own undergraduate days, I know that when I said something in class, I tended to remember that topic better. And pedagogical studies have confirmed that smaller class size tends to lead to more effective learning.
  For quite a while, the student-faculty ratio at Harvard was not as good as at its peer institutions. Under Jeremy Knowles’ deanship, the ratio improved because more faculty were hired; but the number was not enormous and, as Harry Lewis has pointed out, that project remained unfinished.
  This has now been compounded by the university’s current financial situation, since FAS has now placed somewhat tighter restrictions on the number of graduate students who can be hired to teach discussion sections of large lecture courses. The target size for sections is 18 students, but in some cases sections may end up a little larger. You just have to do the math to see how often, and for how long, any individual student can speak in a 50-minute class hour. From a pedagogical perspective, large lecture classes plus upwardly-creeping discussion section sizes do not make for an optimal learning environment.

• Kevin Carey
  9/29/2009 3:57 pm

  Michael,

  So if I understand you, when the facts I failed to include are all put on the table, my argument turns out to be correct. I guess I’m just lucky….

  There’s an obvious difference between avoidable and unavoidable cost increases. Inflation falls into the former category, sabbaticals and “more administration” in the latter. I’m not saying Harvard shouldn’t have spent more money, I’m saying it should have spent its money on different things. All else equal, more sabbaticals undoubtedly make Harvard more competitive. So would million dollar salaries. That doesn’t make million dollar salaries a wise use of money, or answer my question of whether there’s any evidence Harvard was suffering in faculty recruitment before.

  You wonder “why increasing undergraduate enrollment is desirable in terms of making Harvard more undergraduate-focused”? Really? Isn’t the connection between devoting more resources to something and being more focused on that thing kind of obvious?

  The Harvard Crimson article you cite says “The socioeconomic makeup of the Class of 2012 is not yet clear.” It also says that Harvard accepted 110 fewer students than it did last year. This is hardly evidence that the university is making great strides in enrolling substantially more low-income students. It also says that “over 25 percent of the Class of 2012 is eligible for Harvard’s old financial aid program, which eliminates tuition costs for families earning under $60,000.” Is that an improvement over, say, five years ago? (Also, median annual household income in the United States is just over $50,000. $60,000 isn’t low-income.)

  Applications were increasing at Harvard well before the new aid policies were announced. And when you’re already rejecting 93 percent of applicants and you have more applicants than ever before, I don’t think that a strategy to “INCREASE THE APPLICATION POOL of low-income students who apply” is necessarily the way to go-a more effective strategy would be to increase the pool of low-income students you ADMIT. Since I doubt the university is interested in admitting fewer athletes, wealthy legacies, etc. the only practical way to do that is to enlarge the overall pool. Otherwise, this all amounts to little more than taking a lot of credit for making Harvard theoretically affordable for a bunch of low-income students you don’t actually admit.

  Judith,

  The question of class size comes up a lot in these dicussions, and in the most general way it’s probably true that small faculty / student ratios are better. But studies of class size and other educational factors (most of which have been conducted in K-12 schools) tend to show an inverse relationship between effects and student preparation. In other words, class sizes matter a lot for students who are unprepared, come from disadvantaged backgrounds, etc., but matter little for students who bring more in the way of social capital, aptitude, and other resources to classroom. Since Harvard admits the smartest, best prepared-students in the universe, I wonder how sensitive to class size they are. But if there’s any elite college-level evidence to bring to bear on this point (Big surveys like Pascarella and Terenzini provide little) I’d love to see it.

  And even if the general point is granted, it still leaves the question of whether the marginal loss of learning all other students experience as a result of having one more student in class outweighs the marginal benefits that one more student receives at Harvard compared to where they would have otherwise gone.

• Michael Mitzenmacher
  9/29/2009 5:13 pm

  Kevin,

  I apologize if I’m coming off as rude, but really, I simply expect a higher level of argument. I would expect better from my students, and in some sense, I’m spending time responding to this so that other readers, including students, can see what (at least I think) a reasonable argument is like.

  “So if I understand you, when the facts I failed to include are all put on the table, my argument turns out to be correct. I guess I’m just lucky….”

  No, I’m saying that when you start to put actual facts on the table, then you, and I, and others who are interested, can begin have a meaningful discussion on the interesting question. When you start with a rant that shows a marked lack of facts and understanding of the tradeoffs and issues, you actually stifle discussion. I attempted to provide some of the facts you failed to point out — things like the sabbatical policy, which we seem to agree is an interesting point of discussion — precisely because you didn’t, and because it does provide a possible point which such a discussion should include.

  I think we agree that increasing faculty sabbatical time involves tradeoffs; specifically, it costs money. Was that a good use of the money? That’s a point we can argue. I should point out that comparing increased sabbatical time to million dollar salaries is poor debating technique, and simply undermines your argument. As I pointed out, Harvard increased sabbatical time to compete with its peer institutions, which is does to compete with its peers for top faculty. Its peers do not offer million dollar compensation packages (although, conceivably, professors in some fields could indeed earn million+ dollar salaries in private industry; Harvard, as far as I know, does not try to compete with that). To counter your argument, Harvard could save lots of money by hiring fresh PhDs from low tier institutions to teach all its classes, but that doesn’t seem to be a good idea for Harvard long-term, does it? I wouldn’t make such a silly argument, because I’d like to have a real discussion of issues, but I’m attempting to show you what your arguments sound like. The powers-that-be determined that increasing sabbatical time was appropriate in order to maintain the level of its faculty — if you have FACTS to counter this, they would be interesting to hear, of course.

  Again, I’m not saying whether spending the money on sabbaticals was or was not a good idea. I’m simply pointing out that you haven’t provided a meaningful argument for your position that it was not, while in pointing out the relation to peer institutions, I’m giving an example of a reason of why it was.

  I think we can also agree that Harvard’s financial aid policies are quite new, and their impact needs to be examined carefully over time. I think the numbers portrayed in that article represent a strong start, you appear to disagree. You fail to point out that Harvard accepted 110 fewer students precisely because it expected a higher yield rate because of the improved financial aid policy — something explicitly stated in that article. In my mind, again, this undermines your arguments, as you appear to cherry-pick facts that are convenient to you and ignore relevant associated data. Again, whether it turned out that the yield increased, and how Harvard should attempt to manage its yield in the future, are reasonable points of discussion.

  I think we just disagree on your last point. It makes sense to me that before you can admit more low-income students, you have to get more to apply, and in particular you have to get applications from students who can handle the rigors of the Harvard curriculum. (While I’ve heard that all we give is A’s, I can assure you that, at least in my class, that’s not actually the case.) Increasing financial aid — which has increased tremendously under these new programs — seems the right way to go in this case. I imagine it will be an ongoing process to improve the process itself, but I don’t see how you think we’re going to get more well-qualified low income students without spending endowment money on increased financial aid. I think it was well understood that increasing the pool of lower income students involved tradeoffs in terms of other students that could be admitted, and again you offer no evidence but resort to ad hominem attacks (“Since I doubt the university is interested in admitting fewer athletes, wealthy legacies, etc.”…), it continues to be really hard to have a meaningful discussion with you.

  I’ll leave Judith to debate her point with you.

• someone in admin
  9/29/2009 6:10 pm

  Kevin, your core point - it seems to me - is that Harvard has a duty to educate undergraduates: the more the better, in your view. But that is only one of Harvard’s obligations. It traditionally seeks the best graduate students in the country and overseas, and that is not at all cheap-they require top faculty, for one thing, if they’re to come here. Harvard is also a research university — it has obligations to find and fund the best scholars and researchers, which means fit out their labs, buy the books and other titles they need, and so on. Without going into details, you can say Harvard has worked hard on all three aspects — undergraduate and graduate education, faculty support and research — in its years of riches & abundance. Your broadside in the Chronicle sideswipes all that, to say Harvard has wasted its wealth and failed in its obligations to society. That’s a pretty unsophisticated argument, I’d say.

• someone in admin, cont.
  9/29/2009 6:22 pm

  “Harvard’s mission should be more undergraduate-focused than it is.” That from Kevin Carey.

  Why? Because you say so? The Roman Catholic church should be more execution-focused than abortion-focused — because I say so, even though I’m not Catholic.

  KEvin, have you ever been to Harvard, or Cambridge? A key part of the undergraduate experience is the Houses. Take in more undergrads, you have to build more Houses: that costs billions. And they won’t be in Cambridge anymore, but across the river in Allston. Which was and still might be a possibility, but even if the economy hadn’t crashed that’s a decade(s)-long project. Universities don’t move that swiftly, Kevin. Your criticism is, to put it another way, exceedingly premature.

• Harry Lewis
  9/29/2009 7:25 pm

  Michael has done a great job explaining things. Let me just point out that KC seems to be assuming that once you exceed some talent threshold, it doesn’t really matter that much whom you have in the classroom, either students or faculty. It’s a reasonable thing to debate whether it makes sense to try to get the very best math professor or math student in the country if not in the world, or if on the other Harvard wouldn’t still be just as good (and have some money left over) if it didn’t try quite so hard to be competitive at the high end of the talent scale. And you can even argue about whether the predictors that we use (for either students or faculty) are actually good ones. But I hear in KC’s argument a theory a different implication, that it’s better to decide who’s competent and then use other criterion than excellence in deciding whom to bring in, while historically at least some kind of quality metric has
  seemed important even in distingushing among people way out on the right tail. (Note that for students the metric is much more multidimensional and complicated than for faculty, as it ultimately comes down not merely to academic talent but to potential for impact on the world.)

• Kevin Carey
  9/30/2009 8:40 am

  “Why? Because you say so?” Well, sure, because I say so. That’s pretty much the point of writing an opinion column: having an opinion about an issue. This isn’t a court of law, you can’t throw out challenges on standing.

  Of course Harvard has multiple obligations. I didn’t say the university should have spent all of its vast new riches on educating more undergraduates, I just said it should have spent *some* of the money on educating more undergraduates. Sure, it would cost a lot, as I acknowledged. “Billions” seems excessive, but in any case, Harvard has billions it didn’t have before. I know the endowment isn’t a single giant pot of unrestricted money, but it seems like most of the things the university spends it on-faculty, facilities, student aid-could be used to teach students. Princeton managed to increase in size, as did Stanford and Yale, despite having a lot less money in the bank. Is it that Harvard couldn’t manage to follow suit, or just didn’t want to?

  Michael asks for FACTS (although I’ll note that he has yet to provide any to buttress his contention that Harvard was experiencing some kind of recruitment problem that sabbaticals were needed to solve.) So here’s a request for facts that could shed some light on this discussion:

  Harvard received over 29,000 applications for admission this year. How many of those students were (A) low-income, using whatever reasonable definition you choose, and (B) met whatever very high bar of academic achievement and additional worthiness, potential to change the world, etc., you choose. Let’s call that number X. How many of those students were admitted? Let’s call that number Y. If Harvard is really committed to socioeconomic diversity, then the ratio of Y to X should be greater than the percentage of all students who met standard (B) who were admitted. It should also be greater than the percent of wealthy students (defined however you like) meeting standard (B) who were admitted. If that’s the case, then I will publicly praise Harvard for its efforts in the Chronicle and elsewhere.

• Anonymous
  9/30/2009 8:49 am

  Yale hasn’t yet increased in size, Kevin — their two new colleges have been delayed because of the same hits Harvard and the others have taken. If your basic point is “I just said it should have spent *some* of the money on educating more undergraduates,” well, the rhetoric in your column is far more heated and adversarial.

• Judith Ryan
  9/30/2009 11:24 am

  Sorry I was out of this debate for a while doing something else with a deadline attached to it.

  The matter of class size at the college level has not been as much studied as it has at the elementary and secondary-school level. Studies that do exist work with different university systems and thus aren’t entirely compatible. There’s no space here to give a disquisition on research on this question.

  Students themselves tend to have divided opinions. The Light report showed that they say they get more out of a course when the class size is small. Yet practical experience at Harvard suggests that many students choose large-enrollment courses. We don’t know exactly why this is, but it may be because an individual student is less likely to be called on to answer a question.

  In my view, class size matters most in certain kinds of courses. Writing courses and foreign language courses are excellent examples of subject areas where smaller class size improves students’ performance. I believe the same thing is true for any course where performance is not measured by multiple-choice exams or other kinds of tests that can be relatively mechanically graded. The courses I teach are literature courses, where the whole aim is to help students learn to analyze texts using methods that are learnable, to be sure, but that must also be handled with a degree of discernment. That’s what students need to learn, and it’s hard for them to do that in large classes. They need to have a great deal of practice in critical analysis and occasions where they can learn from mistakes.

  Similar points can be made about what students need to learn in many other fields. It’s not just a matter of having students imbibe information and then reproduce it.

  It’s true that if a student asks a question in a large lecture course, the professor’s response will help other students as well. Some students may feel too intimidated, however, to ask a question in a large auditorium, particularly when they aren’t sure how valuable their question might be.

  Thus I’m not inclined simply to add more students and have them taught in increasingly large groups.

• Roberto
  10/4/2024 6:07 am

  cool blog

• Anonymous
  10/6/2024 10:00 am

  When I quickly read the original column, I took it in as an interesting opinion piece and moved on. As I was later drawn into observing the back and forth that followed, what became most notable to me was the strenous nature of the defense of Harvard, coupled with overblown descriptions of the tenor of the original column. The columnist was referred to, for instance, as “going postal,” and was criticized for hyperbole, when far more was thrown at him than came from him. Given the level of vitriol regularly spewed on the internt, the further idea that the columnist was ranting seems to indicate that the particular accuser is in at least some respects quite sheltered. I smiled to read Michael M’s comment about coming off as rude, because indeed, to my reading eyes, he does come off as rude, even pompous. … I don’t have a dog in this particular hunt, but have found the exchange interesting and the tone of the defense of Harvard potentially telling.

• Anonymous
  10/6/2024 10:07 am

  oops. I fear I will be taken to task for having misspelled strenuous, and for various other as yet unnoticed sins of grammar or logic.

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