Education

Why I Started Grading Attendance

James BaileyLeave a comment

I’ve taught college classes since 2010, but I never graded attendance directly until this year. I thought that students are adults who can make their own choices about where to spend their time, and if they could do well on my tests and assignments without spending much time in class, more power to them.

But I got tired of seeing students miss a lot of class, then fail by getting poor grades on the tests and assignments, or scramble for the last few weeks to avoid failing. Explaining the importance of attendance didn’t seem to help, so I finally turned to the economist’s solution- incentives. This Spring I tried grading attendance in one class, and this successful experiment plus the growth of AI mean I plan to grade attendance in all classes from now on.

The Benefits:

  • Get to know student’s names faster
  • Students feel rewarded for showing up
  • Students show up more, bringing more energy to the room
  • Students show up more, so they learn more and do better on other assignments
  • Physically showing up is one thing I can be sure the AI isn’t doing for them, it will be a while before humanoid robots are that good

The Costs That Turned Out Not to Be Big Deals

  • I thought students would dislike me policing their whereabouts and give me lower course evaluations (which is part of why I waited for tenure to try this). But my Spring evals were at least as high as usual, with none mentioning the attendance policy. When I asked students in a different class about this, most said they wished I would grade attendance if it meant less weight on exams.
  • I thought tracking attendance would be burdensome, but it turns out my main course software (Canvas) already has an attendance-tracking tool built in that lets you just click on names in a seating chart each day and enters grades automatically. It is certainly less burdensome than grading most assignments.

I still had some students disappear for a while due to personal issues; sometimes even the strongest grade incentives aren’t enough to get people to class. But overall I can’t believe I waited this long. I’m currently putting attendance as 10-15% of the course grade, but I dream about someday running a discussion-based class like a Liberty Fund seminar, doing a 100% attendance/participation grade, and not having to grade anything.

I’m Chair! 😬

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

As of July 1st of this year, I am the Chairman of the Department of Economics at my university. It’s one of those positions that includes more work and not much compensation. Depending on who I tell, I’m given both congratulations and condolences. Generally, at my university there is an expectation that department faculty ‘take turns’ being chair. So, we’re expected to serve whether the pay is good or not. There’s a lot of informal practice around this process.

In addition, Economics Majors have been less popular at liberal arts institutions over the past several years. No one knows why and there are probably multiple reasons. At my institution, our department has healthy enrollment among the peripheral majors. So, the Economics BA and BS have lower enrollment, but the Business Economics and the Global Affairs majors are more popular than ever.

All the same, I’d like to increase the number of students who have declared majors in our department and the number of Economics graduates. How do I do that?

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US State Growth Statistics 2005-2024

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

In macroeconomics we have basic tools to help us talk about economic growth, which is simply the percent change in RGDP per capita. What causes growth? Lot’s of things. All else constant, if more people are employed, then more will be produced. But the productivity of those workers matters too. That’s why we calculate average labor productivity (ALP), which is the GDP per worker. This tells us how much each worker produces. All else constant, more ALP means more GDP.*

What affects ALP? Nearly everything: Technology, demographics, health, culture, and public policy. Most of these have long-term effects. So, it’s better to think in terms of regimes. After all, incurring debt now can result in a lot of investment and production, but there’s no guarantee that it can be sustained year after year. This is why I don’t get terribly excited about individual good or bad policies at any moment. There’s a lot of ruin in a nation. I care more about the long-run policy regime that is fostered over time.

Given the variety of inputs to economic growth, there’s always plenty of room for complaint about policy – even if the economy is doing well. In this post, I’m inspired by a Youtube video that a student shared with me. The OP laments poor policy in Massachusetts. But compared to some other nearby states, MA is doing just fine economically. This is not the same as saying that the OP is wrong about poor policies. Rather, a regime of policy, technology, interests, etc. is built over time and there can be a lot wrong in growing economies.

In the interest of being comprehensive, this post includes basic growth stats for all states from 2005 through 2024 (the years of FRED-state GDP).** First, let’s start with the basic building blocks of population, employment, and RGDP. Institutions matter. Policy affects whether people migrate to/from the state, fertility, how many people are employed, and what they can produce.

People like to talk about migration and the flocking to Texas & Florida. But that fails to catch the people who choose to stay in their state. Utah is  43% more populous than it was 20 years ago. But you don’t hear much clamoring for their state policies. Idaho and Nevada also beat Florida in terms of percent change. Where are the calls to be like Idaho? Employment largely tracks population, though not perfectly. The RGDP numbers can change quickly with commodity prices, reflected in the performance of North Dakota. But remember, these numbers cover a 20 year span. So, any one blockbuster or dower year won’t move the rankings much.

Of course, these figures just set the stage. What about the employment-population ratio, ALP, and RGDP per capita? Read on.

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The End of Easy Student Loans

James Bailey1 Comment

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is proposing to cut off student loans for programs whose graduates earn less than the median high school graduate. The House proposed a risk-sharing model where colleges would partly pay back the federal government when their students fail to pay back loans themselves. Both the House and Senate propose to cap how much students can borrow for graduate loans. Both would reduce federal spending on higher ed by about $30-$35 billion per year, cutting the size of the $700 billion higher ed sector by 4-5%. I expected that something like this would happen eventually, especially after the student loan forgiveness proposals of 2022:

While we aren’t getting real reform now, I do think forgiveness makes it more likely that we’ll see reform in the next few years. What could that look like?

The Department of Education should raise its standards and stop offering loans to programs with high default rates or bad student outcomes. This should include not just fly-by-night colleges, but sketchy masters degree programs at prestigious schools.

Colleges should also share responsibility when they consistently saddle students with debt but don’t actually improve students’ prospects enough to be able to pay it back. Economists have put a lot of thought into how to do this in a manner that doesn’t penalize colleges simply for trying to teach less-prepared students.

I’d bet that some reform along these lines happens in the 2020’s, just like the bank bailouts of 2008 led to the Dodd-Frank reform of 2010 to try to prevent future bailouts. The big question is, will this be a pragmatic bipartisan reform to curb the worst offenders, or a Republican effort to substantially reduce the amount of money flowing to a higher ed sector they increasingly dislike?

Of course, there is a lot riding on the details. How exactly do you calculate the income of graduates of a program compared to high school grads? The Senate proposal explains their approach starting on page 58. They want to compare the median income of working students 4 years after leaving their program (whether they graduated or dropped out, but exempting those in grad school) to the median income of those with only a high school diploma who are age 25-34, working, and not in school.

Nationally I calculate that this would make for a floor of $31,000. That is, the median student who is 4 years out from your program and is working should be earning at least $31k. In practice the bill would implement a different number for each state. This seems like a low bar in general, though you could certainly quibble with it. For instance, those 4 years out from a program may be closer to age 25 than age 34, but income typically rises with age during those years. If you compare them to 26 year old high school grads, the national bar would be just $28k.

What sorts of programs have graduates making less than $31k per year?

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The Average Teaching Load of US Professors

James BaileyLeave a comment

“One of the closest guarded secrets in American higher education is the average teaching loads of faculty.” -Richard Vedder

I saw this quote in a recent piece arguing that US professors should teach more. I thought it sounded extreme, but as I look into it, it is surprisingly difficult to find data on this compared to other things like salaries:

Since 1996, for instance, the University of Delaware has administered the annual National Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity, surveying faculty and teaching assistants about course loads and enrollment. The data, though, are “only available to four-year, non-profit institutions of higher education.”[7] This secrecy, needless to say, is not the norm for surveys collected by publicly supported institutions. Tellingly, this study is being discontinued because the number of participating institutions “has slowly declined to unsustainable levels.”[8] *

There are some decent older studies that are public, like this 2005 survey of top liberal arts colleges showing that almost all have teaching loads between 4 and 6 courses per year. But in terms of recent data that is publicly available, the best I’ve found is the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement. It still isn’t great, since their 2024 survey only covers 54 of the 2000+ bachelor’s degree granting colleges in the US, and their tables show that these 54 aren’t especially representative. They make nice graphics though:

The graphics show exact percentages if you hover over them on the original Tableau site. Doing this shows that the median professor teaches 4 undergraduate courses per year. Knowing the full distribution would require the underlying data they don’t share, but from these graphics we can at least compute a rough average (rounding 4+ graduate courses to 4 and 9+ undergraduate courses to 9).

This shows that the average professor teaches 4.43 undergraduate courses and 0.75 graduate courses, for a total of 5.18 courses per academic year. If I restrict the data to full-time tenured or tenure-track professors, they teach an average of 4.72 undergraduate courses and 0.91 graduate courses, for a total of 5.63 courses per academic year.

Overall these loads are higher than I expected, especially since the survey sample is skewed towards research schools. But its still lower than the standard 3-3 load at my own institution, and low enough that it makes for a great job, especially compared to teaching K-12.

Overall though I don’t know why we need to rely on one-off surveys to get data on teaching loads, it seems like data the US Department of Education should collect from all accredited schools and share publicly.

*The Delaware Cost study is not just discontinuing new surveys, they plan to pull down existing data by December 15th 2025. Only schools that participate in their survey get access, so I can’t get the data, but perhaps some of you can.

We’re All Magical

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

The widespread availability and easy user interface of artificial intelligence (AI) has put great power at everyone’s fingertips. We can do magical things.

Before the internet existed we would use books to help us better interpret the world.  Communication among humans is hard. Expressing logic and even phenomena is complex. This is why social skills matter. Among other things, they help us to communicate. The most obvious example of a communication barrier is language. I remember having a pocket-sized English-Spanish dictionary that I used to help me memorize or query Spanish words. The book helped me communicate with others and to translate ideas from one language to another.

Math books do something similar but the translation is English-Math. We can get broader and say that all textbooks are translation devices. They define field-specific terms and ideas to help a person translate among topic domains, usually with a base-language that reaches a targeted generalizability. We can get extreme and say that all books are translators, communicating the content of one person’s head to another.

But sometimes the field-to-general language translation doesn’t work because readers don’t have an adequate grasp of either language. It isn’t necessarily that readers are generally illiterate. It may be that the level of generality and degree of focus of the translation isn’t right for the reader. Anyone who has ever tried to teach anything with math has encountered this.  Students say that the book doesn’t translate clearly, and the communication fails. The book gets the reader’s numeracy or understood definitions wrong. Therefore, there is diversity among readers about how ‘good’ a textbook is.

Search engines are so useful because you can enter some keywords and find your destination, even if you don’t know the proper nouns or domain-specific terms. People used to memorize URLs and that’s becoming less common. Wikipedia is so great because if you want to learn about an idea, they usually explain it in 5 different ways. They tell the story of who created something and who they interacted with. They describe the motivation, the math, the logic, the developments, and usually include examples. Wikipedia translates domain-specific ideas to multiple general languages of different cognitive aptitudes or interests. It scatters links along the way to help users level-up their domain-specific understanding so that they can contextualize and translate the part that they care about.

Historical translation technology was largely for the audience. More recently, translation technology has empowered the transmitters.

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EconTalk Extra on Daisy Christodoulou

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

I wrote an Extra for the How Better Feedback Can Revolutionize Education (with Daisy Christodoulou) episode.

Can Students Get Better Feedback? is the title of my Extra.

Read the whole thing at the link (ungated), but here are two quotes:

For now, the question is still what kind of feedback teachers can give that really benefits students. Daisy Christodoulou, the guest on this episode, offers a sobering critique of how educators tend to give feedback in education. One of her points is that much of the written feedback teachers give is vague and doesn’t actually help students improve. She shares an example from Dylan William: a middle school student was told he needed to “make their scientific inquiries more systematic.” When asked what he would do differently next time, the student replied, “I don’t know. If I’d known how to be more systematic, I would have been so the first time.” 

Christodoulou also turns to the question many of us are now grappling with: can AI help scale meaningful feedback?

Now published: Human capital of the US deaf Population, 1850-1910

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

Myself and a student coauthor worked hard on our article that is now published in Social Science History. It’s the first modern statistical analysis of the historical deaf population. We bring an economic lens and statistical treatment to a topic that previously included much anecdotal evidence and case study. We hope that future authors can improve on our work in ways that meet and surpass the quantitative methods that we employed.

Our contributions include:

  • A human capital model of deafness that’s agnostic about its productivity implications and treats deaf individuals as if they made decisions rationally.
  • A better understanding of school attendance rates and the ages at which they attended.
  • Deaf children were much more likely to be neither in school nor employed earlier in US history.
  • The negative impact of state ‘school for the deaf’ availability on subsequent economic outcomes among deaf adults. We speculate that they attended schools due to the social benefits of access to community.
  • Deaf workers did not avoid occupations where their deafness would be incidentally detectable by trade partners, implying that animus discrimination was not systemically important for economic outcomes.
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What does the Department of Education even do?

Zachary Bartsch4 Comments

If you follow libertarian media such as Reason Magazine or its ancillaries, then you are well acquainted with the humdrum of “it goes without saying that most US programs should be ended“. They kind of just say this and then continue with their news. One of the favorites is to say that we should get rid of the Department of Education (ED). After all, 90% of K-12 education is paid for by states and localities. Here I was thinking “what does the Department of Education even do”?

Agreement is different from trust. I trust the Brookings Institute. They have a nice explainer on what ED does. It’s a quick overview and has plenty of the appropriate citations. I learned that most of what ED does concerns K-12 and is achieved through grants that have strings attached. Funding primarily goes to serving “educationally disadvantaged” communities (that have a high poverty rate). Funding also goes to programs for disabled children, minority education programs (like Howard University), and Indian tribes. They also administer Pell Grants and fund & regulate college loans (which are privately administered).

ED’s appropriated budget is online for anyone to see and includes pretty good detail about costs. The total discretionary cost of FY 2024 was $79 billion. The “mandatory” spending, which does not need to be voted on by congress every year, was $45 billion. For context, the entire federal FY 2024 expenditure was $6.75 trillion. So, eliminating the department of education *and* it’s responsibilities (an unpopular position) would reduce federal expenditures by 1.8%. For even more context, the budget deficit is $1.83 trillion or 27.1% of total federal expenditures. Eliminating ED and consolidating its responsibilities to other departments would save $0.6 billion. That assumes eliminating program administration, the ED office of civil rights, and the ED office of the inspector general.

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The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

James Bailey2 Comments

John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, wrote a short book in 2006 that explains his investment philosophy. I can sum it up at much less than book length: the best investment advice for almost everyone is to buy and hold a diversified, low-fee fund that tracks an index like the S&P 500.

Of course, a strategy that is simple to state may still take time to understand and effort to stick to. So the book helps to build intuition for why this strategy makes sense. I think Bogle makes his case well, though the book is getting a bit dated- the charts and examples end in 2006, and he sets up mutual funds as the big foil, when today it might be high-fee index funds or picking your own stocks.

The silver lining of any dated investing book is that we can check up on how its predictions have fared. In chapter 8, Bogle compared the performance of the 355 equity mutual funds that existed in 1970 to that of the S&P over the 1970-2006 period. He notes that 223 of the funds had gone out of business by 2006, and even most of the surviving funds underperformed the S&P. But he identifies 3 funds that outperformed the S&P significantly (over 2% per year) on a sustained basis (consistently good performance, not just high returns at the beginning when they were small): Davis New York Venture, Fidelity Contrafund, and Franklin Mutual Shares. But how have they done since the book came out?

It is a huge victory for the S&P (in blue). Franklin Mutual Shares is basically flat over the past 20 years, while Davis New York Fund actually lost money. Fidelity Contrafund returned a respectable 281% (about 7% per year), and matched the S&P as recently as 2020. But as of 2025 the S&P is the clear winner, up 411% in 20 years (over 8% per year). Score one for Bogle.

But I still have to wonder if there is a way to beat the S&P- and I think one of Bogle’s warnings is really an idea in disguise. He warns repeatedly about “performance chasing”:

But whatever returns each sector ETF may earn, the investors in those very ETFs will likely, if not certainly, earn returns that fall well behind them. There is abundant evidence that the most popular sector funds of the day are those that have recently enjoyed the most spectacular recent performance, and that such “after-the-fact” popularity is a recipe for unsuccessful investing.

The claim is that investors pile into funds that did well over the past 1-3 years, but these funds subsequently underperform. But if this is true, could you succeed by reversing the strategy, buying into the unpopular sectors that have recently underperformed? I’ve been wondering about this, though I have yet to try seriously backtesting the idea. I was surprised to see Mr. Index Fund himself support such attempts to beat the market toward the end of his book:

Building an investment portfolio can be exciting…. If you crave excitement, I would encourage you to do exactly that. Life is short. If you want to enjoy the fun, enjoy! But not with one penny more than 5 percent of your investment assets.

He goes on to say that even for the fun 5% of the portfolio he still doesn’t recommend hedge funds, commodity funds, or closet indexers. But go ahead and try buying individual stocks, or actively managed mutual funds “if they are run buy managers who own their own firms, who follow distinctive philosophies, and who invest for the long term, without benchmark hugging.”