The following content is provided under a Creative
Commons license.
Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare
continue to offer high quality educational resources for free.
To make a donation or to view additional materials
from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare
at ocw.mit.edu.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: All right.
Let's dive right into education.
And, you know, this is the other side of the innovation
equation, right?
We've talked in terms of institutions
and linking and connecting institutions,
and we've talked a lot about R&D and the R&D system,
but you know, from the first class on,
Romer taught us that the talent base
is a very critical consideration in innovation.
And how do you build up the talent base?
That's essentially our set of tests today.
So, first, Norm Augustine.
I wanted to acquaint you with Norm Augustine,
because in the science and technology community,
he's known as St. Augustine.
And he is just an incredible stand-up figure
on issues like the importance of federal R&D investment.
He was chairman for a lengthy period
of time of Lockheed Martin.
He won the President's Medal of Technology.
Just a noted innovator, himself, but also a true expert
on R&D issues, R&D policies.
Unfailingly helpful and willing to volunteer for whatever task
the National Academies or in many cases MIT,
or other organizations kind of need help and advice
from a real senior statesman, Augustine
has always been willing to step up to the plate.
So he's kind of a remarkable figure.
He led the rising against the Gathering Storm report
back in 2000--
around the early 2000s timetable--
along with people like Chuck Vest,
and a really noted community of other experts,
that made the argument for a very significant R&D increase
for the physical science agencies.
Around that time, we had been doubling NIH.
This report made the case for doubling
the physical science-based R&D areas, as well.
And it was a very influential and important report.
He was one of the real leaders of it,
and he played an important role, along with Chuck Vest,
in helping persuade the latest Bush administration--
hi, Karen-- to adopt its recommendations.
So there was a period of time of ongoing R&D
increases for the physical science agencies.
So the report had a result.
In addition, he came back and wrote this 2007 report
that just kind of summarized the trouble
the US has got on the Science and Technology education front.
So it's a 2007 snapshot, but it's still
a great little collection of key points.
I'm just going to summarize it very briefly.
Key finding number one was that US children are not
prepared for the 21st century jobs,
and he has data sets, as you know,
to back all these points up.
Children in school are being taught
by teachers that are not trained in the fields of math
and science that they're teaching in,
which is a major underlying problem in those students
picking up those fields.
US children are falling behind their foreign peers
and counterparts in science and technology areas.
The US K through 12 system just is not
performing in a way that's comparable to many other
systems in the world.
And then, kind of a fourth point is that US secondary education
isn't preparing students--
aside from the teacher problem--
for math, science, or engineering majors,
and too few students--
this is the key point--
are majoring in those disciplines
to yield the talent base that we need
for technology-related careers.
And just to underscore that, the US
ranks 17th among developed nations in the proportion
of college students receiving degrees in science
and engineering, and it fell from third place
30 years before.
So these are dilemmas that the US K through 12 system has.
So that's the K through 12 story.
Then we shift to our friend Paul Romer,
who we visited at the outset of this class.
And as you know, he taught at Stanford,
and then has been teaching at NYU.
He's now chief economist to the World Bank,
where he's been a fascinating critic of economics and changes
and reforms that field needs to go through.
But he came up with prospector theory, and in a way,
what he's playing out here in this pretty noted critique from
2000-- which is still quite widely read--
his critique is, what happened to the supply?
What are our supply breakdowns?
And then he's identified those supply breakdowns
with higher education institutions.
What are they failing to deliver?
So the issue is that the federal government
policies in science and technology
tend to subsidize demand.
So in the private sector, it's primarily tax incentives,
R&D tax credits.
And you promote demand to encourage
science and engineering talent.
That policy approach, which is astronomically expensive--
those are very expensive policies--
that policy approach doesn't inquire
about the supply response that hopefully those subsidies
elicit.
And he goes back and argues that the institutional arrangements
in universities, which are the key institutions on the supply
side, are geared to meeting the needs in a variety of ways.
So there needs to be a new incentive system
to start to turn around the supply side
because the current demand-based tax incentive system just
isn't doing that.
So that's his overall frame.
In the 20th century, he argues, rapid technological progress
drove unprecedented growth.
We know that argument.
And that was fostered by a publicly supported system
of education.
So a steady flow of trained talent,
trained in the scientific method,
was a core policy that evolved over time,
but that public policy approach ignored the structures that
were supposed to deliver that talent base,
i.e. the higher education system,
and the incentives and disincentives
within that higher education structure that make that supply
side problematic.
So he would argue that a governmental-- set
of governmental programs to speed up innovation
gets thwarted by the supply side problem,
in particular by the higher education structure.
So government programs focused on the demand and not
the supply side are going to undermine the innovation
capabilities that we need.
Then he steps back and kind of makes the innovation argument
for us.
He argues that speeding up growth
is really the only way we're going
to be able to cope with the oncoming demographics
that we talked about when we discuss the health care
innovation system.
He says that a conservative estimate of the return on R&D
spending would be a 25% return.
There's arguments that that's low, that it's well over 50%,
but let's accept his 25%.
His argument is that if you--
in theory, that if you increased R&D spending
by 2% of GDP, voila, we'd get a half percentage
point of growth.
Right?
In an economy that has 0.7% growth at the moment,
this is not a minor concept.
Right?
And the data would tend to--
it at least in theory-- bear him out.
But then you run into the barrier, right?
You have to look at the full system,
and that means also looking at the talent.
So just increasing the R&D spending per se
doesn't address what he calls the supply side,
and if the total number of scientists and engineers
is fixed, then you limit--
and this is pure prospector's theory,
as you remember from our first class--
then you limit the biggest input into innovation, and thus
into growth.
So by not expanding its supply of scientists and engineers,
i.e. the talent base, then the US
is limiting its growth capacity by a pretty significant amount,
he argues, in economic terms.
So what's broken down?
What what's the heart of the problem, here?
And this is a deep critique of higher education, which
was highly controversial when this came out and occasioned
a lot of criticism of Romer, but it's hard to dispute his data,
and you will probably see this from your own experiences
or the experiences of colleagues in other universities.
So what's broken down on the talent supply side?
He argues that universities measure themselves
by their ability to select top SAT scoring students.
In other words, they measure themselves
by the quality input they're able to attract,
not by their output.
There's no output measures in this system.
They're competing with each other
in things like US News and World Report
on the students they attract, not on the student outcomes
that they're creating.
So the traditional liberal arts university, he argues,
faces little pressure to respond to skills needs.
That economic messaging that's inherent in the system
doesn't get translated back to the higher education system.
So, meanwhile, the university has a fixed investment
in its faculty that are teaching in many areas--
including the sciences, but obviously outside the sciences.
There is internal pressure to maintain
the relative size of those departments, which are--
they have invested in.
And that, in turn--
and we'll discuss why in a minute--
but makes it more difficult for students
to get science degrees.
So the science faculties, he argues,
are happy to do what they call "maintain
professional standards," i.e. have a lot of lower grades.
And effectively what that does is force out of the system
a tremendous amount of talent because, again, they've
got fixed faculty sizes that aren't coordinated with what
national talent supply and needs may
be in science and technology.
There's no pressure on universities
to address those corresponding faculty
sizes to what the national need may or may not be,
and therefore what's happened is essentially
a bifurcated education system, where sciences and engineering
students have one grading system--
and as you all know, it's a tougher grading system
at liberal arts universities than other majors
in the social sciences and humanities.
And you know, we know that there is significant grade inflation
in the non-science, non-engineering fields,
and that there is limited if any grade inflation in the tougher
technical fields.
So that's what he's talking about, here.
We maintain essentially two grading standards,
the net effect of which is to substantially discourage
entry of talent.
Now this is not in this report, but the National Academy
of Engineering has explored extensively
whether the people dropping out of majors in engineering
are stronger or weaker students than those staying in,
and they can't find any basis for concluding
that they are any weaker.
In other words, we're just driving talent out
of the system through these mechanisms,
is Romer's argument.
So the supply problem--
by running this bifurcating grading system
to drive out talent, to maintain class size numbers
and make sure you don't have to advise too many people--
the supply problem, in turn, drives graduate school numbers,
because of course, undergraduate degrees are prerequisites.
So how does US industry cope with this?
Essentially what it's done--
and this is not bad--
it's encouraged wholesale immigration
from all over the world to fill the gap, which
it's done very systematically.
And that's why, for example, industry
is so concerned about this H-1B visa set of proposals
that the new administration has recently proposed.
What are the ramifications of that
in terms of access to this talent supply?
Obviously, worldwide talent, as we've talked about before,
is a very important competitive advantage
for the United States.
But here we're in a circumstance where
we're not creating parallel opportunities for folks
in the US.
Moving on with Romer's indictment of higher education,
because that's really what it is,
he argues that PhD programs train graduates
for the academy, but as all of us in this room know, there's--
there's a complete oversupply of PhDs in terms of what
the academy itself--
in other words, university teaching-- actually requires.
So then we have to invent new mechanisms to keep this talent
base around.
So we invent long, endless, seven or eight-year graduate
programs.
England somehow manages to get its PhDs done in three years.
Are they worse?
I don't know.
But we have a seven or eight year old graduate--
eight year long graduate education program,
and then we invent this whole class of essentially
apprentices that we call post-docs--
another substantial army of people--
because there's no space in the academy
to accommodate these people.
And yet the training system is not
geared to the location where there
are extensive opportunities--
whether in established firms or startups-- which
is for industry because the training system is really
geared for entering the academy, not for entering industry.
And obviously, it tends to focus more on basic than applied
for obvious reasons.
So this-- we're just multiplying the problems here,
because the core input institutions, i.e. higher
education, are not organized around the skills problem
society has got.
That's Romer's indictment.
I had the privilege of working with him on legislation,
and when this piece of legislation came out,
there was considerable interest on Capitol Hill,
and we're hearing all the time on Capitol Hill in this era
about, we've got a talent base problem,
and there was considerable interest in the critiques
that Romer had made of the system,
and how do you change the system?
So, like other senior staffers, I
read his stuff and thought gee, how are we
going to turn this around?
We're going to have to spend a fortune on creating
a massive new kind of fellowship program across the country,
on top of what we already have to encourage science
and engineering education.
We'll have to significantly increase that--
maybe by a factor of two or more.
How are we going to afford this?
Where's that money come from?
So I had a conversation with Romer, and he said,
Bill, you have to think like an economist here.
You have to bribe the gatekeepers.
Right?
So I-- what are you talking about?
And he said, look, figure out who the gatekeepers are
in this entire system and you bribe
them to make them turn around their behavior.
So in this case, it's the departments and the colleges
and universities as a whole--
it's their administrations.
Bribe them to get them to change their numbers
because if they're not producing enough scientists and engineers
net, then pay them to do this.
And by the way, bribery is a heck of a lot
cheaper than creating a massive new national fellowship,
and much more efficient.
So obviously, bribery is not the apt term here,
but we ended up creating a program at the National Science
Foundation, which Congress passed, called The Step
Education Program, which essentially
offers very significant funding to departments
that guarantee they're going to turn their numbers around,
and then present pathways by which they're going to do so.
In other words, maybe they offer much more one
on one kind of tutorial attention
to keep students in science and engineering.
Maybe they offer fellowships with industry,
so you're guaranteed summer employment
in an interesting, relevant, applied field.
In other words, there may be a whole slew--
and there turned out to be a lot--
of ideas on how to begin to turn those numbers around.
AUDIENCE: Are you talking at the undergraduate level?
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: I'm talking at the undergraduate level.
AUDIENCE: I'm--
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Go ahead, Max.
AUDIENCE: I'm kind of confused how you can simultaneously
have a problem where you don't have enough science engineering
workers but you also have this army of post docs
that you don't know what to do with.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Well, I mean that's kind of the next stage
of the problem.
So his next piece, Max, is innovation and graduate
education training.
So in other words, create curricula that are relevant
not only to training for the academy,
but curricula that are also relevant to training for entry
in the industry, and we're obviously
starting to see some of these things materialize.
So a school like MIT-- but it's by no means alone--
has a massive entrepreneurship curriculum now available
in all of its schools.
This is not just a business school program,
this is available across the board,
and as you undergraduates know, it's really quite accessible.
There's a substantial number of business majors
who do a lot of entrepreneurship--
business minors-- who do a lot of entrepreneurship-esque
features in their education.
That's now much better understood
by students going to universities
as an option for what their route ahead might be
than it was even 10 years ago.
So there has been some change here,
but that's another change he would make,
is to make the training much more relevant to entry
into established firms and to startup firms
at the graduate school level.
So overall, he would attempt to use some federal funding here
to, in effect, redress the imbalance in federal demand
and supply programs to create an input of support
on the federal side--
on the supply side.
All right, so that's two of our three.
You want to pause here?
Because this one's so nicely controversial
that we could discuss it, and you all can disagree with Romer
or indicate how correct he is.
Shall we do a quick pause?
Who's got this one?
You've got it, Max?
Do you want to quickly summarize Romer?
Let's do Augustine, too.
AUDIENCE: Oh.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Great.
AUDIENCE: All right, so Augustine talks about how,
while as a lot of us know, education in the United States
isn't great before the university level.
So he gives a lot of statistics, how
we're doing pretty poorly in math and science
when compared to other countries, how, for whatever
reason, it seems that as people stay
within the American system, the longer they stay in,
the poorer their ability to compete with other countries
is.
So actually, I found out one of the things--
some of the-- so America has, in the past few decades,
been famous for the concept of a brain drain,
where it would take the best and brightest from other countries,
like India and China--
they would come over here for our university
system, which is nice.
It's great for us.
It's not great for them, but apparently this trend
is slowing as we find out in this article,
because of some of our more isolationist policies.
And I really appreciated that he mentioned it,
because often a lot of people tried to talk about,
isolationism is bad because we are the world,
but this actually gives a more concrete
reason for why isolationism actually
causes some significant problems to our innovation system
and to our economy.
So one of the questions that I wanted to pose
is, how have all of our educational institutions
at the university level managed to maintain
their stature and their quality despite the fact that lower--
lower level institutions like high school and below
have been so sub par?
And can we implement some of these characteristics
at these other levels?
Yeah, that's all.
AUDIENCE: I think some of the answer
to that comes from just the inequality across I
through 12 schools.
The US does have some fantastic schools,
it's just who has access to them,
and that tends to favor certain groups over others,
and so instead of being able to tap
into the full potential talent pool that we have,
we're getting the ones who happen
to live in a neighborhood that goes to a good school,
or they have a nice magnet school in their county.
So I think you could also pose the question,
how much better could American universities
be if they had their full talent pool to choose from?
AUDIENCE: That's fair.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I like that point a lot,
because there are--
I mean, we definitely have institutions-- higher parable
learning institutions, universities-- in the United
States that are extremely famous, extremely well known,
and extremely well respected.
You all are at one.
But there, if you look--
that doesn't mean that every single university in the United
States is internationally respected.
There's this huge spectrum of the level of education
or the quality of education that you can get at the university
level, and I think you're exactly right-- that's
the same for K through 12.
It's just there's a huge span.
You just don't necessarily hear about the really bad university
level educations.
[INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: OK.
So--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: So following up on that, then,
I've heard that one of the main reasons
that we-- that, at least for the K through 12 system, people
are-- or governments-- are unable to support
the schools that are doing very well
and punish the ones that are doing poorly.
Is there a way that we could implement this
without jeopardizing the educations of the people who
are already in these systems?
Because schools can't be treated exactly like a free market,
because in a free market, the worst case
is you buy a Zune instead of an iPhone or iPod
and well, OK, that kind of sucks.
But it doesn't suck nearly as much
as it does for the kid who has to go
through a year with a bad teacher,
and sure, maybe the teacher gets fired after,
but that's still a year that this kid has lost,
and that sets them behind, and those--
that impact can last for the rest of this person's life.
So-- that was a really long question, I'm sorry.
So to phrase that more simply, how can we
implement some sort of free market style
without that inherent impact on a kid's life?
AUDIENCE: Well, I think just to reorganize the question
and some decision making, why are you assuming it's
the teacher's fault that, in a central city school,
they don't do well, right?
Usually it's people who really, really care,
but the students aren't ready to learn.
Because like-- I forget the quote,
but it's combined as like a parachute that
needs to be opened to receive information.
So I think it's a more complex issue, is
the point I'm trying to make.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the first time
I've looked into this, because there's a special class called
by Tom Malone, and I think we're going
to be talking about the future of war
next week where he talks a lot about,
now we're in a distributed kind of network system.
And we kind of get through hierarchy systems.
And so like in that class, we posited like,
you know like YouTube has all the videos
and is created by a ton of people.
We talked about like what if somebody made like a YouTube
for education, where the best teachers would get the most
views.
And you could quantify that and pay them
really high salaries, right?
So you'd get like NBA, and NBA player salaries
for doing really great content and a lot of people
would access it.
And pretty much the whole population
would be taught by the best teachers in the country
or in the world.
And then you'd have the personal touch,
like Khan Academy, where it's like online for some subjects
or like [INAUDIBLE] in a really good way.
And then in the actual class system,
you are going through the kind of like the issues
and figuring out what your errors are
so you can learn better.
So I think that's an interesting incentive.
The thing though is like I think this
is more of the dynamics of the market
but the gatekeepers problem than it is like an education problem
or even like the pipeline issues.
If our incentive system is to get the best people
to the school and not care what happens
after, that's kind of like a screwed up system, right?
It's like if your whole-- yeah.
Like we're not focusing on making
the best students in the world.
We're focusing on finding the smartest people up
to that point that they become students at our university.
And our reputation is based on getting the smartest people up
to here.
So it doesn't matter if you have a screwed up economy.
There's always going to be a really top 1%.
Like, it doesn't matter, because like most
of the people at the school will come from all different kinds
of backgrounds.
And they will never say, most likely
it was because of their school.
Like if they come from a poor background,
they're going to say, you know, I just went online,
or went to the library, or I learned from the best people
in their books.
That was even like a response.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Well, you introduced the online idea.
And we're going to jump on that kind at the end of the class.
So we should come back to that Martin.
AUDIENCE: Which I definitely think is an interesting idea.
I think it's easy to frame the access.
All you need is an internet connection
and basically everyone has a cell phone.
AUDIENCE: You know, we'll get to is later.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: And there are pros and cons on this too.
AUDIENCE: It's also overdone, right?
There's like a ton of businesses and a ton of organizations
I've seen try to do it.
And like why haven't they figured it out.
It's probably like a policy, incentives, power issue.
AUDIENCE: Yes, I think, just thinking about it
from like also an international perspective,
I think a problem in the US is also like the whole respect
thing for teachers.
Like I think especially at the middle school
or the high school, like the public education system, maybe
there's not as much respect for being a teacher.
Whereas like maybe in Sweden, or like China,
like being a professor, a teacher
is really well respected and considered a really prestigious
job.
So I think that's like some systemic issue that's
also kind of preventing maybe the top talent from going
into teaching, not necessarily at the higher education level.
I think there is a lot of really intelligent academics
in that space.
But definitely, towards the beginning
where children are like really starting out
their educational careers, and that's the fundamental.
And also from what I know like in Europe,
they start kind of specializing pretty early
on in like high school into what kind of track
they want to pursue later on.
So I feel like that could be an interesting way that they're
kind of promoting, for example, engineering
or math or STEM related technical expertise.
Like they're really fostering that from early stage.
So that really helps and sets up the students
to advance later on.
Whereas like a lot of students here
they get like kind of basic introduction to everything.
But then once they get to engineering classes,
some people aren't very prepared.
AUDIENCE: Actually regarding the first part of what
you said about the teachers and trying
to incentivize the best talent in our country
to become a teacher, that's actually my second question.
I was going to ask, well, how could we incentivize them
outside of pay?
Because I've heard that the US education system
is at an all time high for paying, for the amount of money
that we spend per student in the classroom.
So clearly just throwing money at this problem is not enough.
So what can we do?
Is there a way we can either change the culture
or some other aspect?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I think one of the problems with the US system
is that it's kind of punitive.
Where there's like mass or firing, sorry,
mass firing things, whereas teachers
that are not like performing up to a grade just be like let go.
And that's kind of bad on the students
because there's a lot of turnover.
But I think in other, we can maybe borrow from another model
where other cities, I think what comes to mind
is Shanghai has this program where a lot of teachers
or professors that are not performing as well
are partnered with an educator that has more experience
or has better understanding of how to reach the students.
And they have this kind of like collaborative model,
where they bring up the teachers instead
of trying to just fire them or like dock their pay
or something.
Which I think is probably something
that would be ultimately better for like the students
in general as well.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: So Max, why don't we move on now to Grover.
AUDIENCE: Oh, yeah, sure.
That most anybody is going to be closing points here.
AUDIENCE: I just want to bring up
the point that was made in one of the papers,
I forget if it's this one, about having access to looking
at like seeing engineers.
Yeah, like, if you're in a community where you've never
got to interact with engineers or somebody who does STEM,
you're going to see it a certain way,
especially since when you look at the subject,
it's so dry in the classroom versus what you actually
end up doing.
I think that's also a big component,
especially once you structure who you want to become, right?
Because at that age, you're trying
to figure out where you want to be a role model.
Yeah, like an example, Steve Jobs
got to work when he was 12 at HP.
And he said that was the thing that
led him to work on tech, because his whole background,
his dad was a mechanic.
It also made him realize what a good company was, because he
saw how the employees are treated and it made them see,
oh, this is why having the right company culture matters.
That's a lesson he learned at 12 that led him
to change how he saw his life.
AUDIENCE: I think on my end in terms of Augustine,
there is a point he made about American exceptionalism
and our focus on finding spectacular talent,
not just on good talent.
And so, I remember a few weeks ago,
I mentioned the quote where the good
becomes the enemy of the great.
And maybe in the education system,
the great is the enemy of the good.
And perhaps we're sort of not doing a good enough job
of supporting people who do a fine job at pursuing
engineering and science because we're
focused on finding the innovators, the Edisons,
the Jobs, the Gates of the world.
So to create a support infrastructure,
people who might do a fine job at carrying out
their functions I think is ultimately
the task of the education system at the lower level.
And then at the university level of cultivating that talent
to really create spectacular innovation.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, to add on to that point,
I think, yeah, they definitely prefer the Edisons,
but I think that was more in the paper
already talked about breakthrough ideas.
I think this paper was more about,
we have a pipeline issue that we need these kind of employees
so that these fields stay in the US.
And they weren't looking for Edisons.
They were looking for niche, like you know,
you want to discipline and can move ahead and get that job.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: So let's shift over to Romer.
AUDIENCE: Sure.
you're just like, oh,--
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Well, we're leading into it.
So we might as well.
That's your pipeline boy.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
Yeah, so regarding the pipeline, Romer
decided to focus mostly on the undergraduate and graduate
institutions and trying to figure out
how you can increase the supply of the talented scientists
and engineers that exist in the American innovation system.
So one of the questions that I saw
was posed pretty interesting, someone was asking
what metrics or measures could you
use to actually evaluate these new scientists and engineers
as they're coming into these fields
and how can you train them to come into,
to be prepared to go into either industry or academia.
AUDIENCE: I mean, the first thing that comes to mind
is like professional engineer exams that exist already.
That's kind of like the standard.
AUDIENCE: Those aren't required, are they?
AUDIENCE: No, not usually.
Well some companies will require you to get them.
It's generally just like a--
AUDIENCE: It's a nice little--
AUDIENCE: Thing you can check.
But like, I don't think it's very like,
before I came to MIT, I'd never even heard of it.
So I don't know if that's something
that carries a ton of weight.
But I don't know.
I don't really like the idea of using standardized tests
as a measure of competency.
But I mean if you're trying to talk
about a large group of people there is no feasible way
to do it other than that.
If you want to talk about all the engineers
that are entering the workforce, like, unfortunately,
numbers are kind of like the only way to do it.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, you can't [INAUDIBLE]
recommendation letters.
Just like everyone can find someone that likes them.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Might there be a reason why
such extensive licensing exams exist in the medical field
and not in the engineering or life sciences fields?
AUDIENCE: I mean, it's because it's probably
easy to mess up costs a lot of money if you mess up.
So you don't want people to mess up.
But it's pretty easy to mess up in engineering.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, but people don't die and don't get lawsuits.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: I mean, to the personal engineering
exams, to what extent does accreditation of universities
already attempt to fill that role that you know,
if you're accepted into and graduate
from an accredited engineering program,
you already have that check mark, that like, OK.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
So the PE exam is basically just a feather in your cap.
It doesn't really-- or I don't know, a little stamp
on your resume.
Doesn't really--
AUDIENCE: But is there a fault with the way
that we give that accreditation to things right now?
Is it becoming more meaningless?
If we're graduating maybe an engineer from one school
that is far more capable than another school
that has the same like stand?
AUDIENCE: I mean, you could make the same argument
with like any profession, right?
Like, to go into Stephanie as example of medicine.
So if you have someone who comes from the Harvard vs. name
somewhere you don't like, Harvard.
Yeah, then you can see a difference in quality.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Let me raise a question, [INAUDIBLE]..
It's harder for you folks at MIT to see this
because it's obviously predominantly science
and engineering.
But let me ask Sanam and Steph, how much
do you see the great inflation in a classic,
you know, high quality, liberal arts school
between social science, humanities kinds
of majors and science and engineering majors?
And Lily, you came from one of those institutions.
Please join in.
Is this real?
Is the problem that Romer is seeing here,
is this a real issue?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] econ major at Wellesley College.
AUDIENCE: Not at Wellesley, there
is a definite sense of grade inflation there.
AUDIENCE: It is not a sense.
It is a policy.
AUDIENCE: Yes, it's a policy.
It's an actual policy.
Instituted, grade inflation.
But in terms of the disparity between the humanities,
social sciences and STEM fields, I think there is definitely--
generally, there's the idea that like the STEM fields are
more difficult. So recently we had this policy where
the first semester of your college year shadow graded,
so you're not actually given grades.
And that kind of resulted in a lot of people
entering the STEM fields [INAUDIBLE]..
And that was something that obviously
the humanities professors and social sciences
were very against.
Because if the students coming in
were automatically going to anything outside
of their department, they kind of ended up
staying there because the faculty are great.
So they would continue in that program.
So that was kind of an imbalance that
occurred in the recent years.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: So in a way, exactly what
Romer's talking about.
Interesting.
Lily, what was your point?
AUDIENCE: I was a science major.
And I made A's in every single class
I took outside of my own major.
And not As.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: What were you thinking, Lily?
[LAUGHING]
AUDIENCE: We started--
I wanted to do science.
We started out with almost 600 students
in the first semester chemistry course.
And by the second semester chemistry,
so this is chemistry majors, biology majors, and engineering
majors, all have to take that.
They also have to take a second semester of chemistry.
And there were probably less than 400
by the second semester.
So it was a huge weed out class.
AUDIENCE: How many were there in the beginning?
AUDIENCE: Over 600, just over six.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Most schools have notorious weed
out classes that essentially frustrate
the ambitions of a lot of students,
particularly in the premed area.
Obviously notorious, shall we say organic chemistry is
the [INAUDIBLE].
So this is a dilemma when you've got a societal need
and you've got the institutions that
are supposed to deliver your talent base
just operating off a completely different set of incentives
than what the society may be.
That's the core of Romer's argument here.
And another part of his argument is, the numbers are not that
far off.
In other words, if we just got the people who
wanted to major in science, engineering, and mathematics
to stay in the field, you know, lots of the numbers problems
get a heck of a lot better.
But that 40% or more dropout rate
out of those fields that typically
occurs at the undergraduate level is highly problematic.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
AUDIENCE: I think they've been waiting longer if you want to.
AUDIENCE: Oh, I couldn't see your hands.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, so I started to wonder about a couple
of these choke points, like where actually people
are starting to drop out of these science and engineering
fields.
I know we identified kind of these weed out classes.
And I think kind of looking from like who declares, who ends up
finishing, I think you could probably,
as a whole identify kind of gradient deflation in a couple
of these classes is like very complicated, kind of weed out
classes as reasons why people start to kind of leave
the field and migrate out.
And I think it might be indicative to sort
of each institution kind of where these dropout points are.
But I think en masse, you can kind of
take these like first year classes as kind of places
where students start to fall off.
And then, is it actually--
so is it part of kind of this college exploratory process,
like kind of figuring out what you want to do?
It's like how you phrase it.
As like, you started as a chemistry major.
But maybe you end up gravitating towards social science
because you don't really like the way that weed out class
is structured?
Or is it part of this indicative problem that we have,
where like we can't graduate and sustain
the people who are actually interested in these fields?
And so I wonder if like, you know, just because you know,
we're not graduating enough, is it
because these classes are actually
structured in a way that prevents people graduating?
Or is it like part of this--
kind of the way that we brand your college experience
is like you're supposed to be able to explore
and kind of transition in and out, especially
in that first year and experience things.
And my second point was like, there's
a little bit of a difference I would
say in kind of STEM fields, even in that first year.
Because I know a lot of colleges offer the opportunity
to use high school classes to sort
of test out of those first year, maybe even those weed
out classes.
And then, it's sort of an added bonus
as well, because you end up testing out of these classes,
so you use up less semesters to finish your degree.
And so I know that can be like a big reason
and incentive for students to sort of choose
other universities, because they're like,
oh, I'll only be in this school for three years
if I go to maybe the state school over here,
rather than staying in school for four years
at a different university.
And like, is there a way to identify
sort of the relative quality of education
in kind of testing out of that first year of engineering
classes and then finishing in three versus going for four.
Because I feel like if you can graduate
a whole bunch of people, maybe in that three year time span
without like a marginal decrease in quality of education,
we can start looking more to those programs as well.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Max, how about a close up
point on the Romer.
AUDIENCE: So evidently, Romer is evidence
that the education problem is unbelievably complicated.
Throwing money at the issue has not
been sufficient to actually solve it.
And there are issues with the quality,
as was being talked about, the weed out courses that exist,
grade inflation and deflation, standardizing.
So, such an issue will take--
it's going to take a very long time to solve.
But all of the issues that he has pointed out,
they are definitely solvable.
I'd say the main barrier between us and now and a future
where these issues are solved would be the--
would be just politics, just trying
to get people to agree to these different programs that
would focus more on the education
and less on the incentives of those teaching.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: I think part of what's
interesting about Romer's argument
is that he takes the theory that we've got a talent supply, set
of talent supply issues, and then he
attempts to figure out what are the more specific barriers
to that supply, and then do an institutional analysis of why
these barriers are in effect created at the higher education
system.
And then interestingly, he attempts
to take three or four public policy fixes that
could actually address these.
And I do think that both his article and the Step
Program from the National Science Foundation
created based on the legislation that he
recommended that Congress passed,
and that NSF implemented.
It was never implemented with the funding
scale that was really needed to make a significant difference.
But it started to send a different set of signals
about supply of science and technology talent
to the university system and did I
think have an effect over time.
But these issues are obviously still with us.
So let me move quickly from Romer
to our next reading with Richard Freeman.
And he kind of takes us to the next level
of the supply problem.
Richard Freeman is a quite famous labor economist
at the school up the street.
And he's famous for his wide range and variety of hats.
As you can see, he has a wonderful collection.
So he looks at a different problem.
You know does globalization threaten the--
and its movement in science and engineering,
threaten US economic leadership?
And you know, his--
I'll kind of summarize his four key points here.
You know, the underlying issue is
that changes in the global job market for science
and engineering, science and entering workers, S&E workers
are eroding US dominance in science and engineering, which
in turn diminishes a strong comparative advantage
that the US historically held since the end of World War II
as we've been talking about in the past.
And he makes four underlying points
in kind of looking at this dimension.
In other words, we have Augustine's critique of K
through 12.
We have Romer's critique of the higher education system.
And then Richard Freeman kind of tells us
what the economic implications are
of failing to maintain that leadership base in science
and engineering talent.
So his point is that the share of the world science
and engineering graduates in the US is in decline.
And look, others are understanding this model
and moving to fill it.
Second, that the job market has worsened
for younger workers in science and engineering fields
relative to many other high level
occupations, which in turn discourages
US students in those fields.
Now he's writing this at the time when
a startling proportion of MIT students
and other science and engineering
graduates in other schools were going
into the financial sector, financial services,
and consulting.
Some of that since he wrote has turned around.
In other words, there has been an emergence
at MIT of interest in startups and entrepreneurship,
to the tune that some 20% to 25% of those of you
when you graduate, your graduating classmates
will go into those fields in a way
that community moved out of financial services
post 2008 crash and moved over to what
may be a really important kind of career shift
in terms of the country's future.
But that hadn't occurred yet by the time he's writing this.
So in other words, the extremely high pay
available to those entering financial services
and consulting drained talent out of the system
is his point within the US.
And then, you know, countries like China and India
found that they could compete with the US in high tech
by starting to train substantial numbers of science
and engineering specialists.
In other words, they could leapfrog, right, and in effect
go to substantial parts of their economy being
quite high tech, even while they were working on bringing up
what's in effect a developing world economy in the meantime.
So they hit on this model.
And it's a really important model.
But that in turn had an effect on kind of US dominance
in this field.
I mean, it's not a bad thing for the world to get better,
but it doesn't have an effect on the US comparative advantage.
So to ease the adjustment to a less dominant position
in science and engineering with the corresponding economic
ramifications for US economic growth and competitiveness,
the US is going to have to develop,
he argues, new labor market and R&D policies
that start to try to change the science and engineering talent
numbers.
So we're going to have to step into the marketplace.
And you know, this is where Romer's thinking
would come to bear.
So let me let me move to Goldin and Katz
and they further talk about the societal ramifications for what
we're doing in higher education, right?
We've talked a bit about this before.
And they also teach up the street.
And their book, The Race Between Education and Technology
was really a quite important one.
I think it's held up well since it came out in 2009.
But I had you read a short version, a Milken Institute
review piece that came out before they put their book out.
But I do recommend the book to you.
The gap between wages of educated and less well educated
workers has been growing since 1980,
and this expanding wage inequality
has characterized the US since that time.
So we're becoming a much more polarized society
and the lines are drawn on education lines, right?
And this is, we've talked about this before,
but this is David Otter's barbell problem,
that our society is increasingly looking like a barbell.
And we've got on one bell, a growing
and successful upper middle class that has the education
and is able to use that education
to capture that wealth, a thinning middle,
and a growing lower end services economy that's
less well-paid and less well off,
to which substantial portions of the middle
are now being shunted.
And we can start to see this polarization in our economy
in pretty sharp terms.
And that's what Katz and Goldin are writing about.
The wage inequality narrowed in the United States
significantly from about 1910 through the 1950s.
Then it stabilized until about the 1980s.
And then it's grown since that time.
Why?
And they argue--
I'll attempt to just paint you a quick picture.
But they argue that there is a race between education
and technology, and that what happened in the US
was that there is an ever-growing curve
of technology knowledge since the Industrial Revolution.
And we've talked about this previously,
but I'll reiterate it.
That an economy requires, in other words,
it requires an ever-growing level
of technological sophistication.
And the genius of the US system was
to create mass higher education, which we did,
first through the Land Grant Act.
Of course that created MIT.
That was the big enabler for MIT.
It had initial funding in 1861.
Its graduating class marched off to the Civil War.
There was no revenue base.
In 1862, Congress passed the Land Grant College Act
and suddenly there was a revenue stream
to make up for the loss of talent, loss of the tuition
base.
So that saved MIT.
But created public higher education
really across the country in every state at the time
extended to new ones.
So we created that system of mass higher education, really
through the Land Grant College Act in 1862.
No other country had done anything like that.
So we created a talent base that stayed ahead
of the technological curve, right?
And that's what you want.
You want your talent base to stay ahead
of the increased sophistication of technology in the economy,
so that that talent base can keep moving that curve up,
right?
And that they benefit each other.
And then, what Katz and Goldin point out,
is that in the mid '70s, we level that off.
AUDIENCE: Was there something that caused it in particular?
Let me get to that in a minute, Martin.
But we do need to come back to that.
I don't think we fully understand
the dimensions of what was happening at that point.
But there are some thoughts.
So what happened was that the people that
continue to ride this curve, they
stayed up with the technology curve.
Those that fell off fell behind the curve
and their incomes correspondingly suffered.
That's the case that they're making.
and that these people got left off the curve
and couldn't keep riding up to take advantage
of the economic gains.
So you've got a smaller number of people you know,
riding this curve up.
They get the gains.
Whereas in this period of time between 1910 and 1950,
everybody at least, a very large part of the population
was riding that curve and able to benefit.
So that's the great creation of this mass middle class
in the United States.
And the data tends to bear this out.
So that's their essential equation here on what happened.
Again, they argue that technological advance
is the key to growth.
We know that from this class.
And that the ebb and flow of wage equality and inequality
is very much related to the skill
set you've got to keep riding that technological curve.
Now look, if anything the growth in that technological curve
has just gotten steeper with the development of all
these information technologies.
You know heaven forbid, a next generation
if you don't have coding skills, right?
With the entry of significant amount
of artificial intelligence in the economy.
If you're going to stay up, you really need that skill base.
Otherwise you're going to get left behind.
So, you know, that's essentially their picture
of what's been going on here.
Let me-- that stagnation of education levels around '73
or so coincides with the period of economic challenge
from Japan that we talked about in the second manufacturing
class.
That's the period where the Rust Belt gets created.
So the US had been on an ever rising economic curve.
Suddenly its growth rate fell to the 2% range
from its historic 3% range and its productivity rate
strides growth as we've talked about,
its productivity rate fell to the 1% range.
So that means there's less real wealth in the economy.
And that may, Martin, in answer to your question, that
may have had something to do with our ability
to keep financing ever-growing education.
Remember that the public universities provide
80% of higher education.
That's the key component of the system.
You know, places like MIT are all very well and good,
but that's a 20% share.
The core talent base are getting trained in public universities.
And other things have been happening
to those public universities.
So they're competing at the state level
for funding with two major factors.
One is Medicaid, which the states bear
a very large portion of and the other is prisons.
Because we have a massive prison growth.
And the annual cost of prisoners is
much higher than putting people in higher education.
You begin to wonder where your priorities are
when you think about that.
So there have been increased pressure
on state budgets that correspond with that '73
to like 1990 and 1991, kind of economic decline period that
may account for it.
Now the Obama administration understood this curve well.
And Obama was fluent with Katz and Goldin's work.
And they made a major effort to increase Pell grants
and increase the availability of higher education funding.
So interestingly, there was an improvement in the last decade
in some of these numbers.
Some of that was driven by the fact
that jobs are a disaster in 2007 and 2008.
So people tended to spend that time if they could afford it
in higher education locations.
So that was some of that going on.
But overall, the Administration made an attempt
to try and get those numbers turned around
and they're a bit better.
And the public universities themselves
understood their mission and realized
that they're going to have to increase their employment base
in order to accomplish this.
All right, so that's Katz and Goldin.
I mean there's other important points there, but that's key.
And then I want to do--
you know, we've talked about higher education
as though it's the only way here.
But I wanted to introduce some controversy into the debate.
So William Baumol, very noted economist, taught at Princeton,
more recent years have been teaching at NYU, you know,
a remarkable analyst.
And he's written in many different kind
of economics fields.
Baumol does this NBER, National Bureau
of Economic Research kind of work paper
that just nails the whole system.
So I thought we'd introduce a little controversy
in today's class by putting his piece in front of us.
He argues that breakthrough innovation
comes from independent inventors and entrepreneurs,
that large firms concentrate on incremental innovation.
We've talked about this bit before.
And this conclusion is what is startling.
Education for the mastery of science knowledge
aids incremental advance, doesn't necessarily
prepare you for doing the breakthrough,
entrepreneurial side.
So his point then, is that kind of standard science education
may actually impede breakthrough thinking.
And that large firm R&D requires scientists and engineers
that are educated in the established
fields and the established analytical methods
and that successful innovators and entrepreneurs often
lack that standard preparation.
And that that may get them out of the box
of incremental advance into kind of new territories.
And he points out that we don't have a system
and we don't understand breakthrough learning.
How do we educate for innovation?
We have no real clue on how to do that.
And that procedures for incremental learning
do seem to work.
But we don't know how to educate for the innovation side--
of the innovation system, who's got what.
He points out the Proctor & Gamble with 7,500 scientists,
1,250 PhDs, I mean, these kinds of totals start
to dwarf the size of faculties at MIT and Harvard and Stanford
and so forth.
You know, with 22 research centers,
P&G has in 12 different nations, that's
a pretty amazing talent base.
What are they up to?
Remember that when you look at R&D combined, industry
spans about 70% of the total spending on R&D. Of course,
we know that that's D, not R, right?
But industry has got about a 70% share.
The federal government, about 30% share, that's R.
So that gives us an idea of the different size
of the establishments in the R&D side.
So we know that industry employs some 64%
of scientists and engineers, right?
So industry has got that talent base.
And he notes that critical breakthrough
historical innovator figures like Watt, Whitney, Fulton,
Morris, Edison, the Wright brothers, Wozniak, Jobs, Gates,
Dell, have no college degrees, and frankly,
limited scientific training.
AUDIENCE: Wait, Jobs had a college degree.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Yes, he had a college degree.
No, he didn't finish Reed.
AUDIENCE: No, he left in the first year.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Yeah, he left.
He left after a year or two.
AUDIENCE: I thought he went somewhere else.
AUDIENCE: He stayed.
He stayed with Reed and just dropped in on classes,
but it wouldn't count as getting a degree.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: He was studying things
like calligraphy that actually turned out
to be incredibly important for him.
AUDIENCE: I mean, that's the quote example,
he went a lot of classes [INAUDIBLE]..
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Right.
And he spent a year in India.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, he did a lot of interesting things.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: So Baumol's point is progress requires--
we shouldn't underestimate this.
It's not that one side is bad.
Progress requires both breakthrough radical advance
and incremental advance.
And an example, which I've used before with you all, you
know, if you're flying across the Atlantic Ocean,
the Wright brothers, you know, motorized kite
is a terrific, radical break through advance.
But I'd rather take the 787, product
of 10 decades worth of incremental advances when
I go across the ocean.
So both are really important here.
You've got to do both pieces.
But, a disproportionate share of the breakthroughs do
seem to come from kind of independent inventors
or entrepreneurs.
And large firms tend to specialize on the incremental,
in part because they want to break up their own business
models, right?
They've got established business models.
They want to contribute to those business models
rather than wreck their existing business model.
So that's part of the economic motivation here.
But education for incremental advance
may well be different as Baumol points out, than education
for the novel advance.
And incremental improvement may well
require a much greater mastery of demanding
science and technology information than the novel
idea.
So both are essential.
But then he posts the critical question,
how do you educate for the original and novel idea
generation?
So we've got three new stories on the table here.
And let's start off discussion, and then we'll
take a break in a bit.
First, we've got Richard Freeman.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
I wanted to make some strides actually
on a point to that Baumol made in our conversation of three
months since Baumol was the one who cited P&G
as an innovative research and development firm
with a lot of PhDs.
One of you posed the question about Freeman.
This paper lauds the relationship
in the United States between firms and university research.
For multi-national companies, what incentives
do they have to promote US innovation leadership, even
when they may be based in the US when they operate
in so many different countries?
So at the heart of this question is,
why do we need to invest in America
if it is that the private sector is not investing and has
no rational self interest to invest in us
from an economic perspective?
That is the implication of this question.
AUDIENCE: I don't think it's like--
I think that we look at it one dimensionally.
You have to look at it, like, think about it
like an individual, right?
Like you're going to be a baby.
There's a whole gestation period.
Then there's a time period where you're trying
to grow as an individual.
And then there's one when you're ready to get to it, right?
And like you're very useful.
So for industry like, they can't really
handle this whole gestation period,
you know, one to 18 years old period.
But they can handle it after, when
you're ready to go and do a little ramp up skills.
But to do a whole thing is pretty difficult.
AUDIENCE: That's an interesting answer.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: I'd add too that the US has an extremely
decentralized labor market.
So there is a huge disincentive for employers in the United
States to offer training.
Because they offer training, which can be quite expensive,
investing in you, that in turn equips you to move on.
So often another employer will buy you out
for a lower margin with the educational costs.
But the employer who invested in your education
won't be able to match that increment.
So why should they invest in employees
if the talent is going to go elsewhere?
And countries like Germany have a much more established set
of apprenticeship rules and much more heavily unionized,
80% unionized in the manufacturing sector.
They have been able to create an apprenticeship system that's
much more enduring and employer tied.
That creates tremendous encouragement for employers
to provide lots of skills training to its employees.
Indeed, it's really a part of the German education system.
We have never really been able, because we
have such a decentralized and almost laissez faire labor
market, we've never been able to create
significant incentives for employers to provide education.
It's a deep structural problem in our system.
And you know it's one we're going to probably have
to figure out how to deal with.
We have created a whole system of community colleges.
But the burden is on the employee
to go back and get that education.
We make that pretty inexpensive.
AUDIENCE: Going back here about the gatekeeper thing.
Couldn't we just bribe them?
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Bribe the employees?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
Oh, no.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Bribe the employers?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Right, we could.
AUDIENCE: The education, how much is it?
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: I'm sure it's not cheap, right?
AUDIENCE: Damn it.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: But in other words,
could we create an incentive for employers
to provide the education system, even if they weren't
able to retain their workers.
And what would that cost?
So maybe the feds would pick up that cost.
So in a way, the community college system
is a way of the government picking up that
Cost and share it with the employee.
Because employers can't take the risk mitigating.
I kind of jumped into the discussion here.
I want to give it back to you, Steph.
Get me out of this.
AUDIENCE: I think that's-- who posed this question?
Yeah, I think you're right.
I mean it really gets at the heart of all three readings.
And I think, in particular, let me
see if I can parse for a quote here from one of the readings.
Actually it was in Freeman's reading, when he quoted
Derek Bok, who is the founder--
I think--
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: President of Harvard.
AUDIENCE: President of Harvard.
And now the graduate school of education at Harvard
has a center for innovative learning named after Derek Bok.
And he claimed towards the end of the piece,
or rather he was cited towards the end of the piece
as saying that other countries are facilitating our enterprise
model.
And if, I think it's really meritous of consideration,
that if our education system is not supporting
the production of scientists and engineers, and firms are you
know sort of ready and happy to get employees
from other countries or to move to other countries,
that we're effectively shooting ourself in a foot,
by participating in free market principles for education.
Because we can't provide the labor force
and we can't support the labor force and we
can't support incentives financially.
So at the end of the day, we're preventing ourselves
on all fronts from innovating, which
I think is a really important consideration that merits sort
of being honest with ourselves, as not only a society,
but also as you know a political economy.
AUDIENCE: Something throughout all the readings
that I have not understood.
How is it that we're spending so much on education,
like so much money per student, yet teachers
are not getting any of it and the students
don't have very high quality educations.
Where's the money going?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, Max, I think that
was addressed by Norman Augustine's piece
very slightly when he talked about the appropriation
of funds and where spending goes.
Specifically Augustine cited that 61%
of education budgets in schools tend
to go to education spending sort of broadly.
And that it actually tends to trend downward
for a lot of school districts who
focus on other extracurricular activities like sports.
And I think he made that very brief note
about the role of American culture
in those funding priorities.
And I think that also was a consideration
of mine in reading this piece in conjunction
with the Freeman piece.
Like, what is the role that our own vision of ourselves
and how we want to educate our children
informs our policy decisions and spending down the line.
And you brought the point earlier that
how is it that we don't have-- or that we
have too many jobs that we don't have enough jobs
but have too many PhDs, but then not have enough PhDs.
And I think that the point that Bill was trying to make
is that we have too many PhDs who
are trying to go into academia, but not enough PhDs who
are prepared for industry and not enough PhDs generally
to go into industry.
Does that clear things up a little?
AUDIENCE: That clears things up a lot.
AUDIENCE: OK.
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Yeah, I think I'd
add an additional point there.
And this is a complex one that you are free to disagree with.
But, when we created the higher education system in the US,
obviously it occurred over the process of centuries.
And when the federal government, during and following World War
II, came into a very significant support
role for that system in addition to the states,
that was already a quite competitive system.
And as someone who has spent substantial amount of time
with MIT's top administrators, I can tell you
that MIT and other universities do exactly the same thing,
they watched their university competitors like hawks.
They know exactly what they're up to.
They know exactly what they're spending on what.
They know exactly what their competition models are.
They're looking very hard at how MIT will compete all the time.
It is an extremely competitive model.
It drives a tremendous search for talent at the faculty level
as well as the student level.
And that talent base is very well compensated.
And that is a core way by which you compete for talent
in a competitive system.
We don't really have a competitive system in the K-12
public education system.
It's essentially a monopoly-based socialist model
frankly.
And you know part of the entry of charter school legislation
was to introduce a competitive model into the K
through 12 system.
Now there's a big debate as to how well that's worked.
But I think it's fair to say overall,
it's added a significant dose of competition into that system.
And
You could look at competition in health care.
And you could competition and you
know other large government supported systems too.
But you know, when we came out of World War II,
we created a socialist model for caring for veterans
in federally owned hospitals.
And we fit into what was already a competitive space
by supporting students, who in turn were given funding
and they could go.
They could take the money with them.
Didn't go to the universities to fund them.
So it's introduction of more competitive models
here may have something to do with improvements
in higher education.
At least that was the concept behind introducing
charter schools.
AUDIENCE: Could I ask you a followup?
I know that other countries have normal schools which
are schools meant to train--
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: Yeah, other countries have socialist models
and make them work.
But we're just not as good at that.
AUDIENCE: What prevented the United States
from developing normal schools or incorporating normal schools
into their model?
WILLIAM BONVILLIAN: I don't want to claim
to be an expert on the creation of normal schools.
But in the 19th century, the US did
create both the institutions for mass higher education, i.e.
the public universities, and high school education
in a very short period of time.
And communities were essentially realizing
that they had to upgrade the skills
for an industrial economy as their population shifted
from farming to working in manufacturing firms primarily.
And they understood the need for upgraded skill sets.
And there was an effort across the country
to create high schools.
Now some regions, particularly New England, had them.
But the rest of the country, including the American South,
is pretty quick to replicate a high school
model as a fix for a needed skill set.
So that is a massive social policy
that was done in a remarkably short period of decades
across the country.
So the country is capable of making really major changes.
I don't think I answered your question.
AUDIENCE: That's OK.
I just certainly think it's important to consider the--
as it was highlighted I think in several
of the readings, the role of teachers,
one, moving forward in the future, two,
how teachers are currently being educated, three,
teachers are being compensated and sustained within the model.
They seem to be sort of an undercurrent of what we're
talking about, but not something that any of the readings
are willing to address specifically, and perhaps
strategically for political reasons.