Guest Blogger: Michael Simkovic
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“Law School Transparency” is misleading its customers about the cost of law school and overcharging for data that are available for free (Michael Simkovic)
Brian Leiter recently noted problems with Elizabeth Olson’s uncritical coverage of “Law School Transparency” (LST) in an article published in Bloomberg. The most important substantive problems with Olson’s recent article about LST not already mentioned by Professor Leiter are that: (1) Olson doesn’t mention that LST’s business model is repackaging and selling to prospective law…
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Other things to think about if you have multiple tenure track offers (Michael Simkovic)
Brian Leiter has an extremely helpful post about things that entry level candidates should think about when they receive a tenure track offer. The post below is meant to supplement Brian’s post with additional considerations that are relevant to candidates who are fortunate enough to receive multiple tenure track offers. It may also be of…
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Nobel Prize winners explain how ideology/theory blinded economics (Michael Simkovic)
The Financial Times recently published an excellent profile of Esther Duflo, a French economist who shared the Nobel Prize in Economics with two of her co-authors for pioneering empirical work using field experiments (randomized controlled trials) to evaluate the effectiveness of social policies and the effects of taxation. Over the last several decades, economics has…
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Free college proposals should include private colleges (Michael Simkovic)
From an essay I recently published at "The Conversation": "Students can use federal financial aid to attend any college they want, whether public or private. But the “free college” proposals floated by some 2020 presidential candidates would increase federal funding only for community colleges or state-run universities. Private nonprofit universities would be excluded. . . .…
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Why we need to read scholarship for ourselves and cannot rely on citation counts alone (Michael Simkovic)
Citation counts and other metrics can be a useful starting point for identifying scholarship and scholars that seem promising. Such measures are quantitative, sortable, and rankable. Metrics are quick and easy compared to the time-consuming effort of reading scholarship and forming an opinion of its merit based on expert knowledge of the underlying subject matter. …
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The myth of administrative bloat in Higher Education (Michael Simkovic)
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Professor Philip Hamburger of Columbia calls on the federal government to impose restrictions on access to student loans to discourage universities from hiring more administrators relative to the number of tenured faculty members. I sympathize with Professor Hamburger’s desire to strengthen the role of tenured faculty in university…
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New study finds little evidence that federal student loan limits drive tuition at professional schools (Michael Simkovic)
Robert Kelchen, Does the Bennett Hypothesis Hold in Professional Education? An Empirical Analysis, Research in Higher Education 1-26 (2019): "Policymakers have been debating the Bennett Hypothesis—whether colleges increase tuition after the federal government increases access to student loans—for decades. Yet most of the prior research has focused on studying small changes to loan limits or…
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Pro-billionaire, anti-education populism comes to France (Michael Simkovic)
In the United States, both Democratic and Republican politicians sometimes attempt to bolster their populist credibility by going after easy targets–attacking pharma companies, or doctors, or insurance companies or banks or universities–while being elitists where it really counts: cutting taxes for billionaires and raising taxes on the middle class. French president Emmanuel Macron, who recently…
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New study sheds light on why female law firm associates are less likely to make partner (Michael Simkovic)
A rigorous new study by Ghazala Azmat and Rosa Ferrer finds that much of the difference in employment outcomes between male and female law firm associates is attributable to men billing more hours (not simply working more hours; doing more work that is billable), bringing in more revenue, and having greater aspirations to make partner.…
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New report finds criticisms of GradPlus federal student loans “overblown” (Michael Simkovic)
AccessLex Institute released a new report, Examining Grad PLUS: Value and Cost, showing the primary criticisms of the Grad PLUS loan program—unchecked rises in tuition and the potential cost to the federal government—are either nonexistent or substantially overestimated.
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George Mason donor-contract disclosure case will be heard by the Virginia Supreme Court (Michael Simkovic)
A student group, Transparent GMU, has sued the George Mason University Foundation to try to force disclosure of donor contracts with the the Charles Koch Foundation and other conservative billionaire-backed foundations and re-granting organizations. George Mason is a public university. A limited number of George Mason's donor contracts have already been disclosed. Some of these…
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Tucker Carlson and I discuss the benefits of Higher Education and Student Loans (Michael Simkovic)
Last night I was invited to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. For the last two nights, Mr. Carlson has been inveighing against higher education and federal student loans. Mr. Carlson has been promoting a private-student-lender supported plan to tax higher education institutions that accept federal student loans. Similar plans to tax educational…
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At Yale, the Federalist Society loses friends and alienates people (Michael Simkovic)
Yale’s Federalist Society provided a platform on campus to an anti-gay group which has been identified by mainstream media organizations and the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group because—unlike some religious groups that have misgivings about the theological acceptability of homosexual acts—this group has advocated for criminal prosecution of homosexuals by secular authorities…
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White House proposes to spend approximately nothing on early childhood education to minimize taxes for top 0.1 percent (Michael Simkovic)
NPR reports that the Trump administration has proposed a meager one-time increase in funding for childcare / early career eduction equal to approximately 0.0045 percent of GDP ($1 billion out of $22 trillion estimated 2020 GDP) or about 0.001 percent of household networth. Total federal spending would increase to $5.4 billion, or 0.0225 percent of…
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QJE: Investments in education continue to provide economic benefits two and half centuries later (Michael Simkovic)
A recent article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (the leading journal in economics) finds evidence that early investments in education in the 1600s through mid 1700s continued to provide economic benefits in the form of persistently higher eduction levels and 10% higher wages and centuries later. The study examined the economic performance of communities…
Let us agree to disagree about Dennett. I still maintain that it really does matter that we try to understand…