Downsizing Knowledge: The Danish government's plan to shorten humanities education

After the American Century

The OECD statistics on spending for higher education reveal considerable differences between the Scandinavian countries. Norway spends more than $22,000 per student each year; Sweden about $25,000; and Denmark, about $19,000. Some fields cost a lot more than others, notably medicine and science need expensive equipment and laboratories, whose price presumably is much the same regardless of country. The least funding goes to the humanities, which usually have larger classes and need little equipment and no laboratories. Bluntly, Denmark spends less per student for university education than Sweden and Norway, and the Danish students in humanities receive the least support of any students in Scandinavia.  It is also worth noting that the annual expenditure per university student in the US is about $32,000 and in the UK about $28,000. Denmark has fallen behind, and things are about to get worse.

The number of university students in all fields has been falling in Denmark since 2014, with about 13,500 fewer in 2021. The Danish government has saved quite a lot of money by educating fewer people, perhaps as much as $250 million each year. Being behind Sweden and Norway and having fewer students as well, one might think that it was time for Denmark to invest more in education. 

  

But the new Danish government does not see it that way. They have been aggressively cutting the size of the student body. In 2021, the socialist government told the universities to cut enrolments. Copenhagen University announced it would downsize by 1,590 student places by 2030, and 40% of these would be in the humanities. The next three largest universities made similar announcements. The government was downsizing on higher education, and they were just getting started.

During the run-up to the election in November, 2022, the Socialists announced that they would like to remodel university education, especially for the humanities, by eliminating an entire year. At present, students who want a BA and an MA follow a five year curriculum, with the first three years for the BA and the MA as a two-year degree.  The proposal was not laid out in detail, but it appears that this cutback would primarily affect the MA. In other words, there will be less specialization, with an entire year removed from MA studies.  Few have ever been given the opportunity to do a Ph.D. in Denmark, and for those who do get the chance, there are no regular classes or seminars at that level. 

Note that this "reform" was proposed for all of the humanities, perhaps for some of the social sciences, but not for science, medicine, and engineering, which would still have a longer curriculum. If carried through, the inequality between humanities and rest of the university would make Denmark unusual internationally. Norway, Sweden, the US and Britain do not offer a cut-rate degree in foreign languages, history, art. theology, and other humanistic subjects. 

   

If carried through, this will be the second time university education has been shortened. Until 1993, universities offered a six-year education, which combined 4 years of specialization in one subject and 2 years in a second field. The graduates were then qualified to teach two subjects in the gymnasium. If someone was not interested in becoming a teacher, they could stop after four years in one field and receive a degree called a cand. phil. 

The Coming Danish Brain Drain

It seems obvious that when cutting an education from five to four years it is impossible maintain the same level of expertise, nor will Danish universities be as attractive to students. Furthermore, if there are 20% fewer hours in the classroom for students, then about one in five teachers will not be needed. An entire generation either will not be trained at all or will get an advanced degree and find that there are no jobs. Looking ten years ahead, faculties will consist of people between 40 and 65, with almost no young scholars and no Ph.D. students.  Some of the most promising people will go abroad, perhaps to Sweden, Norway, the US, or Britain. They will not return because there will only an impoverished second-rate university sector to come back to. If the government carries through its plan, then a Danish brain drain seems inevitable. Moreover, the government has forced universities to eliminate several thousand places for international students.

The combined effect of the various cutbacks have devastated some departments. At the University of Copenhagen alone, 344 teaching positions disappeared between 2015 and 2017, or about 6.5% of the faculty. More positions have since disappeared at all the universities. The University of Southern Denmark used to offer degrees in Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese, but all of these have gradually disappeared. Many faculty are deeply distressed, not least because it seems there is no Danish political party that thinks they are worth defending in an election campaign. And when students ask about doing a PhD, the only honest answer one can give them is that he or she should go abroad or forget about it.

Final note on expenditures per student. Harvard University has an endowment of more than $40 billion, and it supplements what students pay in tuition. The total cost to educate one Harvard undergraduate per year is more than $200 thousand per year, more than Denmark spends to educate ten students.  

"Dimensioning" a Danish word for cutbacks at universities

After the American Century

Austerity has taken a new form in Denmark, where the Socialist government has betrayed its campaign platform. When running for election, it promised to support education, because Denmark's future lay in having a highly educated population. The worst thing in the future, they said, would be to be a worker without skills. But after four years in power, the government has failed to create jobs. Fewer people are working today than when they came into power.

To "explain" this failure the government has blamed the universities for training too many people! Never mind that in 2008, when today's new graduates began their studies, economists assured the government that soon there would not be enough workers to fill the jobs. Never mind that unemployment today is considerably lower than it was when the last socialist government was in office during most of the 1990s. The whole problem, obviously!, is that the universities trained people in the Humanities, rather than in Engineering and Science and Law. 

Solution! Cut 3,500 places out of admissions to the Humanities, every year. Some of these people might choose to study law or economics. Perhaps a few will have aptitude for physics or chemistry or engineering. Very few of them will have the grades or the prerequisites to enter medical school. In all, perhaps 500, certainly no more than 1000, will take some non-humanities course of study, if they can get in, of course. Many of these students will drop out, however. After this policy has been in place for ten years,  at best 5,000 people will have degrees in fields they did not want to study, while there may well be 30,000 young people with no advanced education!  To put this in perspective, in 2014 about 70,000 people receive unemployment benefits in Denmark.  Under this government plan, as many as 30,000 people may go directly to the unemployment line right after gymnasium. [Update: in 2017 alone, more than 20,000 people were denied admission to higher education, and the cutbacks continue.]

Look past the rhetorical nonsense, and this plan is simply a foolish cutback. Danish education is entirely tax supported, but the Danish unemployed get 2 full years of support. So the government's idea is that they would rather pay 30,000 people to be unemployed than spend roughly the same amount to give them an education. 

And even if this really were a savings program, Denmark is not exactly a poor nation. In 2014 it will have one of the smallest deficits and one of the lowest unemployment rates of any EU country.   

Education: Pisa Test Results, 2012

After the American Century   

Pisa rankings have been developed, based on extensive testing in 65 countries.  Students at age 15 were tested in math, reading and science. When taking all three tests scores into account, the first forty nations are ranked as shown in the list below. Note that the first three scores are for cities, not nations. Impressive as they are, they cannot easily be compared to entire countries. South Korea and Japan have high scores for a much larger sample, including a cross-section of the entire population.

In general, the top twenty are improving, in some cases remarkably. But most of those with composite scores below 1520 are not improving or only improving a little. Geographically, Asia leads, followed by Eastern Europe, and then Western Europe plus New Zealand and Australia. Well below the middle one finds the United States. There is a dismal tie between Latin America and the Moslem World for the weakest showing. The real last place may be somewhere in Africa, which was not included in the study.

                                                        score in 2009        improvement

1. Shanghai                   1783             1731                     52

Above 1600

2. Singapore                  1666            1630                    - 36

3. Hong Kong               1661             1637                   - 24

4. South Korea             1628              1623                   -  5

5. Japan                        1621              1588                    33

6. Taiwan                     1606               1558                    48

Above 1550

7. Finland                     1588               1631                  - 43

8. Estonia                     1578               1541                    37

9. Liechtenstein           1576                1555                    21

10. Macau-China         1568               1523                    45

11. Canada                   1566               1580                    14

12. Switzerland            1565               1552                    13

13. Poland                    1562               1503                    59

14. Netherlands            1556               1556                    no change

Above 1500

15. Vietnam                  1547                n.a.                     

16. Germany                 1546               1530                   16

17. Ireland                    1534                1489                   45

18. Australia                 1534                1556                   22

19. New Zealand          1528                1559                   21

20. Belgium                  1519                1528                  - 9

21. United Kingdom     1507                1500                    7

22. Czech Republic       1500                1473                  27

23. Austria                     1502                1503                   1

Above 1475

24. France                       1499              1491                    8

25. Slovenia                    1496              1496                   no change

26. Denmark                   1494              1497                   -3

27. Norway                     1488              1501                  -13

28. Latvia                        1482                n.a. 

29. United States             1476              1489                 -13

From 1422-1469

30. Italy                          1469

31. Luxembourg             1468

32. Spain                        1468

33. Portugal                    1464

34. Hungary                   1459

35. Lithuania                  1455

36. Iceland                     1454

37. Croatia                     1447

38. Sweden                    1446                1486                 - 40

39. Russia                      1443

40. Israel                        1422

Latin America (selected scores)

Chile                            1309

Costa Rica                   1277

Mexico                        1252

Uruguay                      1236

Brazil                          1206

Argentina                    1190

Colombia                    1178

Peru                            1125  (last place in all categories)

Moslem World (selected scores)

Turkey                        1386

Unit. Arab Emirates   1324

Tunisia                        1190

Jordan                         1188

Qatar                          1148

Indonesia                    1153 (next to last place overall)

With the notable exception of Finland (which declined from a high position), the Nordic nations made a poor showing. They have collectively fallen toward the bottom of the league table. If their decline continues, within another decade one of them might be relegated and formed to move en masse to Argentina.

Decline in education may well be a predictor for a decline in economic development a generation later.

Education: Danish Universities Need to Learn from the International Competition

After the American Century

The Danish Ministry of Research, which funds university education, is determined to "reform." To do so, it has appointed a committee to make proposals about how to improve the universities. Unfortunately, while each member of this committee is probably a reasonable choice, the group as a whole lacks breadth and international perspective. The committee does not have a single humanist and even more remarkably, not a single scientist. One member of the committee comes from the University of Bergen, but given that Norwegian universities resemble those in Denmark, this does not make the committee very international.

According the the London Times' ranking, neither Norway nor Denmark has even one university in the world's top 116. The top Danish university is the engineering school, ranked 117, and the top Norwegian institution is Oslo, ranked 185. All such surveys in recent years have concluded that the best universities in the world are in the United States, Britain, and Australia, and there is a sharp difference between those in the top twenty or so and the next twenty. Universities ranked lower than 100 are all far behind the world's elite.

One might think the Danish government would put at least one person from the world's elite institutions on the committee. There are Danes abroad who work at these top institutions. There are also expatriates living in Denmark who received their education at such schools. But none of this expertise will be on the committee. Of course, members of the committee have visited some of these elite schools, but a visit, even one lasting a semester, will not provide the same kind of insight as studying for a degree in such a place, much less being a permanent part of the faculty.

The committee is narrow in yet another way: most of them are closely associated with Copenhagen University (currently ranked 150) and they live in the same part of Denmark. (There are some who view Copenhagen as a fossilized institution because it hires much of its faculty from its own graduates.) Three of the five Danish universities are not represented at all.

No one on this committee has the daily experience of being at one of the world's best universities, and as a group they are not likely to think outside the narrow, claustrophobic and insular box administered in Copenhagen. They will likely write a report to the liking of the Minister, who has strong views, but himself does not have enough education to be hired for an entry level position by any university. That said, he is streets ahead of the political clowns who preceded him.

If a major corporation wanted to research a problem, it would not create such a homogeneous group, with no scientists, no humanities, almost no one from outside Copenhagen, and no one from the world's best institutions.

Denmark invests  a good deal in education. However, it has a problem balancing quantity and quality. It wishes to educate a high proportion of people at university, and none of them charge tuition. This makes it quite expensive. At the same time, in these egalitarian societies there is a resistance to either establishing hierarchies or to rejecting candidates. The desire for democratization of higher education tends to water down quality, because no one likes to set up barriers to entry.

Denmark has five universities and one technical university. All are public institutions, all faculty work to the same wage scale, and students receive the same amount in scholarship funding. This egalitarian approach has much in its favor, of course, but it does not necessarily push either faculty or students to do their best. The state rewards universities for quantity production of candidates, that is to say, departments receive money each time a student passes an exam or completes a degree. Whether the student has a high or low grade point average makes no difference.

In almost all educational systems, the most talented students usually do well, and the occasional genius is not really produced by the system. Getting the other 90% of the students to learn is the challenge. And here, egalitarianism and the monetary incentives to admit and pass as many as possible have encouraged Danish institutions to lower standards.

For example, in Denmark receiving a BA, no matter how poor the grades, entitles a student to go on to an MA, regardless of talent, motivation, or achievement. Automatic admission to graduate studies is hardly the norm at the world's best universities. Admitting all BAs to study for the MA is a wasteful and pointlessly egalitarian approach to education. If students knew that they had to do well at the BA level in order to go on to the MA, both undergraduate and the graduate education would be improved. And this would not cost the state more money, but less.

At the level of individual courses the Danish system is also lax. There is no requirement that students attend classes, and they do not even need to be inside the country during term. I have had students go abroad for weeks in the middle of term or miss the first week to go skiing. Since class participation cannot be counted at all in determining grades, students need not give oral presentations, nor can teachers give mid-term exams that count toward the final grade. In most courses, grades are determined entirely by a paper or exam at the end of term.  Contrast this with any of the top universities in the United States, where class participation counts and teachers have considerable freedom in developing and using various means of assessment. In Denmark, if a student seldom comes and never says anything, it has no consequences.  Passivity is therefore widespread.

Furthermore, Danish students have the right to re-examination at no cost if they fail a course, and they  can take any exam three times, even if they did nothing but turn in a blank sheet of paper on the first and second attempts.  If they fail three times, they can petition for the right to retake the exam (or turn in the paper) a fourth time. Contrast this with top universities around the world, which often do not have re-examination at all but tell students to retake the course and pay the fees again, or in some cases charge a fee for a second (and usually final) attempt to pass a course.

When Danish students take a term abroad in Britain or the United States, they all come back saying that they had to work much harder there. Few fail their courses, because they know that they cannot take those exams over again.

Danish universities also have problems in the way faculty are recruited, retrained, and rewarded,  and they could learn much from the international competition. There are foreigners like myself who have been in Denmark for years, who understand alternative systems, and who could make constructive suggestions for improvements. However, my experience is that no one listens to such suggestions. Danes seem congenitally unable to hear comments from outsiders.

In short, if the Danes really want to improve their universities, they do not need to spend vast additional sums of money. But they do need to learn from the best practices at the best universities. They need to demand from students attendance, participation, and real attempts to complete courses. They need to set better norms for behavior and set higher standards for admission to the MA. They need to open the PhD to more students and learn how to make use of PhDs in the broader labor market.

These are just some of the things that Danish universities could change to raise their international ranking. It is unfortunate that their system is so centralized and so controlled by bureaucrats, especially since most of the staff of the Ministry itself do not have a PhD much less any teaching experience or academic publications. It seems unlikely that any worthwhile ideas will emerge from the Ministry.  One can only hope that somehow its homogeneous committee will develop an international perspective. 

Education: Literacy - OECD World Rankings puts US at bottom

After the American Century

The OECD has tested 166,000 people and ranked nations according to their levels of literacy.  Among persons aged 16 to 24 the results are surprising. The United States is only ranked 20th out of 22, while Finland is in the first position.  It would appear that the Bush "no child left behind" program might have been renamed "a whole system left behind."

How much difference is there between the top and the bottom? Japan is second and Italy twenty-first. The OECD concluded that a Japanese high-school graduate has literacy skills comparable to an Italian university graduate. This would strongly suggest that the distance between Finland (1) and the US (20) or  Britain (18) is just as alarmingly great.

It is also somewhat surprising to see a wider spread in the rankings of the Nordic nations than is usual in such studies, with Sweden at 7, Denmark 13, and resource-rich and debt-free Norway at 16. Why  should Denmark and Norway fall behind former Soviet bloc nations such as Estonia (5), Poland (8),  the Czech Republic (9), and the Slovak Republic (12)?

Literacy, aged 16-24
1 Finland
2 Japan
3 South Korea
4 Netherlands
5 Estonia
6 Australia
7 Sweden
8 Poland

9 Czech Republic

10 Germany
11 Austria
12 Slovak Republic
13 Denmark
14 France
15 Canada
16 Norway
17 Ireland
18 Spain
19 England/N Ireland
20 United States

21 Italy

22 Cyprus

The OECD also compiled a similar table for all adults. Many countries are almost at the same rank in both tables, especially at the top, notably Finland, Japan, and the Netherlands. A comparison also reveals that compared to the older generation the younger people are falling behind in Canada, Norway and the United States. In contrast, youth has improved on their parents and grandparents in South Korea, France, and Spain.

Literacy, all adults
1 Japan
2 Finland
3 Netherlands
4 Sweden
5 Australia
6 Norway
7 Estonia
8 Slovak Republic
9 Flanders (Belgium)

10 Canada

11 Czech Republic
12 Denmark
13 South Korea
14 England/N Ireland
15 Germany
16 United States
17 Austria
18 Poland
19 Ireland
20 France
21 Spain

22 Italy

Literacy is a fundamental indicator for the ability to get and hold a good job, and it correlates well with lifetime income. Poor literacy in a nation harms its competitiveness.

Education: World University Rankings, 2013: US at the top

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                         

 

The 2013 world university rankings from The Times resemble the list for years past, with some slight movement  up and down. The same universities are in the top ten as two years ago, though in a slightly different order. and there are no major changes in the top twenty, except that Duke has moved up from 22 to 17, while University College, London, has fallen from 17 to 21. The top 20 are, with the single exception of the technical university in Zurich, exclusively in Britain and North America. According to The Times, twenty-two of the top thirty universities and thirty of the top fifty, are in the United States. Britain is also strongly represented in the top fifty, with the rest of Europe dominant in the rankings between fifty and one hundred.

The highest ranking universities in Asia are Tokyo (23) and Singapore (26). The highest ranked in the EU outside Britain are the Karolinska Institute in Sweden (36) and the University of Munich (55).  The only African University ranked in the top 200 is the University of Cape Town (126). No university in all of Latin America is in the top 200, and only three are in the top 400.

University                   score              ranking, 2011-12

1. Cal Tech               94.9                1
2. Harvard                93.9                2
3. Oxford                  93.9                4
4. Stanford                93.8                3
5. MIT                      93.0                7
6. Princeton              92.7                5
7. Cambridge            92.3                6
8. Berkeley               89.9               10
9. Chicago                87.8                 9
10. Imperial College  87.5                 8
11. Yale                      87.4                11
12. UCLA                  86.3                13
13. Columbia              85.2               12
14. ETH Zurich          84.5               15
15. Johns Hopkins      83.7               14
16. Pennsylvania        81.0               16
17. Duke                     79.3               22
18. Michigan              79.2               18
19. Cornell                  79.1               20
20. Toronto                 78.3               19

The point spread between the top ten universities is only 7.4. Evidently, these ten are all on a very high plane. The fall in the next ten is larger, 9.1, and for the following ten it is 7.2.  After that, however, the differences between universities are smaller, and if graphed would show a flattening line. Between ranking 30 and 50 the fall is only 6.6, and from 50 to 100 it is but a little more than 10. 

Aside from looking at location, one can say that there are about 20 universities in a class by themselves, and about 30 more are quite strong and conceivably could move up, followed by 50 strong universities. After the first hundred it levels off. The scores of universities ranked between 100 and 200 drop less than the difference between numbers 1 and 10. 

The Times also ranks universities from 200 to 400, but does not issue scores, presumably because they are clustered so tightly together. Instead, groups of 25 are listed together.  To see the complete list and other information, click here.

National Security Agency costs more than faculty of the Ivy League plus US Cultural Exchanges

After the American Century                                                                                                                     

Should the United States invest in education, cultural exchange, and international understanding, or should it take money away from such things and instead invest in spying, code-breaking, eavesdropping, and the creation of international distrust? Since 2001, the answer to that question has been to plow billions into The National Security Agency (NSA) while cutting funding for cultural programs. Since May the NSA has been much in the news, as the extent and reach of its programs has become known. Most Americans, if asked before then, probably could not have said what the initials N S A stood for, even though they were paying billions of tax dollars to support it.

The scale of the NSA's main facility at Ft. Meade, Maryland is best grasped by some comparisons. It is larger than the United Nations building and US Congress combined. It is the largest employer and the largest user of electricity in the State of Maryland. There are spaces for more than 18,000 cars in its parking lot, and the site has its own entrance from the nearby interstate highway. Do not try to use the entrance, however, as it is for NSA employees only, and you will be stopped if trying to enter the area.

There are many NSA facilities besides the buildings at Ft. Meade, both in the United States and abroad. Estimates of the number of employees vary, but apparently there are about 30,000. Being a secret organization, it is hard to get a reliable figure. The Washington Post recently wrote that there were 35,000 code breakers working for the NSA and affiliated groups at the CIA and other agencies. Whatever the number, it is clearly more than the combined faculties of the Ivy League plus MIT and CalTech. Harvard has 2100 faculty, for example. Dartmouth and Brown have fewer, Cornell has more. But the faculty for these ten elite universities are less numerous than the employees of the NSA.  Is the social, educational, and cultural value of the NSA greater than ten of the world's finest universities? The Harvard faculty has won 44 Nobel Prizes, trained generations of outstanding leaders, and graduated an international body of alumni from almost every country in the world. Such universities are a major force for progress, peace, and prosperity. They not only create knowledge; they create a global community. 

BEcause the NSA is secretive it cannot create a global community. It creates suspicion and distrust. It stimulates paranoia. It assembles enormous databases.  It listens in on the presidents of foreign countries, and has recently angered Brazil, Germany, and Mexico, to name just a few. Its staff creates encryption and de-encryption codes. They publish some articles, but their best work must be hidden from scholars, and they cannot be said to be part of or to participate in the global community of knowledge. They are paid as well as Ivy League faculty, but they do not have the same credentials. Would anyone seriously propose that the NSA's contribution to life is equal to that of one Harvard or one Yale, much less 10 such universities?

I am not arguing against the NSA, as such. But how large should it be? At what point would money be better spent elsewhere? Its value does not increase as a direct function of its size. When do diminishing returns set in? An NSA twice as large is not necessarily twice as valuable. There is an enormous new building about to open in Maryland. There is a new data center in Utah as well, and there are more facilities on the drawing board. 

The budget increases for the NSA have come at the expense of other programs, notably cultural exchanges, such as the Fulbright program, which creates strong international connections and builds understanding and trust. As the NSA has grown, such programs have shrunk or disappeared. The Mike Mansfield Fellowship program improved cultural understanding between Japan and the United States, until it was cut from $1.8 million to 0! Likewise, the Institute for International Public Policy Fellowship Program (IIPP) once offered study abroad to minority undergraduates, but it has lost all of its funding. The State Department also plans to eliminate all funding for the George J. Mitchell Scholarship. It provides postgraduate study in Ireland and Northern Ireland for 12 individuals a year. That is a small investment, but over time such programs create valuable networks of human relationships.

The largest and oldest such program, The Fulbright, has had to struggle for funding since the end of the Cold War. Yet in many nations the American contribution is matched or topped by the partner countries. Germany and Denmark, for example, put more money into their Fulbright exchanges with the US than the State Department does. American cutbacks in this case make no economic sense, for these foreign countries are funding US faculty and students to go abroad. There are more than 300,000 Fulbright Alumni from more than 150 countries, and everywhere they are a force for mutual understanding that promotes economic growth and cultural exchange. About 8,000 Fulbright awards are granted every year, with roughly 30% of the money coming from other nations or private contributions.More than 40 Fulbright alumni have won Nobel Prizes. No one from the immensely better-funded NSA has done so or ever is likely to do so, because its organization and goals are antithetical to the values that these prizes recognize.

The US government contributes about $275 million per year to Fulbright. By comparison, the 2014 budget for NSA and the like is 175 times that size. It "Provides $48.2 billion in discretionary base funding for the National Intelligence Program." This is more than the operating budgets for the ten leading universities already mentioned and all the exchange programs combined.

Instruments of "soft power" such as the Fulbright Program are being neglected or even abandoned in favor of secrecy, spying, and code-breaking. Yet the West won the Cold War in good part because its cultural life, its educational institutions, and its consumer goods were more appealing than the Soviet alternatives.  Expanding the NSA at the expense of good universities and cultural exchange is not good policy. It is time to see the NSA as just one part of a coordinated approach to better security and improved international relations. Spying cannot bring peace or prosperity. Creating vast secret agencies with no public oversight does not enhance democracy. The danger in such enterprises is that the means become the ends, that surveillance itself (and its expansion) becomes the goal.

The Geography of American Invention

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                        

A new study from the Brookings Institution reveals that a relatively small part of the United States produces most of its patents. As reported in the New York Times, the Census Bureau divides the nation into 370 "metropolitan statistical areas" but two out of every three patents is produced in just 20 places. 

It is even more interesting to study the top five of these 370 areas. Those with "the most patent filings per million people, from 2007 to 2011, were San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California; Burlington-South Burlington, Vermont; Rochester, Minnesota; Corvallis, Oregon; and Boulder, Colorado." None of these places are large cities. All are attractive small cities, in beautiful natural settings where it is more desirable to live than most other locations in the US. All of them have universities and/or large medical centers at their core. All of these places now are, or at least once were, less expensive than major cities. In short, these are upscale, attractive areas with highly educated populations in smaller cities. The extremes of urbanism or rural life are not represented. These are middle landscapes that talented people will choose to live in or that they will be happy to move to. Not Philadelphia, but Princeton. Not New York City, but Ithaca. Not Denver but Boulder.

Patents per worker, 2011

In such locations innovative people can afford to live and to establish offices or labs more easily than in the large cities. In such places they also can find like-minded  innovators more easily than in large cities. These smaller places have a critical mass of talent, but not much heavy industry such as steel mills, and they have less traffic and better public schools than most places.

The implications for other nations need to be underscored. Rather than try to make Europe's largest cities the centers of innovation, it makes more sense to look for smaller university towns analogous to Austin, Burlington, Boulder, or Corvallis. In Denmark the potential for innovation per capita should therefore be higher in Aalborg or Odense than in Copenhagen. In Britain, innovation should flourish not in London or Manchester but in Cambridge or York. 

Furthermore, the study shows that it is much smarter for a city to invest in research universities than in football stadiums or downtown shopping malls. Stadiums represent the "build it and the consumers will come" school of thought. However, fans and consumers may go elsewhere. Universities generate patents and new businesses that create new sources of income, jobs, and production, with consumption an inevitable by-product of the high incomes characteristic of such communities.

This is not to say that no innovation takes place in large cities. Of course it does. But in the United States the most innovative locations have other demographics.

The Brookings Institution report can be found here.

What parts of the American state are Socialist?

After the American Century         

One often hears American commentators, especially on the Right, complain about socialism in the same hysterical tone that people once denounced communism.

So let us look at this question of socialism in a common-sense way. There are some well-functioning parts of American society like the public library system and the fire departments that are actually socialistic. In each case a service is provided to everyone in the community, using tax dollars to pay the costs. Garbage removal is another example of something that is often organized by the state and provided to all citizens. The reasons for this are not hard to understand. All benefit if fires are put out and garbage does not rot in the streets. All citizens benefit when libraries provide books and information to everyone.

There are other obvious examples. The public schools are socialistic, providing and requiring education for all citizens. This is good for society as a whole, because educated people are able to contribute more skills and ideas, and highly educated societies tend to be more prosperous than less educated ones, all other things (such as natural resources) being equal. Indeed, a well educated country with few natural resources such as Singapore, is often more prosperous and has a lower crime rate than a poorly educated nation awash in resources, such as Nigeria.

When one begins to think along these lines, it is obvious that the Founding Fathers of the United States wanted all citizens to be literate and numerate, and that they believed an educated citizenry would be better able to choose leaders and to propose good ideas to their legislatures. Benjamin Franklin helped to found a great public library in Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson's enormous personal library became the basis for the US Library of Congress, which may be used by all citizens. During the nineteenth century cities and towns all over the nation created public libraries that today are bastions of education, freedom of thought, and competitiveness.

The question becomes that of where to draw the line. How many services have such a beneficial effect on society that they really should be provided to citizens out of national self-interest?  Here are some examples that seem to be obviously a good investment:

A national weather service. Why? Citizens will not be caught by surprise by a tornado or ice storm, agriculture will be better conducted, and the country will have more lead time for national disasters.

A national park system. Why? Preserves for all citizens sublime and beautiful landscapes and historically important sites, such as battlefields, Native American ruins, and buildings, such as the homes of former Presidents. Americans invented the idea of having national parks, and preserved such places as Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon for future generations.

A good road system. In theory, major roads might be privately owned, with tolls imposed for using them. But the US rejected that practice, with most roads open to all with no fee. Interestingly, Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that infrastructure such as roads were best left in the hands of the state. So even the patron saint of Capitalism accepted a bit of socialism, in this restricted sense.

It is fair to say that most Americans agree that these and some other government institutions are worthwhile, even if, in many respects, they might be understood to be socialistic. It is just that few Americans think of them in this way, because they have been around for a century or more. They are part of a Normal Rockwell vision of America.

The question is not whether the US state, local, and federal governments should supply any services, but rather how many. Health care remains in private hands, for example, even under Obamacare. Private insurance companies and private health providers remain at the heart of it. The government's role is to regulate, not to provide, services. The care-givers remain the same as before Obamacare was passed. This system is by no stretch of the imagination a socialistic one. Rather, the state requires that people be covered, just as it requires drivers to have a car that has been inspected and insured. Neither of these things is socialistic. To see what a socialized medical system looks like, go to Scandinavia, Germany, or France.

The US medical system produces terrific doctors who continue to make important advances in diagnosis, treatment, and cure.  But while the individual care providers are excellent, the system is not. Per person, the US medical system costs almost double what Northern Europeans (Germans, Dutch, Swedes, etc.)  pay for medical care. Yet on average Europeans are living longer - years longer - than Americans. It is simply silly to say that the US has nothing to learn from other countries in this area.

Rather than pretend that "socialism" is foreign to the United States, it would be useful to have a dialogue about where the limits of socialism ought to be. Should university tuition be paid for by the state (perhaps to be paid back later by graduates, once they have a job?)  Norwegians, Danes, and Germans pay no tuition, which helps to level the playing field and gives all talent a chance to develop. The Scandinavians and the Germans may have a better chance than Americans to move up in the world. US economic mobility is not what is used to be, and that is because the nation is less, not more, socialistic than it was when the great land grant colleges like the Universities of Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and the like were set up during the nineteenth century.

Too often American politicians talk about socialism as if it were some terrible foreign disease. It is not. Socialism is as American as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Whether it is a good idea has to be evaluated on a case by case basis. It is a good idea to have a national center for disease control, for example, but it might not be a good idea pay for cosmetic surgery with tax dollars. It is a good socialistic idea to make knowledge widely and freely available on the Internet, for example from the Library of Congress. But it is almost surely not a good idea to give every citizen their own automobile. National Public Radio seems to me a good idea, but here there is room for debate about whether its rather modest costs ought to be paid for through taxes or individual contributions. Case by case, the United States needs to consider how best to remain healthy, educated, and competitive. In some cases, socialism is a good idea. In others, not. Think about that the next time you see the firemen rushing by to put out a blaze.

Education: Reflections on Teaching

After the American Century

Today I begin teaching again. The first class I ever taught was at the University of Minnesota, in the fall of 1969. I was a half time instructor in composition (freshman English), and I did not even have my MA degree yet. But there were 200 sections of freshman composition to be staffed, and based on my first year of graduate work I was deemed qualified. 

Now 43 years have rushed by, and I have taught students at many universities, and expanded the range of my (in)competence to a much wider range of courses than composition (which I taught until 1974, when my PhD was completed.) 

I have spent literally thousands of hours in classrooms. Here are some of the things I have learned about teaching.

(1) Every class has its own personality, which develops quickly, certainly within the first three or four meetings. The teacher has some influence on how this collective personality emerges, but less than one might think. An experienced teacher knows what sort of personality a class has quite quickly.

(2) Some classes are dynamic and lively and almost seem to teach themselves. Another class, being taught precisely the same materials by the same teacher in the same semester, is slow and dull and must be dragged along. The students make (or fail to make) the "personality" of the class, but they do not understand this. They think the experience of being together is largely the result of the teacher's personality. The teacher is less central than they realize.

(3) Humor is quite important in the classroom. If students laugh at something I or another student says, they relax and they feel more comfortable. They are sharing a perspective and have become more cohesive. More rarely, and unfortunately, humor can also be a weapon in which a student or group of students is made the butt of jokes. This divides the class in ways that are hard to heal.

(4) As part of the class "personality" students quickly select where and with whom they want to sit. After a very few meetings they almost always go to the same places. If the teacher wants to get them to discuss things, it is a good idea to arrange the chairs to face one another, if a seminar table arrangement does not already do that. It is also a good idea, once in a while, to break up the established micro-groups as part of doing group work.

(5) Students can more easily be passive than active parts of a class. They rather easily fall into the role of observers who feel no responsibility for taking part in discussion. The passive students learn less, because they have not taken a position on a subject and defended it. They are just skating on the surface and are not coming to grips with questions, as they must when speaking. (More recently, those who go on the WEB during class might as well be seeing the class on a television with the sound turned off.)

(6) Student attention spans are limited. Few are willing or able to give their undivided attention to a lecture for an entire hour. A class works better if the teacher shifts activities more often than that.  One needs short periods of lecture, discussion, group work, powerpoint, etc.

(7) Brief conversations during class breaks (or during chance encounters) are quite useful and important. Frequently. there are students who say little during class who are quite willing to talk, one to one, while getting a coffee or stretching their legs in the hall. The Danish practice of having a short break each hour opens the possibility for such informal contacts. During such moments I often find out more regarding whether a student likes or dislikes a reading (and why) than I do during class.

(8) Students need (and like) quite different kinds of teachers. I have colleagues that can reach certain students far better than I can, and I can get on the wave-length of others better than they can. There is no one "ideal" sort of teacher, and certainly no "one best way" to do this job. What works brilliantly for another teacher will flop miserably for me, and the reverse. Ideally, a teaching staff should have considerable variety, and every student will find at least one teacher who seems especially well-suited to them.

(9) Much of what students learn is unintended. The idea that one can lay out a lesson plan and march them through a program is very nice as a theory, but often the student strays off the line of march and reads things not assigned but only mentioned or discovered independently. Because every student comes into class with a much different set of ideas and expectations, they also leave having absorbed much different "lessons."

(10) Often the best hours of teaching deviate quite a bit from the outline I had expected to cover. On those days, perhaps more than others, I was able to engage the students, and their energies and questions moved us in unexpected directions. Too much of this might be a bad thing, but in my experience the problem is not too much such engagement but too little. 

(11) The size of a class is crucial to success. A very small class (say three or four students) is actually quite hard to teach, as it usually lacks the critical mass necessary for dynamism and discussion. But beyond a certain point, somewhere around 25 students, a class becomes less talkative and more passive. This is partly due to shyness, partly due to the time constraints. When I have a class of 50 students for 45 minutes,  if they all speak for an equal length of time each will have less than 60 seconds. That does not permit much dialogue. The larger the class, the more likely it becomes mostly a lecture. This is easier for me, actually, than stimulating and guiding a discussion, but I am convinced the students learn less from lectures, for the most part, my brilliant lectures notwithstanding.

(12) Students do vary from one nation to another, but not as much as one might think or in the ways that might seem obvious. I have taught in the US, Spain, Britain, Holland, and Denmark, and taught guest classes in Norway, Germany, Portugal, Italy, and that is enough of this list already.  But this is a vast subject, so let it wait for another day.