Two good pieces in Inside Higher Ed look into Caroline Hoxby’s controversial NBER report. Neither of them is vindicating.
cost of education
One More Thing on NBER Report: Where did pre-2011 data come from?
The closer we look, the worse it seems.
New NBER Study on Online Education is Deeply Flawed
Caroline Hoxby from Stanford University just published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) claiming to analyze “The Returns to Online Postsecondary Education”. This report is a hot mess that that conflates online students, enrollments, programs, institutions and uses a bizarre and misleading data set for its analysis.
Recommended Reading: WCET Survey Report and Tony Bates Commentary
WCET released its survey results on the price and costs of online education last week, focusing on US higher education, and it has caused quite a stir due to the headline, first-look analysis. As Inside Higher Ed described in the article “Online Education Costs More, Not Less”: The myth that online education courses cost less to […]
A response to Bloomberg article on UCLA student fees
Megan McArdle has an article that was published in Bloomberg this week about the growth of student fees. The setup of the article was based on a new “$4 student fee to pay for better concerts”. To solve this problem, UCLA is introducing a $4 student fee to pay for better concerts. That illuminates a […]