Jason Furman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Our last conversation was with Reid Hoffman. He suggested that higher ed in the US now is operating maybe at 30 percent of possible capacity or effectiveness, and I think he meant the good schools, not the community college gone wrong or something. What’s your response to that? And what improvement do you think we should make, if any? Yeah. The hard thing is that there’s so little that we have evidence on. I co-taught the introductory economics course at Harvard with David Laibson. This past semester we did micro. Next semester we’re doing macro. We have over 600 students. We put a huge amount of effort into rethinking the course: how we taught the course, what we were teaching in the course, how we did assignments. how we assessed people, what we expected them to know. And we did all of that with, frankly, less randomized trial, rigorous evidence than I would do on most of the public policy questions that I work on because it’s simply not there. We used an awful lot of judgment. I talked to different people. I asked you your opinion of this question. I think what we did was good, but that there’s some other thing we could have done in terms of changing how we do the lectures, how we do the assignments, that would be even better, that it’s right next to us, and that I don’t realize it because the evidence is there. I’m painfully open to that possibility myself and would love to know. So the observation that we’re operating at 30 percent capacity — that’s probably true. But that’s only useful if you can tell me what I need to do to get to 50 or 100. And I don’t know where to find that information. But just taking that one class, Ec 10, now that you’ve taught it, what don’t other people teach enough of? In that class.…

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