Education

I think this is the coolest thing I’ve seen to hit the slow as morass world of education. Jonathan coined the phrase in response: “education arbitrage.” What a fantastic idea.

BOSTON (Reuters) – Private tutors are a luxury many American families cannot afford, costing anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour. But California mother Denise Robison found one online for $2.50 an hour — in India.

“It’s made the biggest difference. My daughter is literally at the top of every single one of her classes and she has never done that before,” said Robison, a single mother from Modesto.

Her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, is one of 1,100 Americans enrolled in Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched U.S. services last November with a staff of 150 “e-tutors” mostly in India with a fee of $100 a month for unlimited hours.

Taylor took two-hour sessions each day for five days a week in math and English — a cost that tallies to $2.50 an hour, a fraction of the $40 an hour charged by U.S.-based online tutors such as market leader Tutor.com that draw on North American teachers, or the usual $100 an hour for face-to-face sessions.

“I like to tell people I did private tutoring every day for the cost of a fast-food meal or a Starbucks’ coffee,” Robison said. “We did our own form of summer school all summer.”

Jonathan and Lex said it better than I can:

Jonathan: Agreed. The real story is that it potentially undercuts the entire
govt-schools system. If you have kids going from failure to excellent
performance based on a couple of hours’ tutoring per day, how much better
would they perform if they spent four or six hours every day with their
online tutors and blew off their schools entirely? That’s what parents will
be thinking. The teachers’ unions are going to try to make this kind of
tutoring illegal or so larded up with mandated bulls*** that it won’t be
effective. I don’t think the unions can succeed, however.

Yippee. Education arbitrage.

Lex: EDUCATION ARBITRAGE!

Those bast***s in the real, existing, Brezhnevite system we have here are going to EAT DEATH at long last.

This is the beginning of the market wedge that will split the whole rotten system apart.

I hope I hope I hope.

I hope that’s the reception TutorVista continues to get as it catches. Check out their website here. Outsourcing hits education, disintermediation with a vengence…

I wanted to add a couple of things to what Ginny said about SATs. The SATs have been a burr under my saddle since ETS “re-centered” the test in 1994. Mensa* no longer accepts the new SAT because the statistics are now so screwy – they no longer correlate with IQ. The scores had been dropping for a while prior to 1994 and the educational powers-that-be wanted to hide it, so they re-jiggered the baseline. In practice, this meant a 100 – 200 point increase in the composite score – I knew of 2 kids who took both the 1993 and 1994 version (within a few months, and without extra test prep, so extra schooling was not a factor), and that was the difference in their scoring. N of 2, I know, but I have evidence I’ll provide lower down that this is pretty typical.

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Comments on Shannon’s post reminded me of a news report I’d heard this morning.

The College Board is trying to put a pretty face on it, but the fact remains: “For the class of 2006, overall combined scores for mathematics and critical reading dropped by seven points from last year,” although they finish the sentence with “which represents less than 1 percentage point.” If you want to see the scores over a long period (which doesn’t make us boomers look all that bad), look at Table 2. Various other tables give other data, including a graph that shows the improvement in math scores over the last decade – though certainly not back to 1967 levels – as well as those in critical thinking.

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Since Shannon is blasting Ed Schools and their graduates, I figured I’d put in my 2 cents. I’m not in the Academy anymore, so I don’t have to play the nicey-nice games of pretending that every department’s research is equally valuable to society, and that all Ph.D.s represent the same intellectual effort on the part of the Ph.D. holder. I once I read a comment about how Education Ph.D.s resent that graduate students and professors in other disciplines, especially science, intimate or outright state that Education Ph.D.s are stupid. I’m certainly guilty of that. Where’s my data?

Well, let us get some figures, shall we? Like my advisor used to say, an argument without numbers is a religious discussion. Whom are you trying to convert? Take a look at this, and scroll down to the section titled “How Difficult Is Admission To A Good Program” (the title is on the left-hand sidebar). There is a chart of majors and their average GRE scores. Out of 28 programs reported by ETS in 2002, which one scored #28 in the mean total GRE score? Public Administration. Wow, we give political and bureaucratic power to these bozos? But on topic, which one scored #27? Yep, you guessed it, Education. Education schools were spared the ignominy of last place only by the sheer ineptitude of those wishing to enter government service. And it’s not even as if they had bombed the Qual section, the average Verbal score was lower than any Engineering discipline except for Industrial Engineering. (Engineers, for those who are uninitiated, are reputed to not be able to write worth beans. Unfortunately, this stereotype is often deserved.)