I wonder how the videos worked for you today. Truthfully, for explicating data, they are probably as good as a live presentation where I would otherwise have to futz with the computer screen in class. It did work from my end. My throat was in much better shape today after class than on Tuesday. I do hope they have a microphone for me soon, but now at least there is plan B in case not.
Here are some subject matter ideas on the various videos and related issues.
About tuition - We didn't mention college specific surcharges. While they didn't exist at all when I started back in 1980, they are now important. The one for College of Business started during the time I was an Associate Dean there (2006 - 2010). I know the surcharge for the College of Engineering was already in place by then, but I don't know when that started. Something to understand about these surcharges - the bulk of the money flows back to the specific college. In contrast, for the base tuition, much of that goes to campus administration. This is an example of transfer pricing, which we'll be talking about in a few weeks.
The other very important issue with tuition is that the table I showed might be referred to as "list prices." If a student gets a full or partial scholarship, then the "transaction prices" will be lower than the list prices. It would be great to get data on the transaction prices - what fraction of the students are paying the full list price and what sorts of discounts are the other students getting? I believe such information is harder to come by, though I'm not really sure why other than for this reason. If student A pays full tuition and student B gets a discount, is part of what A pays used to cover that discount for B? Were it framed that way, A might be miffed. On the flip side of this, I think the campus needs to be open about how such discounts are allocated. And if we looked at income distribution of the families who have students attending the U of I, I would guess that the upper middle class and well to do families are over represented. (Right now I'm saying that without the data to back me up, but I don't think it is a fabrication.) To attract more students from working class families, those tuition discounts will be needed.
Another variable to consider that we didn't discuss is class (or section) size. I showed that IUs have risen about 10%. We didn't present any information on the growth of instructional staff. If they have grown, but by less than 10%, then class size must be going up, on average. There is also a composition effect to consider. Fewer students are majoring in the humanities now. Humanities course are frequently taught in smaller sections. If those students who used to major in the humanities are now majoring in other disciplines, economics for example, and econ classes are larger on average than classes in English or comparative literature, this shift in what students major in will also cause an increase in average class size.
Marketing of the U of I - What message is getting out? From when I started in 1980 to the mid 2000s, I was a pretty serious fan of U of I men's basketball. I would go to home games and watch the away games on TV. Of interest here are the commercials that aired during halftime that promoted the university. (I'm guessing that the same commercials would also air at halftime of football games.) My recollection, imperfect as it may be, is that many of these commercials featured a dedicated researcher who somehow brought undergraduates into the research, either within a class setting, or as part of the research team in the researcher's lab. The message being sent was that research and undergraduate education are strong complements and that undergraduate students get involved in research when at the U of I. I don't doubt the sincerity of the faculty member depicted in the commercial, but I always question how representative those commercials were of the overall situation on campus. I haven't seen such commercials recently. (I stopped watching basketball here a while ago.) Has the marketing changed in accord with some of the data we looked at in class today? Or is it still pretty much the same as it was? It may be the normal expectation is for a large organization to somewhat hype its product, whatever the organization and whatever the setting. But too much hype starts to be a violation of trust and thus tarnishes the brand of the organization. We should discuss this a bit more on Tuesday. We should also discuss how much the marketing matters for forming an impression of the university.
Teaching a course as if the subject is a settled matter versus taking an inquiry approach - Intermediate microeconomics, as a methodology, is pretty much a settled matter. Applications of intermediate micro, in upper level courses such as ours, the topics are far less settled and interesting questions keep popping up that deserve to be addressed. Are researchers more likely to embrace an inquiry approach than teaching faculty? I don't know the answer to this question. For those of you who have already taken other 400 level courses in economics, it would be good to learn how those courses were taught, as settled or as inquiry. And for those of you who have another major in math or science, it would be good to know if the answer is different there.
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