Category Education
Should every child in Ontario have the right to attend a Catholic school?
Every child in Canada has the right to attend a free, government funded public school. But some schools are better than others. And the range of choices available to children varies widely – and arbitrarily – across the country.
On the benefits of full-day kindergarten
This post was written by Kevin Milligan of the Department of Economics at the University of British Columbia. There was a flurry of media coverage earlier this week on the full day kindergarten programs that are being rolled out in BC, Ontario, and PEI. I am here to expand a bit on some of the […]
Do women promote women?
It's tenure and promotion time. In universities across the country, assistant professors are preparing their files, bundling together every article they have ever published. The files are sent out to external reviewers, experts in the candidate's field, whose carefully worded letters can make or break young academics' careers. Every year I am asked to do […]
“It’s like having a private education within the public school system”
The demand for French immersion education in Vancouver so far outstrips the supply that the school board allocates places by lottery. But why? Is it because French is a useful employment skill? Because learning to speak French makes you a better person? Or is it because parents know intuitively what economists can show econometrically: peer […]
Why economics textbooks are (sometimes) ideological
In a recent comment on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative Tom Slee shared this experience: …{W]hen my son comes back from an Economics 101 course at an Ontario university and shows me bald statements like these from his textbook (Parkin and Bade) then I have no problem with using a broad brush to criticize the profession:… "Arguments […]
The market for textbooks: do economics professors practice what they preach?
Economics textbooks extol the virtues of competition. But the market for textbooks is anything but competitive. A professor typically requires students to buy a specific textbook. Even if that text is available from sellers such as amazon.com, students may not discover which books are required until the first day of classes, by which time it […]
In Praise of Dark Ages
This can't be quite right. But I'm going to run it by you anyway. An occasional Dark Age is a good thing. We sometimes need to forget. We sometimes need to torch libraries. That's the only way that knowledge can progress. Paul Krugman defined a Dark Age well. I forget exactly what he said, and […]
Has female empowerment caused a decline in teacher quality?
My sister, Rachel Goddyn, believes that expanding female job opportunities have led to a decline in the quality of elementary and high school teachers. My own family is a case in point. Our grandmother was a kindergarten teacher. My sister Alice and I both teach at universities — something that would have been unimaginable for our […]
SpongeBob SquarePants and the Economics of Identity
SpongeBob SquarePants lives in a pineapple under the sea, makes the best burgers in Bikini Bottom, and loves life. Akerlof and Kranton's Economics of Identity explains why SpongeBob is so happy. An identity is a sense of self, "this is who I am". Every one of us has many identities – our gender, nationality, religion, […]
How increasing tuition fees can increase university participation rates
I'm recycling this old post in celebration of Lucien Bouchard's call for an increase in Quebec university tuition fees. The Quebec government has just released a collection of studies on financing education, including this one (121-page pdf, in French) written by Valérie Vierstraete, a professor of economics at the Université de Sherbrooke. It addresses exactly […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments