CEO Pay

The latest data on CEO Pay (from the Economic Policy Institute):

The continued rise of adjuncts in higher education

The following is from the Wall Street Journal (see here)

Krugman brings the data

Paul Krugman, though often shrill, nevertheless is an economist who pays attention to the data (see here).  The graph below should make everyone involved in the debate (perhaps, a kind description of what passes for this in America today) think twice about their rigid views regarding fiscal policy.

Krugman says:

The point is that 2010 was a real moment of truth. Were you going to go with the logic of more or less Keynesian macroeconomic models, or were you going to decide that loose psychological speculation about confidence trumped the arithmetic of spending? Being a forthright Keynesian at the time meant sticking out your neck quite a lot: you were running very much counter to what the Very Serious People were saying, and you would have been ridiculed and possibly suffered some serious career damage if US or UK interest rates had soared the way the VSPs warned, if inflation had taken off, if the correlation between government spending and GDP had turned out to be negative instead of positive.

As it turned out, however, the Keynesian view came out looking very good, and siding with the VSPs was not a good move after all.

Some troubling data

The graph below is quite troubling to me - I just don't know what to make of it.

Data on Grade Inflation in American Universities

Tim Taylor (see here) points us to research by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy regarding grade inflation (see the following graph).

Rojstaczer and Healy state:

Even if grades were to instantly and uniformly stop rising, colleges and universities are, as a result of five decades of mostly rising grades, already grading in a way that is well divorced from actual student performance, and not just in an average nationwide sense.

Taylor notes (see here)

Like so many other bad habits, grade inflation is lots of fun until someone gets hurt. Students are happy with higher grades. Faculty are happy not quarreling with students about grades...
 
To me, the real and practical problem of grade inflation is that it causes students to alter their choices, away from fields with tougher grading, like the sciences and economics, and toward fields with easier grading. 

Executive Orders

I "don't have a dog in this fight" as the saying goes, but for the record:

The fall of "faculty governance"

Timothy Taylor (see here) has a new post entitled "Administrators Take Over Academia."  Using recent research and data, he details how the notion of "faculty governance" - once a cornerstone of higher education - has declined to the point of irrelevance in some Universities.  It seems to be the norm these days as universities continue to spread the "we are a business" propaganda without ever making clear what they mean by that.  He shows the graph below which details the rise of this philosophy.