Student Incentives and the Skills Gap: Siding with Students' Future-Selves
Issues and Solutions...
In our last post we addressed the incentive problems that universities and their faculty face as they work to improve programs and narrow the skills gap between what employers want and the graduates higher education produces. This week we tackle incentive problems that universities face when working with students.
Let’s start here. Students would be better prepared for long-term career success, and employers would experience smaller skills gaps in their preparation, if...
· Students took challenging classes to push themselves and learn more, and engaged in non-required but still essential co-curricular opportunities to build essential professional and personal skills.
Student Incentives: Fun Today, Payoff Tomorrow?
At most comprehensive universities we provide students multiple pathways to a degree – not only multiple majors, but many variants of similar courses. Introductory calculus might be offered in four flavors: an elite honors section for future mathematicians, a rigorous course offered for engineers, something more applied for business majors, a cookbook version for students who never want to take math again. Some of this variety reflects a desire to cater programming to individual student interests and specific degree paths. Some of it reflects a wide range of student capabilities. But some of it reflects a willingness to work hard in courses.
And boy, as any faculty member knows, there is a lot of variation in the willingness to work hard!
Every university has a set of exceptional students who make the institution proud in every way. But, from what we and most faculty can see, far too many of our students do only what is needed to graduate, taking easy courses of study, cheating on assignments, and approaching coursework in the knowledge that “C’s get degrees.” Students may also believe that a degree from the university is the only signal that matters, and not the major, nor their grades, and certainly not their participation in non-required co-curricular activities. What explains the poor work effort of these students?
One possibility is that there are generational differences in student attitudes and approach to work, exacerbated by the pandemic and its disruptions to norms. We will tackle that possibility in an upcoming post, but let’s start with incentives that hold regardless of generations.
Working hard in courses and in the co-curriculum comes at an immediate cost. That includes higher stress and cognitive load, the opportunity cost of working for money while in school (which many students need to pay bills), and the opportunity cost of missing out on the undeniably great social opportunities in college — football games, long weekends with a partner, and having too much fun at parties. But for all these costs, hard work brings a delayed benefit, with better learning and better career outcomes.
In effect, there is a clash of incentives between the student today and the person that student will become decades later. They are the same person, but the student deciding today whether to put in that extra effort is discounting the value to their future self.
In this respect they are exactly like every other person who eats an extra brownie today despite their future-self wishing their waistline was slimmer or their A1C levels lower, or even their tomorrow-morning-self wishing they had stopped one cocktail earlier the night before. Students are bad at this because everyone is bad at taking their future self’s interest into account, a phenomenon economists call “hyperbolic discounting” – the “hyperbolic” part because people routinely discount the future so steeply its almost as if the future does not exist.
That incentive problem is especially bad for younger people, and especially bad when the future is further off and uncertain. If students don’t understand how choices and effort made in college translate to improved career outcomes then effort feels like all cost and no benefit.
Solutions: Take the Side of Students’ Future-selves.
The underlying behavior is not just a student problem (one of the authors just finished off the last of the Ben and Jerry’s carton.) But a fix likely involves universities aligning themselves with the interests of the student’s future-self, not their current-self. What would this mean? Universities should
1. Increase the salience of student choices by relentlessly connecting choices students make today to the tangible benefits they will receive a few years hence… and for the rest of their lives. This could involve a concerted approach to advising, in which academic advisors and faculty repeatedly emphasize and encourage the right choices for students – starting before students arrive on campus. Then colleges/departments could re-enforce the wisdom of these choices by creating opportunities for alumni (especially young alumni) to interact with students and tell their story.
2. Increase immediate benefits for working harder and trying more. This could include increased financial aid for high performers as well as heighted non-monetary recognition. (e.g. Hummels used to offer a personalized recommendation letter from the Dean for case-competition winners.) Or the benefit could involve creating direct connections to career outcomes, something like giving favored access to interviews with preferred employers.
3. Create new sources of financial support for high-impact learning experiences such as study abroad and undergraduate research. This is particularly important for students whose financial constraints require them to work during the school year and limit their engagement in the full university experience.
4. Make individual courses tougher, not grade-inflating or otherwise providing easy pathways through courses, both to enhance learning and build professional skills such as persistence and meeting deadlines.
5. Reward, not punish, faculty for holding to a higher standard. A simple version of this would be discounting quantitative scores on student evaluations by the average GPA in a class, or at a minimum, reporting that GPA alongside the students’ approval ratings.
6. Stop offering watered-down versions of majors that sound to an outsider suspiciously like the more rigorous versions of majors.
7. Get significantly more punitive about cheating.
These approaches would be costly to both students and the university in a variety of ways. As an example, if these measures were not complemented with additional resources to support student success the university would likely experience increased time to degree and a declining graduation rate. (A troubling recent study by one of our colleagues Kevin Mumford and coauthors claims that the sharp gains in graduation rates universities have enjoyed over the past decades is entirely due to grade inflation.)
But in our view, it is past time to stop taking the side of our 19 year old customers and start taking the side of their 40 year old future selves.
Note: We won’t be posting next Friday, November 29, but will be back on Friday, December 6. Our topic: incentives and employers.
“Finding Equilibrium” is coauthored by Jay Akridge, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Trustee Chair in Teaching and Learning Excellence, and Provost Emeritus at Purdue University and David Hummels, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue.