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20.2.05 [ Redefining the Objective Function--Revisited ] 8 comments

8 Comments:

Once again, BC's Ministry of Education comes through for me: A Recent Survey of High School Students gives some nice stats with respect to a students' concerns when considering advanced education.
Blogger Mike, at 6:45 PM 


Just a thought: I use Microsoft outlook to manage my personal information and scheduling and contacts and such. MSWindows routinely conects to the Microsoft servers to check for "updates". I wonder, though, how much of my personal information does microsoft know? To get ahold of some of that macro-data (no names, no specifiec addresses, no personally identifiable data) would be pretty wicked for doing any number of econometric studies. *sigh*
Blogger Mike, at 6:51 PM 


Some very nice numbers which devuldge some detailed socio-economic information are available here. This is great save for the study group: people already in post-secondary (where the heck is Northwestern University? the northwest, I suppose--Yukon? Alaska?). It would be ideal to find some detailed info like this, but from high school students who also describe their post-secondary plans.
Blogger Mike, at 6:57 PM 


This is more than useless, I just had to post it here because it's cot "comprehensive" in the title--which is what I'm looking for (but I'm looking for something that is actually comprehensive, rather than merely called comprehensive).
Blogger Mike, at 7:13 PM 


ooh! College comparison study! Yeah, this is awesome, but it's got more variables than data points (how can you have negative degrees of freedom?!)
Blogger Mike, at 7:16 PM 


Increasingly, to do my project justice, I should really be collecting my own survey data. Arg!
Blogger Mike, at 7:17 PM 


Methodology for construcing a Social Welfare Function?
Blogger Mike, at 7:19 PM 


So you poltically-minded people don't get confused, when I say "social welfare", I am using the economist's lense.
Blogger Mike, at 7:27 PM 


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Definitely, I am going to assume the simple case, I just don't have the time to construct the realistic model--even if I did, it would provide almost no meaningful information. So, the stylized model (negative elastic demand, positive elastic supply) shall be employed. The question is still, "is the price of tuition fair?" but I will have to reword it so that it can be answered by a regression function.

Let's assume that I have constructed the three functions (demand, supply, social welfare). An equitable tuition price will reflect that students pay only those costs which provide explicit personal benefit (for a given level of enrollment), while the government pays for (through tax revenue) the external benefits to education. This is tough: I find it difficult to assign the proper regressands for external benefits, convincing others of the appropriateness of my social welfare function will be nearly impossible.

Ideally, I would like to find some academic paper which describes a social welfare function with respect to post-secondary education, and merely use that. Then I could smite potential criticism with: "hey, it's not my idea; someone smarter than the both of us thought it up!"

Then, there is the actual demand curve. In this instance, I will describe it as the marginal willingness to pay by a private consumer of advanced education. Here, I could collect my data by doing a survey where the subject chooses but a single hypothetical institution from many prototypes (each offering different services and prices). After the selection component of the survey, I would have a section on personal information (including all those important socio-economic factors). This would be ideal: I would send a copy to every grade twelve student in Elk Island and have instructors force their students to answer them (avoiding the self-selection bias). The only problem with the survey approach is that I have less than a week to collect the data.

Surprisingly, the supply curve will be the easiest to construct. Universities are required by the Freedom of Information and Protection Act to release their internal audits, and these are indeed quite accessible. Though a marginal supply cost will be impossible to quantify, a per-unit supply curve will be adequate (and will error on the side of lower tuition costs).

So, my goal for right now is to find survey information on students into post-secondary. I know I've answered a few, my friends have as well, the information is out there, but where?

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