Derek Rury

Today we released our new NBER working paper: "Easy A's, Less Pay: The Long-Term Effects of Grade Inflation." Joint work with Rachel Nesbit, Nolan Pope, and Merrill Warnick. Grades in U.S. high schools have risen steadily over the past several decades, but the effect is unknown

@HannahWardEdu @jt_kerwin @jt_kerwin here is an RCT we ran that tested whether texting parents vocabulary words boosted a pre-schooler’s vocabulary. It did! Perhaps not the same as the OP’s claim but we do cite the RCT you brought up. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

@jt_kerwin Correct.

Parenting hack that has served me well... Talk to your children like they're people. Even when they're babies! Talk to your babies using your full vocabulary. Just walk around explaining what's going on like a documentary narrator.

Very excited for this paper to be forthcoming at JEL! We learned so much working on this project and are indebted to the many excellent scholars whose work we draw on, who participated in the @nberpubs conferences on fertility, and who carefully (and anonymously) reviewed drafts and pushed us to clarify and deepen our thinking-

I'm honored and excited to join the faculty of America's oldest research university, Johns Hopkins. I'll start this summer as a full professor, one of the founding faculty at the brand-new School of Government and Policy. We're building something unique & historic.

⚡ Key takeaways from the #EdWorkingPapers Policy and Practice Series! A summary of “Making the Implicit Explicit: An Experiment with Implicit Gender Stereotypes and College Major Choice” by Stephanie Owen and Derek Rury 📄 edworkingpapers.com/policy-practic… #AnnenbergEdExchange

Many thanks to the folks at @AnnenbergInst for their write up on my working paper with @steph_r_owen on implicit gender-STEM stereotypes and major choice! edworkingpapers.com/policy-practic…

love the smell of success in the morning.

Humans are so fascinating…

@paulnovosad @DinaPomeranz Individuals/students respond to incentives and we’re creating a choice environment in higher education that is not producing the efficient level of human capital. There’s plenty of anecdata/opinions on this but not enough research on this topic.

Fair enough, we old folk should all be on guard for this. But my claim isn't that today's youth are rotten. It's that many features of today's institutions are doing moral harm to them. The worst thing we can do for young people is raise them in an environment where acting virtuous is self-harming. We control everything about how universities operate, we should be stamping out every incentive for dishonesty.

One of the side effects of well-meaning progressive policies was creating a system where everyone is constantly lying to get ahead. Lying about your fake 1/64th Native American identity to get into college, about your fake disability so you can have a dog in your dorm, about your sick grandma so you can get out of midterms, about the token representation on your "diverse" board, about your "joint venture" with a black-owned business so you can get a government contract, about your fake daycare, about your "home office" so you can get a tax writeoff, about your kid's ADHD so they get extra time, and on and on. The progressive instinct is that everything should be heavily regulated (to make it safe / fair), but also that we should have tremendous leniency for people in hardship. And then there's this bull-headed resistance to the idea that people might be cheating, because you're worried about unfairly excluding someone legitimate. These are well-intentioned instincts, but they result in really high returns to cheating. And then people cheat, and the instinctually honest people look around and say, "wait am I a sucker?" No small part of U.S. success over the generations was social trust, a system where most people felt like working hard and being honest was the way to get ahead. If that continues to erode, it will be catastrophic. Obviously there are many factors and groups to blame, but progressives have been running the institutions for a generation and need to recognize how damaging this combination of over-regulation + leniency has been. At elite colleges, students are *surrounded* by people cheating the system in small ways, getting away with it, and getting ahead. It's incredibly toxic and will make them all a little less trusting and a little less honest for their whole careers. This is part of why elite students these days want to get private equity jobs instead of starting social enterprises. They're learning early that everyone is looking out for only themselves and you're a fool if you do otherwise.

@jasonfurman @ojblanchard1 Students ideally are selecting fields in which they have a comparative advantage. Grade inflation influences and degrades students solving this information problem, leading to an inefficient allocation of human capital in the economy.

@jasonfurman @ojblanchard1 There is also evidence that grade inflation happens differentially across fields (perhaps not at Harvard, but elsewhere). This influences what fields students select into if they have little information about the degree of GI in different fields.

Olivier makes a key point: The issue really is grade *inflation* not just grade *levels*. GPAs have risen at most every U.S. school for most every year since the 1960s. And the steady-state equilibrium absent price controls may well be every student getting an A in every course.

At every level (elementary, high school, college) there is an INCENTIVE to inflate grades for institutions because grades are highly salient and the down-stream impacts (productivity) are hidden. We definitely need more research on this topic.

Grade inflation is a hazard because humans are ego-driven agents who are cost/effort-minimizers. It’s a part of our DNA. But grade inflation likely arises because educational institutions exist in a market where butts in seats rule supreme.

Parents try to help struggling kids — but grades shape their beliefs far more than test scores, especially when the signals conflict. Information interventions based solely on test scores may have muted effects if grades paint an overly rosy picture.

Because parents overweight grades, inflated grades hide academic struggles — preventing investments that would otherwise occur. This is a cost of grade inflation that hasn’t been documented before.

Why do parents invest more in their child’s education? Do they respond more to grades… or to standardized test scores? And what happens when these signals conflict? A new paper w/@ariel_kalil digs into this fundamental question. 👇 drive.google.com/file/d/10heyLC…

Main Effect 2: Grades Matter More Across all choices, parents put significantly more weight on grades than on test scores. Grades move investment decisions more than equivalent changes in percentile test scores.