Free Trade in College Professors!

Matthew Yglesias throws down the gauntlet:

TAPPED: THE ECONOMICS OF SELF-INTEREST. I tend to agree with the consensus in the economics profession in general, and with Alex Tabarrok in particular, in the current immigration debate. But this is a bridge too far for me: "Economists are probably also more open to immigration than the typical member of the public because of their ethics -- while economists may be known for assuming self-interested behavior wherever they look, economists in their work tend not to distinguish between us and them." That's a mighty generous self-interpretation. A skeptic might think that this has less to do with "tend[ing] not to distinguish between us and them" than with the fact that economists reap benefits from high levels of Mexican immigration.

I'll believe that this is all about altruism when I see an open letter from economists demanding that we scrap the complicated H1B visa system and instead allow unrestricted immigration of foreign college professors without all these requirements about prevailing wages, work conditions, non-displacement, good-faith recruitment of natives, etc. Obviously, there are many foreign born professors in the United States, but there could be many more, wages for academics could be lower, and college tuitions could be significantly lower. If there's really no difference between "us" and "them" economists should be leading the charge to disassemble the system of employment protections they enjoy.

--Matthew Yglesias

I'll pick up the gauntlet:

I hereby call on all governments to allow free mobility of university professors. All universities and other institutions of higher education should be allowed to hire whoever they want to reside, teach, and do research at their universities, without let or hindrance by any government whatsoever.

Comments

[Nathan Newman]

Of course, to put yourself in the full position of your average worker fearing immigration, you'd have to also call for abolishing tenure and placing yourself in jeapordy of being replaced.

Ready to take that further plunge?

[save_the_rustbelt]

Your call to action is pretty hollow unless you renounce tenure.

The guys at Cafe Hayek have taken me to task because I suggested a real free trader economics professor could not accept or retain tenure. Didn't make any friends.

So, in or out?

[hack]

Hell, talk is cheap. Just calling for the abolishion of tenure is not enough. I hereby call upon professor DeLong to resign his faculty appointment effective immediately and notify the university that he will only work on a year to year contractual basis.

[Slocum]

For free trade in education, what we *really* need is to break the acreditation/parchment-printing ologopoly:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30632

What's required are alternate forms of acreditation that will eliminate the exorbinant rents universities are able to charge because of their exclusive licenses to print parchment. Ask yourself, why would anybody spend thousands of dollars for the right to sit in the back of a 400-student lecture hall when they could be watching a video or reading a book (at home at their own convenience)? The answer is simple -- rent-seeking. The university has the right to issue 'credit hours', and there's no way for the student to earn them for simply mastering the same material on his own (more efficiently and for a tiny fraction of the cost).

Keep in mind -- Abraham Lincoln never went to law school.

[billy]

I think it's unfair to call for Prof. DeLong to work without a tenure. Tenureship is a term of employment willingly entered into by employer and employee.

If you are asking the Prof. to retry getting tenure in a more competitive market, that's fair.

But if a person of high calibre will not work without tenure, and the University agrees to that in a competitive market, what's wrong?

And why just economists? Doctors, nurses, accountants, lawyers, bankers, brokers - let's get competition for all of them. Why should the Walmart worker and tech engineer bear the brunt of competition? Open immigration will make all the services of todays high cost professionals accessible to the minimum wage worker. I'm all for it.

[spencer]

the way the academic labor market works is that the graduates of the top universities work at that level or at a lower level. The graduates of the second ranked schools work at that level or a lower level, etc..
It is almost unheard of for a graduate of a third ranked school to go to a top ranked school.

So out good hosts competition are the graduates of maybe a dozen top ranked economic departments around the world.

Moreover, it is extrmely unlikely that the president of a top school will decide to eliminate half of the economics department so the university will hit the numbers Wall Street expects next quarter.

I'm sure our host believes what he said, but I'm also sure it would not make any difference. There are many instiutional arrangements that limit markets besides government and/or tenure.

[RSA]

Why is the suggested alternative to tenure always a five-year or one-year contract? And why do people equate tenure with having a job for life?

Having tenure doesn't mean that you can't be fired for just cause. (I'd be interested in any universities that don't have such a caveat in place.) Misconduct, misbehavior, neglect of one's duties, etc., can all lead to dismissal.

[Ari]

Same issue, I am not going to give up the AMA even when I do not agree with positions because the organization at least potentially can protect my interests. Workers need security, and if economics professors are willing to give up tenure, who cares? I would not give up tenure, and I am sure they would not do so. Alex Tabarrok has no concern that I can find for workers, but he is sure to be completely secure.

[david]

Our host does not believe what he said.

[Robert Waldmann]

I too pick up the gauntlet and hereby call on all governments to allow free mobility of university professors. All universities and other institutions of higher education should be allowed to hire whoever they want to reside, teach, and do research at their universities, without let or hindrance by any government whatsoever.

Also everyone else too. I really think most economics professors, including those without tenure, stronly support abolition of the H1B visa system. I think that Yglesias's proposal was made hoping it would really be taken up and that he has told academic economists how to be taken seriously.

Sad to say, I see nothing at Atrios, but I guess he is a electro journalist now.

[wml]

Well the key word is GOVERNMENTS. The market might be restricted for other reasons, but at the very least the government shouldn't make things worse by restricting the free flow of persons across countries.

[Jeffrey Alan Miron]

I'm with Brad and Matthew. No immigration restrictions on professors. Or anyone else either.

[sm]

Would law school have ruined Lincoln?

[Auros]

Unless they're planning to recruit the professors for research-only, can we please at least require them to speak English? Teaching is definitely a job where speaking the language is a serious qualification. I had some math professors at Johns Hopkins who I am sure were brilliant, but generally could not make themselves understood to the undergrads in the classroom.

[dale]

"No immigration restrictions..."
Lack of money may restrict someone from immigrating. Shall we provide expense stipends for all immigrants who can show need? Surely, if immigration is an ethical issue, money, or the lack of it, shouldn't be allowed to filter who is free to come.

[radek]

Sign me up too.

[Fred Hapgood]

Whatever the free speech and freedom of research arguments for tenure might be, it is also true that academic hiring is such an insanely complicated and fantastically time consuming project that once it is done for a specific person nobody wants to do it over again. An institution that ran on five year contracts would do nothing but attend to hiring.

[Colin Danby]

Amen.

[andres]

But why bother with immigration and visa requirements? Haven't you people ever heard of distance learning? With the right player software and websites it will be perfectly possible to take principles of macro from an Indian professor sitting in his Bombay office. Visas? Who needs them?

[anne]

What am I missing? Universities routinely bring on international faculty for short and long term positions. There are endless ways of doing so. Also, I am not about to give over tenure and only wish to expand it. Why ever should I be so self-sacrificial or wish to weaken faculty positions? What I would prefer is to improve the general balance between employers and workers, so that workers at all levels have security approaching that in Europe. I also never have the slighest idea that Alex Tabarrok cares a fig about workers and instinctively turn from any position he might favor. Whether he gives up tenure is of no concern to me.

[a different chris]

>But if a person of high calibre will not work without tenure

Funny how it exists in absolutely no other walk of professional life.

I guess nobody outside the ivory towers is "high-calibre"???

PS: that's not to say that I'm unsympathetic to anne's general point. A co-worker of mine was whining about what the UAW wanted - along the lines of "I don't have this, and I don't have that, so they should give it up".

I asked him why he didn't think the problem was that (unlike our lesser-educated parents) we "didn't have this, didn't have that" instead of the fact that the UAW workers did?

save-the-rustbelt: I gotta see that thread. Nobody really likes to hear the truth, do they?

[save_the_rustbelt]

a different Chris:

STR gets flogged to within an inch of his motley life...

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/trade/index.html

The Trade section of Cafe's archives.

[Colin Danby]

To pick up on Anne's question, Canadian universities, I think as a matter of law, stipulate in job ads that "Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority." and I think some other countries are even more discriminatory.

In the U.S., onerous visa procedures are a substantial non-tariff barrier. If you're a star, U.S. universities may go to the trouble of bringing you in. But if you're a grad student appplying for your first job, and you have neither citizenship nor green card, a lot of places won't even look at you -- they're not willing to go to the trouble and uncertainty of the visa process. If you hire in, say, March you have no assurance that you can have the person in place and teaching by September.

To pursue Andres' point, indeed there are a lot of interesting things we could do. Virtual classes with students on different continents. All kinds of interesting faculty collaborations. The bandwidth is there, and cheap enough.

[Matt]

But, you see, it is my desire to take my advanced degree to a foreign land, renounce my USA citizenship, become a new citizen of my adopted country, immigrate to the USA, get a professor job, then return to my old country, and outsource my new job over the internet.

I wonder if my return on the investment will cover the airline tickets.

[christo]

Twenty million Chinese college professors will be in California next week.

[A. Zarkov]

Very easy to support something you know will never happen. He’s giving us the sleeves off his vest. However tenure and other barriers to entry can serve a useful purpose. Who wants to be a commodity? Who wants a career that involves constant insecurity? That’s what happened to computer science, and American students have abandoned this major in droves. They flock to careers like law, which has substantial entry barriers.

You can’t practice law without a license. You can’t take the bar exam to get the license without attending an accredited law school, and at least in California the bar exam is hard to pass. The February 2006 exam had 39% pass rate. Thus the State Bar can easily regulate reduce the number of new lawyers by simply making the exam more difficult. If you want to work in a top-notch law firm you need to attend a tier 1 school, have a high GPA, and clerk for a federal judge, and of course pass the bar.

While the business community pays lip service to free markets and competition, in reality they only want that for everyone else, particularly for their employees. For themselves they want a monopoly, or at least a comfortable niche. They try like hell to avoid being in a commodity business. So I think entry barriers do serve a useful purpose, and that applies to immigrants too.

[Arun Khanna]

I understand signaling of educational quality of institutions.
I do not support free immigration for all foreign college faculty.

I suffer from agency problems.
I do not support free immigration of all foreign college Professors.

I believe in the system of nation states.
I do not support free unchecked immigration from the Middle East for any college Professor.

[Scott Martens]

Never happen. It'd take about 10 minutes for somebody to work out that language skills constitute an informal trade barrier that discriminates against anglophone doctoral candidates and that there is no Pareto optimal way to eliminate this trade barrier. Most foreign graduate students study English, and many do not study any other foreign language, and there are very few English language universities in non-English speaking countries, so most non-English speaking countries have nothing to lose by agreeing to free trade in faculty. They end up hiring roughly the same number of local graduates, even under free trade conditions, and their excess production of doctorates can, at least in part, be exported to the English speaking world.

Teaching Anglo students foreign languages will not improve matters unless there is at least one foreign language with as many faculty positions as the English speaking world. Maybe Chinese will fit the bill in 30 years, but it sure doesn't now. Converting foreign universities from local languages to English is not a Pareto optimization because it lowers the quality of education for non-native English speakers.

Nah, the lumpenprofessoriat would never stand for it. Only the most spectacular anglophone doctorates would ever have a chance of finding work. They'd find some good free trade based argument for opposing it.

[save_the_rustbelt]

"Who wants to be a commodity? Who wants a career that involves constant insecurity?"

Academic economists seem to think this swell for everyone but professors. In truth few ever have security, but we have unraveled 100 years of progress toward soem security for workers.

[Karl Smith]

All of this stuff about Delong droping his tenure or working year-to-year is cute. However, it ignores the unasialable fact that he is BRAD DELONG.

Its not going to matter. Is Derek Jeter going to bebat risk for losing his job if we open baseball to foreign competition?

[save_the_rustbelt]

"All of this stuff about Delong droping his tenure or working year-to-year is cute. However, it ignores the unasialable fact that he is BRAD DELONG."

Hey, we get to have some fun too.

Maybe we should start an economist fantasy league, we could print cards with their pictures.

I'll give you one Samuelson for two DeLongs.

[Vickrey]

As it is, the vast majority of graduate students in the top Economics Ph.D. programs in the country are foreign born.
As a US-born Professor at a large public university let me just say that I positively welcome open applicants from the world over. Already most of the applicants are in fact foreign born, as are the vast majority of economics graduate students at the best Ph.D. programs.
It is in my own best interest. Academic departments are teams, and you always want to have the best players on your side. Both because you share in the team victories, and because it raises your own level of play. By definition, you get the best selection of players by drawing from the biggest possible pool.

[Vickrey]

P.S. - I should add to the above comment that I am still an assistant professor, so it's not just cheap talk.
It should also be said that just because some of us argue for removing all barriers to hiring foreign born or foreign trained professors, that we should also argue against tenure. They are quite different issues. Tenure is an institutional and contractual adaptation that has evolved to serve universities and faculty very well. In short: removing immigration barriers would add some insecurity to US-born assistant professors but improve university education and research, whereas arbitrarily placing barriers on the institution of tenure (which is after all voluntarily accepted and continued decade after decade by universities and professors) would probably end up harming both.

[liberal]

A. Zarkov wrote, "That’s what happened to computer science, and American students have abandoned this major in droves. They flock to careers like law, which has substantial entry barriers."

I agree in principle, but from my anecdotal observations, many computer folks are still paid a very nice salary. Not as nice as in the dot com boom, but still pretty nice, given the skills involved.

[liberal]

A. Zarkov wrote, "You can’t practice law without a license. You can’t take the bar exam to get the license without attending an accredited law school, and at least in California the bar exam is hard to pass."

IMHO the real rent-seeking part of this is the accredited law school part.

They can make the bar as hard as they want; I'm sure there would still be lots of people from India who could pass it. (I'm assuming that India has some kind of Anglo-American system of law.)

[MDtoMN]

"you want to work in a top-notch law firm you need to attend a tier 1 school, have a high GPA, and clerk for a federal judge, and of course pass the bar."

Not True - Students are hired by top-notch law firms at the end of the students' second year in school (after a summer at the firm), and then they apply for clerkships. There is no clerkship requirement for working at a top notch firm. The rest is required, that is true.

[Oskar Shapley]

I hereby call on all governments to do something I know they do not want to and will not do. Surprise me.

[A. Zarkov]

liberal:

“IMHO the real rent-seeking part of this is the accredited law school part.”

Yep you got that exactly right.

“They can make the bar as hard as they want; I'm sure there would still be lots of people from India who could pass it.”

That’s also true, provided they take the bar review course. The dean of Stanford Law School, (one of the hardest in the US to get into) flunked the California bar exam. It seems she wanted to quit Stanford and work for a private firm, so she needed to get licensed in CA. Evidently she didn’t take bar review or study much. She did pass the on the second try.

The system is designed to keep the hordes out, and it works pretty well at that.

[A. Zarkov]

MDtoMN:

“Not True - Students are hired by top-notch law firms at the end of the students' second year in school (after a summer at the firm), ..”

Yes, you are quite right, I goofed on that one. What I really meant was a clerkship is a tremendous help to a legal career, and private firms are happy to let their new associates go off and do a clerkship. If you don’t get that first summer job at a big law firm you can recover with a clerkship. It usually means an automatic boost in salary.

Thanks for the correction.

[zain]

Dear sir madam
i would like to know more economics and the different between statistics
thanks

[International Professors Proj]

Warmly recruiting new members!

[intlprof]

We are building to send First World academics into the Third World. Those we have there now, arrived under their own steam.

We aim to create a somewhat peripatetic academic; not sovereign but akin to an institutionalized Independent Scholar.... traditional type of prof will also be welcome.

Conceiving a new professor; examining the idea of the professor