Posted: May 25th, 2015

Economic topics

Economics 479
McNamee
Assignment 2
Adam Falk, the president of Williams College, recently conducted a study of predictors of
student success on his campus. He concluded that the single best one is not a student’s
major, courseload, or financial means, but the amount of personal, face-to-face contact
that student has with his or her professors.
Against this evidence, universities and colleges are increasingly turning to online
education, in courses such as this very one, to save money on overhead costs. With
online courses, they need not pay for the physical space used in teaching, that is, and
they can and do hire adjunct faculty for whom they do not have to provide benefits such
as health care or a retirement plan.
You are an advisor to the incoming president of a university. In less than a week’s time,
the president is going to announce her plan either to (1) convert most of the university’s
undergraduate teaching to online courses or to (2) reserve online courses for specialized,
graduate-level seminars and concentrate on classroom teaching.
The president’s announcement will take the form of a 500-word speech. Your job is to
assemble good reasons—ideally, three of them—why she should adopt either option 1 or
option 2, and then provide a firm economic argument to support her choice. Her
argument might be couched, for instance, in terms of affordable education for the
broadest number of students possible, or it might press the case that higher education
should not be as widely available as it is; it might conjure up the social benefits of a large
number of educated people, or it might even discuss the utility, or economic “happiness,”
that comes from personal discussions in the classroom.
Some possible concepts to use are indeed utility, as well as the law of supply and the law
of demand, opportunity cost, cost/benefit analysis, and scarcity. There are many other
possibilities, and your job is to determine the strongest one that matches your case.
Please see and follow the syllabus for matters of format. In brief, your speech must be
double-spaced, in Times or Times New Roman font, and saved as a .doc file in Word
97-2004 (Mac) or 98-2003 (Windows) format. Your speech must carry a title and byline
(for example, The Case for Online Courses / by Adam Smith, where the slash represents
a return and new line). Use the file-naming convention you followed in Assignment 1:
Lastname_Firstname_Econ479_2.doc.
Remember that you are writing the speech for another person. Do not cast it thus: “as
your economic advisor, I suggest…” but instead “as president of the university, I have
decided…”
The president and I look forward to reading your speech, which is due before 5:00 PM on
May 27. As ever, now is a good time to reread the syllabus and checklist.