Today in Teaching in Higher Ed

Very big indictment of Ohio that this buffoon rose all the way to U.S. Senator by never facing a real election.

Congratulations to Drake Peavy on his MA defense, "How NIL and the Transfer Portal Changed Competitive Balance in College Basketball."

After graduation, he'll be going to EY in Chicago as a Transfer Pricing Consultant.

Yay! Congrats!

I would love to read some qual research where people ask faculty their ideal uni to work at, while factoring in where they currently work, and where they got their terminal deg. I'm genuinely curious when and which people preference status over, say, living near family. Someone please do this.

What?

Line graph showing monthly absence rates for the 2024-25 school year. Two lines track students born inside vs. outside the U.S. from September through May. Both groups follow similar patterns through the fall, but diverge sharply at a vertical dashed line marking the January 20th inauguration. After that point, foreign-born students' absence rates remain elevated while U.S.-born rates decline as expected, eliminating the pre-inauguration gap.

NEW PAPER: We study the effects of immigration policy on student attendance in 2025. Students born outside the U.S. were 2.2pp more likely to be absent after Jan 2025 (a 37% increase).

That's ~2 extra missed days per semester.

LINK: edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1453
@annenberginstitute.bsky.social

College Closures As colleges and universities continue to face rising financial pressure, the topic of college closures has received increased attention from policymakers and the public. College closures are important...

I wrote a chapter for the @aefplivehandbook.bsky.social on college closures. It's a part of a great--and free--resource designed to support practitioners and policymakers in education.

Quiz Generator A local LLM-powered quiz generation tool that creates multiple-choice quizzes from student assignments and documents. There are examples if you are interested in what the results looks like. Currently it uses a local LLM through Ollama. There are validation checks to make sure it produces the right number of questions, and options. I also have set it up to use randomization via python on the answers (when I initially ran it without that almost every anser was B). I personally had good luck with Qwen 3.5. Why? There are two related purposes to this idea: A student who has spent time working and writing a paper ought to be able to easily answer questions about that paper. Yes, this was partially created out of a concern over AI use. I am a firm believer that the purpose of writing is to learn, I hope that this quiz demonstrates to students what they learned through their own research.

I've spent sometime over the last few months working on a way to generate quizzes for my students based on their own papers. I might write up a blog about my experiment later, but for now here is the code if anyone is interested in trying. github.com/reuning/quiz...

How Economics Discovered Women by Shelly Lundberg - Hardcover Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

My book (!) How Economics Discovered Women is now available for pre-order from the University of California Press. The book is a survey and critique of how the economics of gender has developed since the mid-1970s. www.ucpress.edu/books/how-ec...

💔 When were you there? My grandfather (David Smith) was faculty from 1970 to the mid 90s

Banner reading “A Tribute to David Smith – Our Teacher” from Hampshire College, featuring a large tree design filled with names and text, hung on a wall beneath wooden beams.

My grandfather passed away a few years before I started grad school, but his legacy as a teacher & mentor at Hampshire still inspires my life as an academic.

Here's a tapestry his former advisees had made for his memorial service. May we all be so lucky to learn from one another like they did. ❤️

Sad news. 😢 My grandfather was part of the first faculty at Hampshire when it opened in 1970, and my mom and her siblings grew up alongside the campus in its early days.

It's always been a special place for our family, to say nothing of the many students & scholars who found their paths there.

Tell Congress to Save NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate! On April 3, the Trump Administration released its budget request for fiscal year (FY) 2027. In it, the Administration states its intent to dismantle the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Social, Beh...

Hey, #EconSky! The administration is trying to cut NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate. Click below to contact your representatives and urge them to save it. Tell your friends. Our research matters and is worth funding!

www.congressweb.com/COSSA/58?fra...

@brhkim.bsky.social!

Be sure to check out some new work by our own Professor Peter Nencka @peternka.bsky.social

🎉🏫New paper! 🏫🎉 "High Schools and the Uneven Rise in American Opportunity" by myself, Alison Doxey, and Ezra Karger (@ezrakarger.bsky.social)

www.peternencka.com/assets/high_...

www.nber.org/papers/w35068

Incredible, fascinating work (as always!) by my pal @peternka.bsky.social & coauthors!

I’m offering a lightly used set of regalia in UC Berkeley colors to a junior faculty member, preference for a mom and 1st gen scholar. DM me your details— I’ll ship for free.

Call for papers for the 2026 AI in social science conference: submit by May 1. Conference will be held October 8-9, 2026 at the University of Chicago

Submit your work using AI in the social sciences to the annual AI in Social Science conference at the University of Chicago! Submissions due May 1!

The conference will be held October 8-9 in Chicago, IL, USA.

bfi.uchicago.edu/events/event...

@beckerfriedman.bsky.social
@caai-booth.bsky.social

It was a pleasure working with Grace on her thesis this year! If you or your team are looking for someone passionate about applying their technical skills to advance social impact, she’s your gal!

What?!?!

Thanks for the rec!

Oooo great! Thank you! Looking to see if they’ll go to Maine 👀

Thank you!! Excited to get back to my LAC roots 😊

If you’ve done a long distance move and actually had a *good* experience with your moving company, can you drop their name here? Please and thank you 🙏🏼

Is anyone thinking about submitting to APPAM this year a project on school segregation/composition or on high schools? I have an abstract that would fit nicely on a panel (but don't quite have the bandwidth to put a panel together myself)

If anyone has figured out how to do homework for stats oriented classes in the age of AI I'd appreciate hearing what you've done.

Half my class is clearly trying, the other half is submitting AI assignments that are perfectly fine but clearly devoid of human interaction.

Congrats, and thank you!

Foreign students *subsidize* domestic students. Without them college will be *more* expensive and there will be *fewer* spots.