Too much choice in higher ed?

After the recent exposure of the weakness of our undergraduate education that I lamented publicly, I find this a compelling point:

Recent work in psychology, marketing, and behavioral economics, however, presents compelling evidence that more choice is not always better. Why? Because while “homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi... the folks that we know are not like that… They are not homo economicus; they are homo sapiens” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008, pp. 6–7). Homo sapiens can make mistakes, and the way choices are structured can affect how frequent and severe these mistakes may be.

Mistakes can happen, for example, because of pure cognitive overload. When it comes to complex decisions with long-term implications, individuals often struggle to determine which factors are most important, to gather all of the relevant information, and to appropriately weigh the costs and benefits in a final calculation. For students trying to choose the right courses, just acquiring all of the necessary information, let alone absorbing it, can be prohibitively time-consuming. Details about course content are often located in one place, course schedules in another, and program rules and requirements in yet another—often in a several-hundred-page academic catalog. Some pieces of critically important information, such as instructor quality, may not be revealed until after a decision is made.

So it isn't just that students are studying less (which they are). They are also paralyzed in some way by the choices before them and as such never fully commit. College is a time of freedom from choice rather than commitment to a career path.

Georgia on my mind

Jay Bookman updates us on the fate of a de facto state income "flat tax" proposed by Republicans. As all thinking people already know, the "flat tax" is horribly regressive. It always, always means a raise in taxes for the vast majority of us, while lowering them significantly for the wealthy. Here's a chart put together by the Fiscal Research Center at GSU:


Now before you go and feel sorry for the wealthy, thinking they deserve a 20% break on their taxes, here's a chart showing the federal marginal tax rates for the top earners:

So basically rich people are already paying a significantly lower federal income tax rate than any time since the Great Depression. There is a strong inverse relationship between their tax rates and income inequality. The only person who should want a "flat tax" -- aka the Orwellian "fair tax" -- are those people making a hell of a lot more than 95% of us, who want even more by taking it from us.