 Good afternoon or good morning wherever you are. This is our fireside chat. I'm not sure how cozy everyone is feeling but I have my mug of tea in front of myself and it's a relatively cool afternoon here in Maputo so I think we can it's not cold enough to light a fire but we can suspend our disbelief for a few moments. Just to introduce myself my name is Sam Jones. I'm a research fellow with UNU wider as I said based in Mozambique primarily working with the Ministry of Economy and Finance but today it's a real privilege and honor to be able to have a brief conversation with Professor Miguel Urquiola. I probably got the pronunciation wrong so forgive me. Thank you. I think Miguel if I may I mean I'm sure that to most of us here you need no introduction but just very briefly Miguel is a professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Columbia that's the one in New York and is also a member of the UNU wider board. Miguel's research has focused primarily on I mean very broadly speaking on education but particularly around issues of school choice and the ongoing debate around the merits of public versus private provision of education. If I recall I think I first came into contact with his work in the 2006 Apples and Oranges paper which I'm not sure if you remember but I thought it was very helpful because it gave some kind of innovative and interesting measures of education system performance and how to do that using survey data. Some of the more recent work has looked at school vouchers there's a very important survey in the general of economic literature on school vouchers and also a recent discussion about whether education is a consumption or investment good in the annual review of economics but more recently Miguel has turned his attention to higher education and he has a recent book out entitled Markets, Mines and Money and he asks and answers of course why is it that the vast majority of top ranked research universities are located in the USA? I mean I guess for many of us we just take that for granted but as he shows in the book and it might want to elaborate on this wasn't always the case in Europe I mean Europe European universities UK Germany in particular were some of the leading centres of education for a long time until at least the end of the 19th century and I'm sure that for many of us attending the conference here we have some academic interest or role with universities so how universities can be strengthened and particularly the research element of universities how that can be strengthened and nurtured is very relevant. So we're going to start our chat with a little bit focusing on the book but I should say beforehand that if anyone wants to drop in and ask a question you're more than welcome so please just place that in the Q&A make sure you click session and then Q&A and feel free to write your question there. So turning back to the book Miguel you I think you grew up in Bolivia but took your university education in the US so was this choice of topic just did that come from your personal experience in any way? Yeah I think so I mean you know like any topic it comes from you know somewhat from personal experience but also like a trajectory I think as you said I grew up in Bolivia and I worked there after I finished college and one piece of advice I got there that I followed or I had to follow because it was a boss's instruction basically was to travel to Chile and see a little bit about education reform in Chile which is a forefront country and so looking at Chile I became very interested in educational markets because as you know Chile is one of the forerunners and sort of putting in place vouchers and sort of having a for-profit whole large educational sector that was news to me I did not know that and then I would say I spent the next many years of my life working on that type of thing and kind of you know I think that most of my work on Chile at least and on vouchers some of it says that markets are not a free or not a silver bullet of sorts in education things may not work very well I think I had made that point you know which is a controversial point but I think that the a lot of the experience shows that surprisingly perhaps certainly surprisingly to me when I first approached it they don't seem to work that well in some cases and so I have been doing that for a long time and then for the book I thought well why don't I think of a case where I think that markets worked well in education and can we look at the factors that make them work badly in one case and why did they work well and so then I was looking around and of course one way you know I've lived in American universities for a long time they're very market oriented the US educational system has so much of the US is very market oriented and then and then you see that lo and behold it has a university sector that in terms of research at the top performs extremely well and as you mentioned was not always the case the US was not a leader and so I got into it that way sort of saying can I see a place where you know the opposite of what I've usually said is true and can I explain why and are the same big factors behind both observations kind of that's how I got to the book topic that's yeah that's interesting because I was actually going to ask exactly because a lot of your research has been the opposite showing some of the the risks associated with this private provision so perhaps I mean could you very briefly just just for us who may not have read the book you know what's stood out for you as some of those factors then that explain why private provision in this case worked well and not another so I would let me just mention two factors and each of these will say sort of there are things that get messed up in education usually when there's lots of markets and for the case of research might not one is a factor I called sorting which is I think it is an innate you know trait of many educational systems to sort of sort people out to their customers and all kinds of actors want to sort people out by sorting I mean basically a tendency of like to congregate with like so you know it could be wealthy people want to go to school with wealthy people people of this ethnic group want to go to school with this ethnic group people of this religious group want to go to school with that with the same with the same religious group this is you know I think I'm not going to say universal but it is a predominant tendency in many countries in many educational systems my sense is that in K through 12 this often messes things up because it becomes very hard for the customer to kind of tell apart quality from from you know sort of say tell apart what we call usually as economist value added versus just absolute achievement it is very hard if if you're a parent I'm going to say in Maputo or Lima or London and you're looking for a school it's very hard I'll speak for myself to sort of say which school is actually good at teaching and which school is just full of kids who I you know who are high at you by contrast I think that sorting I argue at the university level creates a series of dynamics that might not be bad for the production of research for example tends to concentrate resources stuff like that things that you need for research it tends to concentrate talent and stuff like that so sorting I would say is factor one and it kind of messes things up in some cases and it makes them work in others and it's not obvious when that's going to happen the other thing let me just to not speak too long mention a second one which is observability and relates to this issue like what can I observe in people's performance as we know because there's a lot of people working on things like teacher value added it's very hard to observe performance of teachers for example this is why we work on it right if it were easy to know which teacher is good or bad we would know right away and in fact even for researchers it's hard to predict which teacher might be good or bad it's hard to know just by looking at videos of teachers by contrast I think for researchers there's a lot more observability it's certainly not perfect there's noisy stuff but we can sort of see with you know which chemistry professor is writing papers are these papers having a big impact or not observability is a key thing if you don't have observability this is not just about education if you don't have observability almost nothing will work well uh and that's interesting could i just just interrupt i mean i'm just interested i mean you know some of us would say wow this kind of the this i mean revolution in terms of observability yeah has been for many of us it you know you could you could say well this is the last 30 years maybe that the many universities have moved to research excellence frameworks and so on was this true earlier on uh that perhaps we you know some of us might be them might not be aware of and was this already starting in the early 20th century right so that's that's a little question so you mean the sort of observability of research often research yeah it yeah i mean impact fact i'm thinking impact factors and uh you know top yeah sorry go ahead there's one way there's one place where you can draw a big distinction between europe and the us in europe it was already the case by the end of the 19th century for sure that there was some observability for research in the sense that for example there were journals where people were publishing these sort of reports from scientific societies the us lagged behind badly in this uh and one of the things that it did around the turn of the century 1890s uh is you have things like the american economic association the american chemical society being created and creating journals and sort of observability to see whether people are doing research that is one area um there is a there was a famous mathematician who got a job at john's hopkins was recruited this english guy uh and he told this anecdote that he said that the president of john's hopkins and this was like 1880 who really believed in research kept bugging him to create a journal for mathematics in the us and he said i kept telling him there's nothing to publish so why would he do this you know uh and so that anecdote illustrates that this is an infrastructure for observability that has to be created it it has to be nurtured the us was late to the game relative to your but it's one thing that helped it sort of catch up for developing countries i think you know it's costly to to set up uh uh net you know a system to measure research output and for developing countries my guess is that actually thanks to the internet and things like that it's much easier these days to sort of piggyback on a on a on a measurement thing that already exists right so like uh journals these days are more globalized uh and so you don't have to create like the us had to create its own journals in a way because things work differently it's not obvious to me that say you know uh say say you know countries have to do it now yeah i mean talking about developing countries i mean i think it's it's a particularly interesting issue i mean perhaps more than anything academia is a global market these days right i mean you you yourself came from bolivia um you know there's many many of the the top researchers in the world gravitate towards the us yeah now in a way you know that's sorting right which is exactly what you talk about yeah but what does that mean for students in developing countries particularly at the undergraduate level where you know the ability to move is is difficult particularly it's highly costly i mean could could there be a i mean is this a classic brain drain problem that you know the top researchers now go to you know foreign universities leaving a lower quality of instruction back home yeah i think that it is a problem uh and it is true that like you say um academics at least has become much more global and at the top level of academics this is one you know there's a lot of also sorting has this feature that it's very self-reinforcing right so that that the fact that the u.s has such great universities makes it easier to recruit away people um in terms of an undergraduate though i think that here is where the observability comes back i think that the u.s university is by and large based on noisy measures imperfect measures are able to recruit some of the best researchers in the world this is clear if you're a german top academic you'll get offers from the u.s it's not obvious to me that this means that they're recruiting the best teachers and when you're an undergraduate what you want are good teachers uh and researchers you know top researchers can be excellent teachers they are by definition excellent teachers for teaching for example phd students and people at the cutting edge because they kind of know the cutting edge so they know how to talk about the cutting edge at least but it's not clear that they're that they're necessarily better at teaching micro economics one right and so in terms of the more basic type education in a way one might be better off i think in places where there are less less focused on this rat race for getting the best researchers and teachers at many you know universities across the world which are not elite research universities may just be more focused on you know providing or their space for them to be more focused on providing a good chemistry you know organic chemistry class rather than trying to write something that is cutting edge so i don't worry as much for the teaching side i don't think it's obvious that saying stanford has absolutely the best teachers it could be but it's not obvious to me so sorry i was just uh muted that i that kind of is very interesting you say that because there's a trend certainly you know in a lot of most countries including developing countries to say that you know all all university teachers or university you know university faculty should be focusing on research um so i mean it may be what you're saying is that should we be going back i'm just provoking a little bit perhaps should we be going back to a model which was uh existed in some countries uh you know a number of years ago where you have a distinction between research universities and teaching universities i mean is that maybe a comparative advantage of some institutions could be on the teaching what whilst other um universities could be on the on on on the research is this i mean is this is this a model you think would work or am i getting into dangerous territory here you are you are you are very provocative uh i i am sympathetic to the idea that not every institution should do everything right so so for example um i think i've heard a famous education economist caroline hoxby say this you know caroline hoxby has said stanford or harvard do not have a comparative advantage at training a large number of people in sort of basic things that's just not what their comparative advantage is in uh and i think she's used the the words it would be misplaced energy kind of to try to make them do that and so you have for example ratchety has shown in his research amazing schools at training a lot of people one close to where i live in new york is is the city university cuny uh and you know now this doesn't mean and here you know uh on average i think universities everywhere should aim for their faculty to have phd's for example but it doesn't mean that everyone should try to do everything and i'm sympathetic to that idea and therefore i'm not hostile to the idea you mentioned that one could have some faculty focused more on teaching and some focused more on research yeah i mean i think that is happening in some countries i mean some academic job postings now tend to say well some of them i've seen say teaching specialization research specialization it doesn't mean that you you're exclusive but it's a focus i think i think then the question uh would be is teaching at the university level as observable as research yeah i don't think it is as as as observable i think that once one looks at teaching at the university level one starts to get back into the world we live in when we look at teaching in the k-12 level that it it gets harder you know we can see student evaluations uh and so we know which teachers make students happy in some sense but for example the real outcomes we care about when we teach at university is is this person going to be productive in the long term right is this person going to have a good job is this person going to be an interesting person is there will they contribute to society we don't see those outcomes until much later on uh as much as for example in the previous education session we were saying uh or the moderator was saying you know it's tough to measure uh you know learning uh in many developing countries and measure performance there we're looking at outcomes where we say we'd like to see where you're at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year and ideally we can measure that well at the university level it's even harder and so there's a really there again you're in a this quicksand where things are very hard there may be teachers who are really good at the university level and are unpopular right and they're so um and i think even students realize that with with a long term they they say you know professor professor jones yelled at me but exposed years later years later there's a there's a story i think so some people in they did some research and actually took in a trained actor to do a lesson and you know the the brief was to be as you know as kind of a fun and engaging as possible don't teach them anything and of course the course evaluations were the best that they'd ever heard of precisely because it was picking up uh not that in fact they've learned anything just the fact that they enjoyed being there it was entertaining yes so yeah this is one thing i mentioned in the book that as chair of the department if the dean or the provost came to me and said miguel hire excellent researchers i would say easy just give me money right if they came and told me how you're excellent teachers it's not as easy yeah observability there becomes becomes problematic yeah exactly no i'm seeing the time is is is is quite short so could i just ask you maybe i don't see any questions in the chat or anything so maybe one last question i mean from develop from the perspective of development economics um you know there is actually the criticism that may be the concentration of all the great researchers even if they're from developing countries originally the fact that they're not in these you know the countries where they're doing research yeah and also uh the fact that you know that there's a concentration of influence in in you know a handful of universities that could be bad for the discipline do you have any any thoughts on this debate at the moment yeah that's that's a good question uh it is risky i think primarily for the reason you mentioned which there's less exposure uh and i think that is the risk in this and you know that's a risk that's a bit specific to development economics or certain you know so lots of fields not to all of them like we would worry less about that for someone who's doing i don't know some type of classical music or something that that that that is a concern perhaps it's somewhat mitigated in recent years by greater ease of travel and you know things like we are on right now these screens but maybe you know maybe travel is getting harder and so i think that is a concern uh i have to be consistent with what i say in the book i worry less about the concentration than most people i think but i agree i agree that there is a danger that things become kind of like insular and then you're not looking at the world in a way that you need to yeah i guess it's about what conversation are you part of if you're part of a conversation amongst other elite academics only yeah uh then that can be somewhat detached from i guess some of the the challenges and problems that may be uh do the the to which it would be exposed if individuals were located in in a developing country but as yeah yeah i mean but as well as you said uh you know technology potentially is a is a is a way around that i guess as uh particularly now that you know you can get good internet connections uh you know not just in urban centers but also in rural areas to a certain extent right if you've got the money if you have the money but it's become so i've been advising a couple of bolivian universities and this would not have been possible pandemic you know uh exactly yeah and you know probably internet connections there are not better than the ones you're experiencing right now so no no no exactly and even in Mozambique you can get um you know a reasonable 3g internet yeah connection in many rural areas these days and that's a change you know over the last five years so you can do stuff online that you could never do before if you have the the megabytes as it were huge i agree yeah great well i i think we better um unfortunately i mean it's a sad to cut it off um but let me just say thank you so much miguel for for your time uh and for your insights uh i think really stimulating and i would recommend uh anyone to to to take a look at his new book it's it's actually very interesting um and thank you for your time and i would encourage you now to move to the next session uh whichever that may be thanks a lot thanks to everyone thanks bye bye thank you bye bye thank you