MATH EDUCATION AND GROWTH: RECENT EVIDENCE
Mathematical literacy has always been a key factor in improving a country’s productivity and competitiveness. Stanford University’s Eric Hanushek has shown that there is a positive relationship between students’ performance in mathematics tests and economic growth. This is not at all surprising. Proficiency in math implies a high-level of cognitive skills among the labour force, in other words a high quality of human capital, which leads to technological innovation and productivity gains.
Another more recent study by the OECD, “The High Cost of Low Educational Performance”, reports similar findings. In particular, its authors found that even relatively small improvements in the mathematical skills of a country’s labour force can have a large positive impact on a country’s long-run economic growth and well-being. According to the empirical results, an improvement of the math and science scores by 100 on the PISA scale leads to an increase in the annual real GDP growth rate by 1.74 percentage points. The OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international study which aims to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in three separate areas: reading comprehension, mathematical literacy and science. One of the appealing features of the PISA is that it provides a relatively objective measure of a nation’s educational achievements, thereby making the quality of educational systems comparable across countries. Georgia joined the PISA in 2010.
THE CASE OF GEORGIA
According to the PISA 2009+ (which covers 10 additional countries that were unable to participate in PISA 2009), on the mathematics section Georgia is ranked 66 out of 75 countries surveyed. Although outperforming a few countries, such as Panama, Qatar, Tunisia and Indonesia, Georgia lagged behind all other former Soviet Union countries expect for Kyrgyzstan. Georgia’s position on the science section is even worse. It ranks 70 out of 75 participant countries.
These figures clearly indicate that severe problems exist in Georgia’s educational system. The causes might be poorly qualified teachers, a lack of time devoted to mathematics classes, or just students’ choices and the belief that math is not that important in their lives.
At the higher education level, the popularity of mathematics remains a big challenge. Many parents get attracted by such courses as International Relations, Finance and Banking or Jurisprudence, and push their children who are about to go to university towards these specializations (see the ISET-Blog for more on the influence of parental will on their children’s education-related decisions). While such professions are obviously important in their own right, the Georgian labour market without doubt suffers from an excess supply of these so-called “prestigious” occupations.
Many graduates with degrees in these fields do not find jobs after graduation simply because there is no demand for their skills, which thus aggravates the problem of unemployment. In Georgia this is highest amongst the youth (people in 20-24 age group) exceeding 35% according to some counts. I would argue that if some of these people had graduated from math department, they would have had a greater chance of getting hired. For example, consider two recent graduates with different backgrounds (say both from TSU), one with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and the other with a degree in economics and business administration. If both were to apply for the same position (requiring some degree of analytical thinking) in a commercial bank I would bet that the former would have a greater advantage when the employer was making his decision. This is exactly what is happening in many Georgian commercial banks, where job applicants with math and other related backgrounds such as statistics, physics or computer sciences, have significant advantages over other graduates. This is also true for other sectors which require analytical and problem solving skills.
Since 2009 the former Georgian government began undertaking several important steps to make the exact and natural sciences more attractive for potential students, redefining the way the state grants are distributed among the different fields of studies. According to the new strategy only the 100% state grant, which pays 2250 laris per year, is available for students enrolled in so-called “popular” departments such as economics, business administration and law. Whereas for those students admitted to the faculties of the exact and natural sciences (which also incorporates mathematics, programming and physics) 30%, 50%, 70% and 100% state grants are available. This has made these departments much more popular among potential students, as their chance of being granted a state scholarship is now higher than it is in those “popular” departments. However, as it is the quality of “educated people” that ultimately matters, rather than the number of diplomas printed, one also needs to make sure that the quality of technical education improves alongside these changes.
Another important step in this direction has been the decision of the former government to establish the Batumi Technological University which will focus on technology, media and engineering disciplines. According to President Saakishvili’s announcement, concerted efforts will be made to bring well-known professors from top American universities to Batumi. It is crucial that the new government continues to support this idea so that the new university will be able to admit its first students in the nearest future.
Most importantly, more emphasis should be placed on mathematics and math based subjects at the primary and secondary levels of education. However, any such efforts will also be vain if the quality of teachers is not improved through various training programs or even by increasing salaries to attract the brightest teachers.
Provided that the OECD study’s findings are generalizable to countries like Georgia (and there seems to be no reason why this should not be the case), the Georgian authorities should start implementing more “aggressive” reforms to improve the nation’s mathematical performance. Educational reforms are of course difficult to implement and, even if implemented quickly, the returns may take decades to come. However, this by no means should be used as an excuse not to invest in math education, as doing so would imply foregoing enormous gains for future generations.
Comments
Givi, Good review! I do agree with you that we need to prioritize mathematics; There is a myth in the west that Georgians are good at math. Actually they consider that the Soviet education gave a good math skills. This is true to some degree and more importantly I think we still have this Soviet educated math teachers we can capitalize on!
Nice post and interesting relationship. I hope new government will joint PISA again and we will be able to monitor changes in Georgian students' international standing.
How do you control for endogeneity in these kinds of studies?
This result is likely driven by the rapid advancement of South Korea, China and other Asian nations who populate the upper right corner on the chart. South Korea has grown from $200 income per capita after the Korean war (it was poorer than the North!) to what it is today through a strong emphasis on education, discipline and organization. And for quite a number of years it has been a global leader in math and science education.
...
To answer Michael's question:
Pretty anything is endogenous in the evolution of complex social systems, such as nations. Even the amount, timing and location of rainfall can perhaps be manipulated given today's level of technology
The Confucian tradition of learning did not "Granger-cause" Korean (or Chinese) growth simply because it was there during several centuries during which Korea (and China) did not grow. The economic recovery of the great East Asian civilizations started when all the conditions were ripe. Once it started -- in a great variety of ways, from socialism, to military dictatorship, to a semblance of Western democracy -- there was nothing to stop it.
But now let's conduct the following thought experiment: what would happen to Korea's growth 10 or 15 years from now if its children (and their "Tiger moms") suddenly stop investing in the math and science education?
Yes Michael, the issue of reverse causality in this type of studies is always problematic. The study itself actually talks about this extensively. But from the purely intuitive point of view it must be true that improvements in nation's cognitive skills (in this case proxied by math and science achievements) lead to higher growth rates.
As I understand one of the most severe problems with endogeneity would be if Hanushek did not control for the effect of other sciences which are math based that is, physics, engineering, economics etc. If this is the case then the results could be overestimating the role of math achievement for growth.
Hi Giorgi, thank you for you comment!
The thing is that obviously there is a high correlation between math achievements and a nation's success in those math-based sciences you list. and this is exactly the reason why the authors of this study control for a country's math achievements to proxy its success in engineering, physics, economics and other fields which ultimately affect economic growth. So I don't think the results overestimate the role of math.
I think he does control for science in this study. Is not this a PISA database?
Archil, you are right; he actually takes the average of math and science scores. The graph in my post which is taken from his other study, however, draws the relationship between growth and test scores in mathematics only.
and in this case while teasing out "pure" math effects he is not controlling for science?
again economic growth, it’s like there is no alternative way of development… these copy-past models of development of the Western worldpart… unfortunately without looking at the consequences that this type of development brought…
One might argue this is the way to income equality, which will eventually yield to democracy; another might bring dozens of counter-examples to this argument…
But the question is: will the economic growth make us more joyful, happier, satisfied with Life…
In the end of the day if an individual chooses to connect his/her life with Arts rather than burden his/her head with tons of mathematical formulas and never ending process of thinking, this choice should be understandable, it should be acceptable… may be this is the choice that will make him/her to live a meaningful life and even make the people around him/her Happier…
The fear is that the country might fall apart from the “developing” world, it might get dominated by richer powers… understandable...
we are not born to compete with others, we are born to Live!
fortheMeaning, you fall victim to the misconception that there is a conflict between math and art. Math is art, maybe even its purest form.
yes, well, the tradeoff mentioned above is more about the development of Heart vs Mind.
The race for the economic growth forces us to be ignorant towards our Heart and invest heavily only on the development of Mind.
One can easily observe that most of the people living in the developed part of the world are head oriented, they had to bypass their hearts generation after generation... and the developing world tries to catch them by becoming even more head oriented.
The question is whether this kind of development is what will make us more peaceful, joyful, happier, satisfied with Life… or it just forces us to depart further and further from our true nature...
I always wondered why Georgians seem to be rather unwilling to pick up mathematical subjects. As far as I can see, mathematics and related fields are the only areas where Georgia has world level experts. Why are the young Georgians so eager to study subjects taught by people with outdated knowledge, far off from world's research frontier, while their math departments are competitive on an international level?
The article gives an answer: Math is less "prestigious" than subjects like law and international relations. This seems to be a Georgian peculiarity -- in most countries, mathematical subjects have an excellent reputation. In Israel and Germany, math is accepted to be one of the intellectually most challenging subjects, and the fact that mathematical skills pay off on the labor market also contributes to their good reputation.
I wonder why Georgia has this high math level in the first place if math is so unpopular. Possibly, the Georgian mathematical tradition is passed on within a small intellectual elite in a process which does not depend on the attitudes prevalent in the general population. I observe something similar in chess: Georgia has a tradition of being home to the world's strongest female chess players. Interestingly, this tradition is not appreciated by most Georgians. This is really surprising -- in Israel, intellectual stars are much more honored. Everybody is (somewhat) acquainted with game theory since Robert Aumann got the Nobel Prize in 2005, and when Boris Gelfand made it to the world chess championship final last year, everybody became interested in chess. In contrast, I found that people like Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze are pretty unknown among Georgians. Yet despite this lack of appreciation for chess players, and despite the lousy organization of the general chess scene, Georgia keeps on producing female grandmasters. It seems that the tradition of female chess brilliancy is passed on by a small elite of chess enthusiasts, who pick the promising talents among Georgian girls and make them excel, passing on knowledge on personal and private levels rather than depending on formalized chess education. This process functions unaffected by the harsh environment chess faces in Georgia. I assume that something like that is also going on in math.
Finally, I think the article takes PISA too seriously. Finland is always getting the first place, but do they really have the best school system? Arguably the fact that Finland has a very homogeneous population is more important. Unlike Finland, other countries have substantial populations of unskilled and unintellectual people -- mostly immigrants -- which heavily affect the PISA performance of their school systems. Georgia may have similar problems if Georgia's residents in rural and agricultural regions inherit a lack of appreciation for intellectual professions from their parents. If pupils do not want to achieve higher levels of education -- because they want to take over their parents' shops or smallholder farms -- the best school system will fail to produce decent PISA results.
Another issue is the way math skills are captured in PISA. As Keith Devlin, math professor at Standford University, says: "Most of the mathematics used in present-day science and engineering is no more than three- or fourhundred years old, much of it less than a century old. Yet the typical high school curriculum comprises mathematics at least three-hundred years old--some of it over two-thousand years old! [...] Virtually nothing
from the last three hundred years has found its way into the classroom. Yet most of the mathematics used in today's world was developed in the last two hundred years!" Indeed, what is taught in highschool math (at least this was the case in Germany where I attended school) is (1) calculation and (2) techniques for solving certain classes of problems, like finding the maxima of a differentiable function and stuff like that. Mathematical reasoning and argumentation, which is the bread and butter of math on a university level, are completely left out. I am skeptical whether the skills of a 15 year old in highschool "math" allow for any conclusions about his/her success in doing serious mathematics at the university level, and hence I am skeptical about the possibility to derive far-reaching conclusions about a country's competitiveness based on the PISA math results.
It’s right in place to mention about Israel and Germany being “math” oriented countries.
At the same it is worth to mention about those countries being troublemakers for the world.
What Germany did in the last century and what Israel has been doing so far simply shows that it is dangerous to invest on the development of Mind without balancing by the development of Heart.
It is dangerous to follow that type of development blindly.
It’s right in place to mention about Israel and Germany being “math oriented” countries.
At the same it is worth to mention about those countries being troublemakers for the world.
What Germany did in the last century and what Israel has been doing so far illustrates that it can be dangerous to invest on the development of Mind without balancing by the development of Heart.
It is dangerous to follow that type of development blindly.
It’s right in place to mention about Israel and Germany being “math oriented" countries.
At the same it is worth to mention about those countries being troublemakers for the world.
What Germany did in the last century and what Israel has been doing so far illustrates that it can be dangerous to invest on the development of Mind without balancing by the development of Heart.
It is dangerous to follow that type of development blindly.
please, keep only "January 7, 2013 at 10:12 reply" to the "comment of December 30, 2012 at 12:10", delete the other two posts by fortheMeaning.
very-very sorry for the mess caused.