Intellectual Merit Research Articles

Risk Based Student Loans

Credit markets serve a vital function in capitalist economies: evaluating the riskiness of a range of possible investments and channeling resources toward those investments that investors believe are most likely to prove successful. This process is known as the “risk-based pricing” of credit. Ideally, risk-based pricing should lead to lower cost of capital for lower risk investment choices with larger rewards, and therefore more investment in such promising activities. Conversely, risk-based pricing should lead to higher costs of capital, and therefore less investment, in high-risk activities with relatively low rewards. If creditors are well informed and analytic, and borrowers respond to financial incentives, then risk-based pricing — compared to uniform credit pricing — leads to a more efficient allocation of society’s limited resources. Although risk-based pricing is standard in business loan markets, and may be increasingly common in consumer credit markets such as mortgages and credit cards, risk-based pricing is seldom used in the market for student loans. Most student loans are extended under Federal Student Loan programs administered by the Department of Education. These federal programs have historically offered loans at rates lower than those offered by most private lenders, on terms that are more attractive to student borrowers, and without adjusting the pricing on loans according to the risks inherent in different courses of study or lending to different types of borrowers. The Federal Student Loan programs — first established in the mid twentieth century to increase the supply of skilled labor, promote economic and technological development, and provide upward socio-economic mobility — are broadly successful: they have provided low cost credit to millions of students; helped increase educational attainment; held administrative costs to below those of the private sector; and generated a profit for the federal government. However, Federal Student Loan programs have not incorporated many recent insights from financial, developmental, and labor economics that distinguish between different types of education. Because of this, Federal Student Loan programs, and more broadly, U.S. labor markets, are not performing at their full potential. There is a large mismatch between the skills workers have and employers’ needs, and this mismatch contributes to structural unemployment, reduced output, and higher student loan defaults.This article argues that introducing risk-based pricing in federal student loans would advance the interests and values that Congress articulated when it first established Federal support for Higher Education. Risk-based pricing of student loans would signal the long-term financial risks inherent in different courses of study. This price signal would likely improve students’ ability to make informed decisions about the course of study that would best balance their innate abilities and individual preferences with postgraduate economic opportunities. Similarly, price signals would enhance post-secondary educational institutions’ ability to adjust their programs to improve their students’ postgraduate prospects. Allocating educational resources more efficiently would not only benefit individual students and their families — it would enhance the productivity and competitiveness of the U.S. labor force, with beneficial consequences for both the private sector and public finances. Over the long term, such efficiencies could increase the resources available for further investment in education and research. Transparent, risk-based student loan pricing could greatly benefit students and educational institutions, particularly if it were data-driven and sensitive to the values of equal opportunity and independent research that are central to the academic enterprise. This article discusses legal and policy reforms that could facilitate risk-based student loan pricing, potential hazards from a shift toward risk-based pricing, and safeguards that could help protect students and educators from abuse. This article focuses primarily on the economic consequences of education rather than on moral or philosophical views about the ideal purpose of education or its proper role in society. The economic focus of this article is not intended to deny the intellectual merit of philosophical views about education, but rather to reflect the fact that government support for Higher Education in the United States has primarily been driven by economic considerations, particularly during the mid-twentieth century when Federal Student Loan programs were established. Part I of this article discusses rationales for government support for higher education, with an emphasis on human capital theory. Part II discusses the U.S. federal student loan system. Part III discusses coordination, information, and incentive problems in the higher education and skilled labor markets. Part IV explains the theory of risk-based credit pricing and how risk-based pricing of federal student loans could ameliorate some of the coordination problems discussed in Part III. Part V discusses predictors of income, employment, and student loan default, and also considers ethical and moral considerations that might limit or preclude the use of certain predictors to risk-adjust student loan pricing. A powerpoint presentation based on this article is also available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2121096.

Science Saturdays: A Simple Science Outreach Model to Achieve Broad Impact

AbstractThe National Science Foundation (NSF) evaluates grant applications based on two criteria: intellectual merit and broader impact. The broader impact criterion (BIC), or the science outreach criterion, is intended to connect science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) research to the general public, and has grown in its relevance for successful grants. A method to increase the competitiveness of a grant application and, in turn, the quality of science outreach programs is to suggest successful science outreach models for connecting scientists to the public. Science Saturdays is a fun science lecture series for the general public that is a simple, scalable, and transferable model. Its main mission is to introduce participants to excellent communicators of science and to shatter stereotypes about those who do science. It aims to inspire and motivate children as they traverse the STEM pipeline by emphasizing that science is fun. This paper discusses the elements needed to create this outreach program and the lessons learned from its development.

What If We Took Researchers' Workplace Decisions Seriously? Mundane Incentives Versus Intellectual Merit in the Selection of Research Topics

What If We Took <i>Researchers'</i> Workplace Decisions Seriously? Mundane Incentives Versus Intellectual Merit in the Selection of Research Topics

Semantic Annotation for Java.

This paper describes how to use annotation to provide semantic information. The applications include the automatic construction of a GUI so that the user input is constrained to a correct range (guarding the input). Elementary GUI examples include elements for a variety of data types. Given sufficient effort, we envision the annotation technique as a replacement for XML and BeanInfo-based systems. We show that semantic annotation has several intrinsic benefits, geographically colocating constraints with their parameters eases maintenance, enables compile-time checking, and establishes consistent constraint declarations. Semantic annotation is shown to be GUI agnostic (devoid of Swing, SWT, AWT or HTML considerations). We also show how GUI annotation can be considered dangerous. The automatically constructed GUI’s are simple, and of no intellectual merit, other than their construction technique.

Transformative Research Initiative: The Role of Undergraduate Institutions

The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) recently held a summit meeting to address the role of undergraduate institutions in transformative research. This summit was prompted by the omission of undergraduate institutions from the conversation that had occurred at several National Science Board workshops held between 2004 and 2006 to identify key factors to foster transformative science. Given that the National Science Foundation Grant Proposal Guide has now incorporated the revised new intellectual merit criterion specifying potential transformative research, this CUR summit meeting sought to provide recommendations to individuals, PUI institutions, CUR, and federal funding agencies to enable faculty at predominantly undergraduate institutions to submit competitive proposals successfully satisfying this criterion.

Realizing Societal Benefit from Academic Research: Analysis of the National Science Foundation’s Broader Impacts Criterion

The National Science Foundation (NSF) evaluates grant proposals based on two criteria: intellectual merit and broader impacts. NSF gives applicants wide latitude to choose among a number of broader impacts, which include both benefits for the scientific community and benefits for society. This paper considers whether including potential societal benefits in the Broader Impacts Criterion leads to enhanced benefits for society. One prerequisite for realizing societal benefit is to transfer research results to potential users in a meaningful format. To determine whether researchers who discuss broader impacts for society are more likely to engage in broad dissemination activities beyond the scientific publication, I analysed proposed broader impacts statements from recent award abstracts. Although 43% of researchers discussed potential benefits for society, those researchers were no more likely to propose dissemination of results to potential users than researchers who only discussed broader impacts for science. These findings suggest that considering potential societal benefit as a broader impact may not lead to more actual societal benefits and that many potentially useful results may not be disseminated beyond the scientific community. I conclude with policy recommendations that could increase the likelihood of realizing potential societal benefits from academic research.

Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact: The National Science Foundation’s Broader Impacts Criterion and the Question of Peer Review

Over the last 300 years science has been quite successful at revealing the nature of physical reality. In so doing it has provided an epistemological basis for scientific discovery and technological innovation. But science has been decidedly less successful at guiding political debate. How do we conceive of the science‐society relation in the 21st century? How does scientific research hook onto the world in a multi‐faceted, pluralistic, and global age? This essay seeks to reframe our thinking about the broader impacts of science by awakening an appreciation of the inescapably political and (and as a consequence, philosophical) dimension of all knowledge, scientific or otherwise.

Taking the “Soft Impacts” of Technology into Account: Broadening the Discourse in Research Practice

Public funding institutions are able to influence what aspects researchers take into account when they consider the future impacts of their research. On the basis of a description of the evaluation systems that public research funding institutes in the Netherlands (STW and SenterNovem) use to estimate the quality of engineering science, this article shows that researchers are now predominantly required to reflect on the intellectual merit of their research and on the usability and marketability of the technology it contributes to. In addition, SenterNovem also mandates reflection on sustainability. Here it is argued that these requirements do not suffice. Funding institutions should also do more to enhance reflection during the research process on the “soft impacts” of technologies, which refer to the alterations that technologies may bring about in the quality of human life. To do this it is suggested that it is helpful to engage a specifically trained ethicist to monitor the research process and create a feedback loop from the ethicist to the funding institution.

Multinetwork nanobiosensing: Potential approaches in understanding, diagnosing, and tracking discogenic pain

AbstractBackground Lower back pain associated with disc degeneration is a common and costly health condition. As a symptom, lower back pain is considered the leading cause of disability. Many studies have indicated that the intervertebral disc and supportive structures are indirectly and directly innervated, which is a factor in acute and chronic lower back pain. Unfortunately, the cellular and neural mechanisms during disc degeneration that lead to discogenic pain are not well understood. The pain caused by intervertebral disc degeneration is coined discogenic pain and is due in part to the lack of accurate diagnostic tests.Objective The long‐term objective of this preliminary study is to develop an accurate diagnostic test of a multinetwork nanobiosensing method for the objective of diagnosing discogenic pain. Within the context of the long‐term research objectives, this pilot study is aimed at providing a basic understanding of the in vivo biomechanics of human intervertebral disc with or without the degeneration process over time.Methods Medline and PubMed databases were searched from 1966 to March 2006. Studies describing the neural and cellular changes during disc degeneration were reviewed and discussed in an effort to provide a basis for understanding mechanisms of disc degeneration; however, they do not measure pain. In addition, the most current studies of diagnostic tests available today for assessing discogenic pain were also reviewed, especially those relative to the clinical association of pain with disc degeneration.Results Despite recent developments in noninvasive imaging technology, the pathophysiology of discogenic pain is poorly understood. Other than discography, there is no imaging technology that relates to this clinical problem. Currently published studies demonstrate inherent inaccuracy in the sensitivity and specificity of testing, especially for discogenic lower back pain.Conclusions There is a need to develop more reliable diagnostic tests for discogenic pain. The available literature shows that the cellular and molecular mechanisms leading to discogenic pain is largely nonexistent. The emergence of nanotechnology is opening new horizons for biosensing applications. The proposed diagnostic test should be based on in vivo measurement(s), instead of noninvasive imaging, which would capture the biochemical and biophysical mechanisms at the intervertebral disc level.Significance This project has the potential of adding a new level of understanding with a broad societal impact. From an intellectual merit standpoint, it is expected that there will be a quantum leap in our basic understanding of disc degeneration changes in vivo over time and indirectly the mechanism of discogenic pain. The societal impact standpoint will be severalfold, including the significant reduction of human suffering with increasing human productivity and quality of life. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Minorities Striving and Pursuing Higher Degrees of Success (MS PHD'S)® in Earth System Science Professional Development Initiative: Enhancing Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact of Diversity through Alignment of Vision, Goals and Objectives, and Measurement

The MS PHD'S Program facilitates the involvement of minority undergraduate and graduate Earth system science students in a series of activities designed to: (1) increase exposure to and engagement in the Earth system science community, via participation in scientific conferences, mentoring relationships, virtual activities, and field trips; (2) enhance professional skills, grantsmanship, oral and written communication; (3) provide funding, education and career opportunity resources; (4) facilitate networking opportunities with established researchers and educators; (5) and sustain on-going interaction, communication and support via membership within a virtual community comprised of peers, junior/senior-level researchers, and educators actively involved in facilitating full participation of minorities in the Earth system sciences. These activities, conducted in three phases, occur during professional society meetings, field trips, and a ‘capstone’ event at the National Academies. At the conclusion of the five-year MS PHD'S in Earth System Science Initiative's Professional Development Program, it is anticipated that a minimum of 100 Earth system science undergraduate, graduate and recent minority graduates will be better prepared to achieve their academic and professional goals. It is also expected that because of mentor-mentee partnerships, science exposure, and networking activities, MS PHD'S participants will remain actively engaged in their fields of specialization and respective professional societies.

What is the relationship of religion to economics?

In this journal, Welch and Mueller (WM) (2001) demonstrated a classificatory method for conceptualizing relationships between religion and economics. No judgement can be drawn from WM as to which of their four classifications might be a, or the, correct one. They conclude that the relationships are “both complex and controversial”, and that before any assessment can be apprehended adequately of how the two fields interact, “the permutations and subcategories implied by the system” used need to be identified and explored more thoroughly. This paper pursues that path, but argues that a more determinate verdict than WM's is possible. Here, an alternative interpretation of the relationship between religion and economics is investigated, in which WM's categories are assessed. In the alternative, WM's four classes are not taken to possess equal intellectual merit, as they appear to be. Using more current and comprehensive definitions of religion than WM's, a case is constructed that three of their four categories possess greater intellectual value than the remaining one. These three are here collapsed into one new mega-category regarded as that most validly describing the relationship between religion and economics.

Assessing the science–society relation: The case of the US National Science Foundation's second merit review criterion

The science–society relation exhibits a tension between scientific autonomy and societal control of the direction and scope of scientific research. With the 1997 formulation of two generic merit review criteria for the assessment of National Science Foundation proposals—one for intellectual merit, and a second for ‘broader impacts’—this tension between science and society took on a unique institutional expression that has yet to work itself out into a well-accepted balance of complementary interests. This article examines some of the issues associated especially with the second ‘broader impacts’ criterion.

Standards for evaluating proposals to develop ethics curricula

A focus on standards for assessing proposals for online teaching of practical and professional ethics provides an approach to standards for raising the level of online teaching. Intellectual merit, broad impact, and integration of research and teaching featuring a high level of interactivity are key criteria for evaluation. Especially noted is research that can serve to prepare instructors, to enrich the content of courses, and to stimulate further research. Yet raising the level of online teaching hinges on developing easy access and navigability in an online curriculum.

Assessing Uncertainty in Simulation‐Based Maritime Risk Assessment

Recent work in the assessment of risk in maritime transportation systems has used simulation-based probabilistic risk assessment techniques. In the Prince William Sound and Washington State Ferries risk assessments, the studies' recommendations were backed up by estimates of their impact made using such techniques and all recommendations were implemented. However, the level of uncertainty about these estimates was not available, leaving the decisionmakers unsure whether the evidence was sufficient to assess specific risks and benefits. The first step toward assessing the impact of uncertainty in maritime risk assessments is to model the uncertainty in the simulation models used. In this article, a study of the impact of proposed ferry service expansions in San Francisco Bay is used as a case study to demonstrate the use of Bayesian simulation techniques to propagate uncertainty throughout the analysis. The conclusions drawn in the original study are shown, in this case, to be robust to the inherent uncertainties. The main intellectual merit of this work is the development of Bayesian simulation technique to model uncertainty in the assessment of maritime risk. However, Bayesian simulations have been implemented only as theoretical demonstrations. Their use in a large, complex system may be considered state of the art in the field of computational sciences.

Turn up that Radio, Teacher: Popular Cultural Pedagogy in New Century Urban Schools

Synthesizing literature from critical pedagogy, sociocultural psychology and cultural studies with popular cultural texts and experiences from actual classroom practice, this article conceptualizes the critical teaching of popular culture as a viable strategy to increase academic and critical literacies in urban secondary classrooms. Relying on scholarship that views youth popular culture as a powerful, but often times underutilized, point of intervention for schools, these authors discuss the impact of using youth popular culture to reconnect with otherwise disenfranchised schooling populations. The authors rebut criticisms associated with the teaching of popular culture by showing how teachers can simultaneously honor and draw upon the sociocultural practices of their students while also adhering to state and national standards. Further, the article demonstrates the social relevance, academic worthiness, and intellectual merit of hip-hop artists such as the controversial Eminem and popular film texts such as the Godfather trilogy. They conclude with a call for postmodern critical educational leaders—vigilant advocates for students who are willing to combine academic content knowledge with a commitment to an engaging multicultural curriculum.

Neo-liberalism and East Asia: Resisting the Washington Consensus

This article examines current debates over the future direction of the reform agenda in post-crisis East Asia and sets them in the broader context of the global debate on the role of ideas and ideology in shaping economic policy-making. It argues that the contest of ideas in economic policy-making can evolve independently of their intellectual merit and empirical credibility and political interests play an important role. In the case of post-crisis East Asia, re-igniting the 'economic miracle' of the pre-crisis era does not stem from a politically neutral, dispassionate and intellectually rigorous analysis of what went wrong in the recession-inducing 1997 financial crisis that engulfed the region. It represents an attempt to reinvent orthodoxy in the domain of economic ideas and ideology by the global policy community that is in turn influenced by US-centric institutions.

Ilya Prigogine

Ilya Prigogine

Academic exclusion: the case of Alexander Del Mar

Alexander Del Mar's prescient and profound contributions to monetary economics have been basically disregarded for the duration of a century. This paper sets out Del Mar's contributions to monetary economics and economic statistics and demonstrates the striking relevance of his contributions to modern monetary thought. The contemporary arbiters and judges of intellectual merit were aware of Del Mar's writings but Del Mar was excluded from contemporary reference and recognition. His exclusion had led to his having been denied his rightful place in the history of economic thought. One explanation for the silencing of Del Mar is that his intellectual position placed him in opposition to the views of the leaders of the profession. Del Mar was also forthright in his criticisms of his contemporaries' views and was open in his writings in commenting on prior anti-Semitism. We present evidence suggesting that prejudice and bigotry in high places in academia were involved in Del Mar's exclusion from the consolidating profession of academic economists in the late 19th century.

Merit-based funding at the National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation (NSF) invests in the best ideas from the most capable people as determined by competitive merit review. This talk will first summarize how NSF evaluates proposals for research and education projects in speech communication. The review timeline, as well as the merit review criteria of intellectual merit and broader impacts, will be discussed. Finally, a summary of current and future NSF funding opportunities will be provided.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowships: A Missed Opportunity

NSF Graduate Research Fellowships: A Missed Opportunity