Guests Information:
Guests: Professor Charles Becker
Professor Edward Tower
Professor Charles Becker
Associate Chair, Director of MA Program, and Research Professor of Economics
Specialties: Development Economics
Full Profile: http://econ.duke.edu/people?Gurl=/aas/Economics&Uil=cbecker&subpage=profile
Professor Edward Tower
Member of MA Program Committee, Professor of Economics
Specialties: International Trade, Development Economics
Full Profile: http://econ.duke.edu/people?Gurl=/aas/Economics&Uil=edward.tower&subpage=profile
编者:傅宁 (Ning Fu), M.A. Candidate in Economics, Department of Economics
Ning:Professor Becker and Professor Tower, thank you for accepting our invitation for this interview. I know both of you are members of our master’s program committee, so my first question is: what kind of qualities are you looking for in the applicants? What kind of characteristics will make an applicant stand out from the rest?
Prof. Tower: my short answer is: I do whatever Charlie tells me. My longer answer is that there’s an ability to substitute, and so I do look at verbal score, I do look at TOEFL, I do look at the writing test, I look at the statement, and I look at the quality of writing of the essay that the student submits. Often students submit a sample of their writing. And I don’t look just for the words, I look for the organization, for good headings. When students send their writing samples, just as in our course, I very seldom, or never, read the whole thing. I look at the abstract, the introduction and the conclusion, and ask whether the ideas are well put together. If there’re some words that aren’t quite right, that’s not an issue. It’s whether the ideas are put together, and whether the whole essay says something interesting and speaks to my intuition. For me, for the most part, the personal statement doesn’t make that much a difference, but when a student has a really imaginative personal statement, often I forward it to Charlie with a note saying ”Man, this is absolutely great! ”
Prof. Becker: So in fact, it does matter a lot.
Prof. Tower: There’s one instance where I said : “Charlie, these two students I think wrote fantastic personal statements, but I didn’t admit either one of them because their score on other accounts was a little below those of other applicants. Charlie admitted them.
Prof. Becker: I place a lot of weight on people’s personal statement, mostly because everyone has high scores, and I don’t place emphasis on TOEFL or verbal GRE beyond the minimum of the university, because I think there are too many competing hypotheses that fit: one is that somebody is good at languages, a second is that someone has put in a lot of effort to acquire English, and a third is someone comes from a higher socioeconomic class and has more opportunities. I can’t distinguish among those possibilities and therefore ignore it. So Professor Tower and I differ. When it comes to personal statements, I tend to go through them really quickly. But when they’re really good, it’s a signal of better organization and more coherent vision of what the applicant wants to do. Then it becomes important. To be considered for admission, to be considered for, say, the final 30%, it doesn’t matter. We admit about 15% of our applicants. So going from 100% to 30% of the application pool there is no impact. But in the last cut from 30% to 15%, it becomes more important. We have this huge dataset that we have collected. We keep track of every person’s math courses and grades in every math and economics course. We keep track of the names of the persons who wrote recommendation letters, and the quality of those letters. And then, because we have large number of Chinese applicants, we have another file that keeps track of all students from a given university, and how they perform here, and we relate that to their university and their faculty. It’s very different if you went to Peking University in foreign languages, versus Peking University in mathematics. Your grades would be lower in mathematics, and there’s much higher competition. So we take the university and the department into account. Then we look and see where we’re getting really good students from, and we go back to those departments.
Ning: So our performance here will affect the applicants back in China.
Prof. Becker: Absolutely.
Prof. Tower: When I say I don’t pay much attention to personal statements, what I really mean is a lot of personal statements are similar, and it’s hard to distinguish very much between them. Those that stand out in my mind are the personal statements that are really well organized, but these are very few. There was one student who just had absolutely incredible headings. They were just what Diedre McCloskey advocates in her book, Economical Writing. The headings were informative.They said what I was going to find in the next paragraph, they weren’t just topic headings. This applicant was somebody who really knew how to write and organize an essay. But those are fairly rare. Students might want to read McCloskey’s book or one of her articles on writing for how to write a really good personal essay.
Prof. Becker: Let me show you this (the detailed application database). There are entries for “Are they admittable, yes or no”. In another column, I gave a rating of an applicant’s mathematics on a one to five scale, elsewhere I gave an overall rating. I note an applicant’s intended track (specialization) and which professors they hope to work with.We have the names of most of their references, and a list of math courses and everything else. Then we write a summary statement. (an example) “Very strong letters from such and such, easy admit but may not be a star”, something like that, (another example) “very Duke-focused statement”.
Prof. Tower: In those statements about why you want to come to Duke, some students show they have carefully looked into the research of the faculty members and are very familiar with the faculty members. Those people are signaling that they are super well organized. Just “I want to work with Charlie”, that isn’t gonna do the trick. But a really cogent explanation of why I want to work with Charlie is powerful. Sometimes I find an applicant knows my colleague better than I do.
Prof. Becker: The opposite of that is this person here who forgot to replace every mention of “Cornell” in her essay. This person probably would have been admitted, except when you make a mistake like that, you are out. So even though she ranked third in her class of 600 in a top university in her country, that won’t work. But you’ll be surprised how many people mass produce their applications. I think that’s a bad idea. Instead of applying to 20 programs, it is better to double the time you spend on each one and apply to ten – I believe your probability of having admission and possibly some financial aid will increase. One of my students applied for 25 or 26 places. I was so angry because you have to fill all those forms. I decided from now on for people who want more than 15 applications, I would want to make them pay for the department 50 dollars at the margin because there has to be a cost. It’s a terrible strategy because if you apply for 20 or 30 schools, you can’t know them all very well, so you’re writing the empty essays that the schools ignore. If you have me write 10 or 8 recommendations, I really want to help you and if I know someone there, I’ll write a personalized letter. If you let me write to 20 places or 25, they you get a mass-produced letter from me, too.
Prof. Tower: Charlie is more responsible than I am. I write one letter and send copies off.
Prof. Becker: My rule of thumb is if it’s 10 places or fewer, I write personalized letters, if more, they get a single letter.
Ning: My next question is, from your experience of viewing these applications, what are the differences between Chinese and American students? Do you have any specific suggestions for the Chinese students?
Prof. Becker: The difference today is not that great.
Prof. Tower: That’s exactly what I was going to say.
Prof. Becker: First, our goal for this program is not to have all Chinese, not all Americans, not all Chinese and Americans. We want to have more diversity. But I have the same rating system. We cut off at the same number. If there are a lot of students with the same number, the fact is we slightly favor non-Chinese and non-American students. But we come very close to meeting our first-order conditions so that the marginal admission from each country or region is comparable. We’re looking for the best, the brightest and the most creative students. In terms of academics, I don’t see a huge difference. People are bright, creative, interested. When people get here, there are two differences between Chinese and other students. One difference is that if a Chinese student gets into academic trouble, he or she will be ashamed to admit it, and therefore will retreat inside, and that often makes the problem worse. If you ask Chinese students, or anyone else about Chinese students, they’re always doing great. That’s because they will never admit their fellow students have a problem and will hide it. So we worry about that. When it happens to non-Chinese students, sometimes they go into hiding, sometimes they don’t. But when things go wrong, a Chinese student will lose face by going to other Chinese students. There’s a source of shame or something that keeps Chinese students from asking for help relative to others. Most Chinese students do very well, but those who don’t, do not use the safety net.
Everyone here has academic talent, but on occasion people get sick or something. The reason people get into academic trouble is rarely related to ability- breaking up with girlfriend or boyfriend, taking too many courses – so it can happen to anyone. The disadvantage of Chinese students is that they’re reluctant to ask for help when they are in trouble.
The other thing that tells people apart is: many Chinese students come here with a girlfriend or boyfriend, and those who don’t, tend to find a partner while at Duke. Relative to other international students, Chinese students make a stronger community. For those who have to work on their English, that hurts them. You’re adults, and there’s a large community, and this is a great opportunity to meet a potential spouse. We provide this service for free. But the cost to it is that the community is more focused on itself, especially when they’re in large numbers. We believe people are adults, and there’s no quota for Chinese students, but this is something I hope the community would make an effort to modify, in order to strengthen language skills of those with weaker English.
Prof. Tower: About the issue of getting into trouble and confused, the student who best dealt with this is Summer. When she took my course two falls ago in international economics, she would come into my office later on that day with all her questions from the lecture. So the lecture is still fresh in my mind and still fresh in her mind. It was a very effective way to teach and fill in the blanks, and clarify things I did not make clear. I think it makes a lot of sense for students to do this and there’s no reason why students can’t utilize it in groups. I notice sometimes two students from the same country would take my course and end up being very close and studying together. I think that works quite well. I always found it easier to go talk to a professor if I went with someone else so I didn’t seem stupid, and the two of us could work together.
Prof. Becker: You know in my 206 class, I break up nationalities. I put one American, one Chinese, one neither and one another person.
Prof. Tower: That’s interesting. I haven’t done that, but I’m always delighted when students from different countries choose to work in a team together to work out a computer project.
Ning: So my next question is, once students successfully get into our program, what kind of improvement do you expect from their two years’ studying here? And how does our program help them achieve this goal?
Prof. Becker: Different people have different objectives. Some people are trying to get more math skills. Summer is a good example. She is an engineer but she wants to learn more economics. Others major in Economics and need to learn more math and stats. For international students, it is important to become much more fluent in presentations and language, and ideally experience as much research as possible, often as a TA or RA . We want people to be professional in the field they want to enter – policy making, or business, or government, or think tanks, or going onto a PhD.
Prof. Tower: That incidently is one important element of personal statements. Charlie spends lots of time on placement. A personal statement can signal your personality. It’s going to tell whether it’s going to be easy for that person to get a job afterwards.
Prof. Becker: This is also true for American students. A couple of years ago a potential student came to visit. He wanted to go to into the financial sector. Great background, but incredibly quiet, almost reclusively so. Adrian and I talked about it and we thought ”that guy’s going to be hard to place”. Even if you have everything else, if you are really shy and you want to go into business, it’s hard no matter what your grades are.
The amazing thing about Duke, what makes this program work so well is that you can take classes everywhere here, you can work with different people. Our students are RAs and TAs in the business school, in the policy school, in health institutes, in political science and all over the place. And they take classes everywhere. We work with computer science, with the stats department. So when you come to Duke to get a master’s in Economics, it’s not just the Econ department. You’re part of the university. That’s not typical. Everyone can make the program that’s ideal for them. Most other universities just don’t do this. It also makes it much easier to design a course of study that meets individual needs, and to get to know professors individually – and they will write recommendations.
Ning: My next question is: for students back in China and here at Duke who’re planning to apply for PhD in economics, what’s your suggestion for them? How could they get into their ideal PhD programs? Should they take more math class, more PhD class, or more research experience? What’s the most important thing to do?
Prof. Becker: There’re a lot of necessary conditions. Good math is necessary. Good programming, computational and econometric skills are necessary, and good grades in these classes. It’s so hard to get into schools right now. Getting into any top 15 school is effectively a random event. Look at the placement today, we have students who are admitted to one school, but not the other. Because there are so many great applicants, the admission committees are making choices that are in fact very close to random. What we can do is not worry so much about that: at Duke we’re going to make you an effective economist, an effective researcher. My goal for our program is to raise people who are good researchers five years from now. I can’t promise anyone will get into Harvard, and I can’t promise anyone will even get into Duke or into some place further down. That’s not possible. But what we can do is try to build the skills. We offer a range of courses here, so it’s important to take the quantitative courses, it’s also important to take those courses that force you to present, to analyze, to read a lot of English and be able to read fast. So Professor Tower’s class on current issues in international trade and economic development is really important in this regard. I was just in Boston University this week and talked with one of our former students who was upset about her presentations. Now she’s no longer a first-year student, and has to make presentations. These things are really important because being able to get through the first year, you have to have a math and stats background. Then you become a RA and develop good programming skills. But eventually, you have to have good presentation skills and good writing skills. You have to have read widely and not be afraid to write. Instead of writing the minimum amount you could write on a research paper, you have to be comfortable enough with English to write a complete paper. And you have to read a wide range of economics literature, so you know what the interesting problems are, and you read other research to know how to build models. So reading, solving problems, and getting field experience are critical. One thing I pay attention to, that gets back to your earlier questions, if I notice an applicant from Shanghai or Beijing or Tianjin, who has gone off to Gansu, or Guizhou, or Yunnan province, to work in some remote places in one of the government programs, that says a lot of the applicant’s character. I pay a lot of attention to that.
Prof. Tower: As you were polishing your book review, which you wrote in the class, for publication in The journal of the Asia and Pacific Economy, you commented to me that my course is an English class as well as an economics class. You also said that you learned a lot about how to write from reading well-written economics books that were used in the course. I’m very pleased that you said that, because I want the class to feel that way. I have a question for you, Charlie, the writing samples, the research papers that the applicants submit, do you find them very good on average?
Prof. Becker: A lot of them simply try to demonstrate they can write in English.
Prof. Tower: Or that they know econometrics skill.
Prof. Becker: Yeah. Overall, they’re not as good as recent Duke undergraduate honors theses.
Prof. Tower: When I finish reading many of the writing samples, I can’t find anything I learned or that I want to pass on to other people. And that’s a disappointment. If you can write a research paper that has a memorable conclusion that is worth passing on, I think you’ve done something important. You want to signal this skill in your writing sample.
Ning: The last question: I realized one of the research interests for both of you is development economics. Could you tell me something about the future of this branch of economics?
Prof. Tower: We just gave a job offer to a young woman at Harvard. When she was a graduate student at Princeton, her thesis advisor wrote an article on New York Times, saying how clever and important and well executed her thesis was. At the time, she was on the job market. Her advisor is a columnist for the New York Times. She spent a lot of time in Peru. There were three different squatter settlements. In these, people just took the land and built primitive housing. Those squatter settlements got title to the land at different times in the history of Peru. She looked at how people’s standard of living developed in these three areas, and discovered once they got legal title, they no longer have to stay at home and hold a machete to keep people away from their property. So they were able to go out and get work and make good things happen. Here she was looking very closely at this real estate development and making sense out of it, and she ended up in Harvard. She did some very interesting things on bride prices in Bangladesh. So she’s looking very closely at particularly interesting problems in developing countries. In the debate we had in the economics department as to whether offer her a tenured full professorship, several professors argued very strongly that this is the way development economics is going – looking imaginatively at interesting problems, and tieing sociology and economics together. One professor said, “If we want to be on the frontier in new development economics we must hire her. Yes, what she’s doing is somewhat controversial. The old guys don’t think her work is that important, but there’s a good chance that this is the path of the future.” So these professors argued “If Duke is gonna be on the frontier of development economics, she is the person we should get.”
Prof. Becker: I think what Professor Tower said is right. If you look today versus twenty or more years ago, or even ten years ago, there’s this explosion of information that we just couldn’t imagine, both on the micro and macro level. For many of these datasets, you not only know the household characters, but you can actually place them – you know where the household is located in the survey. The techniques we use today in micro issues in development are technically more sophisticated in practical terms. They’re more sophisticated because we follow a household over time, or we could go back to their past and there’s just so much more data. At the macro level, we have again an explosion that gives us amazing information that wasn’t there on, say, asset-market, prices for long periods and high frequency. So you can ask things about stock market efficiency that you couldn’t do before. You can ask about higher moments of distribution. You can do much more sophisticated work on bubbles and such. You could have done it theoretically, but the data didn’t allow you to provide empirical support. So I see development economics entering a golden era-economics as a whole is- it’s in a golden age right now. In the case of China, you have these wonderful surveys, so many now. They’re available on various asset markets. One example is not from China, but I’m sure there is a Chinese counterpart. I have a grad student who is looking at housing prices at Saint Petersburg in Russia, and he’s been collecting at least a thousand observations a week. And every Monday morning, he uses Google Earth to find the particular location of the observations and can make the prediction of how long it’ll take to travel to various points, so you know the expected transportation cost at each site.
In China, also you have this great data on middle aged and elderly people. It’s possible to use that information to examine the impact of major events that took place during, say, the Mao Zedong era. There are many pieces that were written on the long-run impact of the Culture Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and so on. Some of the research our students are doing now. Zhu has this great paper on long-run health and education of those who were sent to the countryside during the revolution, using not data from back then, but data on people who are elderly people today. Yang has a similar paper looking at another impact of the Culture Revolution. These are using contemporary data. There’s so much literature in China today in part because China generates a lot of interesting data. You can go back and learn about today, but you can also like an archaeologist and use information today to learn about the past. It’s an amazing time.
Ning: I think that wraps up my interview today. I’d like to thank you on behalf of all the Chinese students. This will be extremely useful information for them. Thank you!