Stanford Report, February 22, 2006

In Print and On the Air

GARTH SALONER, the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Electronic Commerce, Strategic Management and Economics at the Graduate School of Business, told London's Financial Times Feb. 13 that an increasing number of students from England and North America view India as the destination for their first post-MBA job. "These young people now regard India as part of the global labor market for their particular skills, and that is a big change from a few years back," he said. Last month, Saloner brought a group of students to Mumbai and Delhi, where they bumped into peers from Harvard and Wharton who also were meeting business leaders. Stanford graduate student ADRIAN LI, who is scheduled to go to Beijing next month as part of an exchange program, said one reason he chose to visit India was "to take lessons to China. There are many parallels but also different levels of development," he said. "Take microfinance, which in India alleviates poverty more effectively [than in China]."

Although most experts support smaller class sizes in schools, some have begun to argue that bigger may be better, the Washington Post reported Feb. 14. Hoover Institution Senior Fellow ERIC HANUSHEK told the Post that he "would advocate letting class sizes creep up somewhat and using the released funds to go toward teacher salaries." But, he added, it would be "a long, long time" before this produced more achievement if ineffective teachers got the raise, too. "There is an economic theorem," he said, "that bad teachers like more pay about as much as good teachers, so increased salaries do not have any effect on the retention of good teachers unless some other policies are also put in place." Higher salaries would lead to more applicants for openings, Hanushek said, but "there is not a lot of evidence that school districts tend to hire better teachers when they have a larger pool to choose from."

STEPHEN SCHNEIDER, the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, described science fiction writer Michael Crichton's latest book, State of Fear, as "demonstrably garbage." The fiction book, which dismisses global warming as a largely imaginary threat, recently won the annual journalism award of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the New York Times reported Feb. 9. Petroleum geologists may like it, Schneider said, but only because "they are ideologically connected to their product, which fills up the gas tanks of Hummers."