Vivre la Difference

I was doing a little research into the various ways you can get an online education (that is, how you an get a degree or technical qualification online, not the simple fact that every time you read something you get a little more education) and was a little surprised to find out quite how old the idea is.

There have been correspondence courses, of course, almost since the day that we had a reliable postal service but the first college or university to set up a full system was in 1947 in South Africa. The UK followed with a similar system in 1969 but some of the universities had been running smaller schemes before this. One odd fact is that President Mugabe of Zimbabwe got his degrees from London University. He did his studies while in prison.

The programs seem to have developed by at first simply sending assignments and books through the post. The students would perform the tasks in their own time and then mail them back. With the development of TV some of the classes and lectures began to be broadcast that way and you may have heard of the Outback schools in Australia where the children listen on the radio.

With increased computerization there were two more options. Either the student (that could be you!) received a CD ROM to work from, replacing the books, or perhaps the work was via a website or email.

Now, with the expansion of broadband, it looks like we could get another revolution in the way this all works. We can now get decent quality streaming video on our PCs and some colleges are starting to make lectures avaiable as an MP3, something you can listen to on your iPod.

There’s also that change in the student loans scheme I noted a couple of weeks back. It used to be that only those colleges which did more than 50% of their teaching on campus could have their students qualify for subsidized education loans. This restriction has now been lifted so I think we’ll see quite an expansion in the programs on offer.
Interesting times really, the mixture of changes in technology and financing coming together. It’s almost certain to lead to a big expansion of online education. Which is of course a good thing, more choice for the student making it easier, especially for those returning to education or doing a program while still working, being just what we want.

[tags]personality tests, distance learning, EQSQ, college degree, online education, education online, internet, web 2.0 [/tags]

A couple of days back I blogged on “The Value of Education and Training“. The essential question is whether going off to college, whether online, to a campus, to a technical school or whatever is actually worth it. Being the economist type that I am I dressed the question up with more detail, pointing out that what you actually spend to go to school isn’t the only cost, there’s also the loss of the things you can’t do while you’re doing the education.

My answer was that yes, it does seem to be worth it given that college graduates get a great deal more money on average. This is known as “the return to education” and it works just like economists predict it would. If you invest in capital (and education is known as human capital) then you expect to see a return or profit from that investment.

What rather surprised me was these figures I found today:

Full-time workers age 25 and over without a 

high school diploma had median weekly earnings

 of $407, compared with $585 for high school

  graduates (no college) and $1,029 for college

 graduates holding at least a bachelor�s degree.

Those numbers are a little different from the ones I used before but there’s a technical reason for that to do with using means and medians (no, I won’t bother to explain that!).

What it does show though is how high the returns to education are. Dropping out of high school (on average remember) cuts $170 a week from your income for the rest of your life. So if you did do that getting your GED really sounds like a good idea. Getting a college degree adds (again, on average) $450 a week to your income, again, for all the years you work. I was quite astonished when I saw those numbers (they’re from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the Department of Labor) I really hadn’t realized quite how high the value of education and training was.

[tags]personality tests, education and training, EQSQ, college degree, opportunity cost, economics, high school, GED [/tags]

We’ve already had a look here at what psychiatrists do and the relationship between them and a psychologist. I’ve had a little email asking if I can give a guide to other psychiatirc jobs. Ones that, hopefully, don’t involve getting through med school or struggling to get a Ph.D. Nothing wrong with those choices nor the education that lead to them, of course, but they’re not for everyone.

There’s three major classifications of jobs that I can find that are part of the support services in psychiatry in general. They are, if you wish, the psychiatric jobs that actually make the system work, for pyschiatrists on their own really wouldn’t have all that much of an impact.

The first is pyschiatric nursing. The usual requirements for nurses apply, a degree (perhaps associate’s, perhaps bachelor’s, some advanced jobs require a master’s) specialist training and so on. There are any number of programs to help people with one level of education get to the next, part time, full time, on the job and so on. Average earnings are similar to other types of nursing, around the $52,000 level according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Nurses should be caring, sympathetic, responsible, and detail oriented.

Says the BLS. Those are almost all empathic qualities, with the addition of that attention to detail. That’s rather a more systemizer’s trait. So if we were going to use our EQSQ tests to look at whether someone wanted to take up one of these psychiatric jobs we’d be looking for someone more EQ than SQ but not too much so.

The second is social workers working in the psychiatric and substance abuse fields.

Social workers help people function the best way they can in their environment, deal with their relationships, and solve personal and family problems. Social workers often see clients who face a life-threatening disease or a social problem, such as inadequate housing, unemployment, a serious illness, a disability, or substance abuse.

This is what the BLS tells us and we can see that this is a more empathic set of requirements. The usual educational qualification is a bachelor’s although the higher level jobs require a master’s. Salaries are a little lower than nurses, $33,000 on average, but many would consider the work to be a little easier too. Not quite so much blood and gore to deal with for example.

The third is psychiatric aides who are, again according to the BLS, responsible for:

In addition to helping patients to dress, bathe, groom themselves, and eat, psychiatric aides socialize with them and lead them in educational and recreational activities. Psychiatric aides may play games such as cards with the patients, watch television with them, or participate in group activities, such as sports or field trips. They observe patients and report any physical or behavioral signs that might be important for the professional staff to know. They accompany patients to and from examinations and treatment. Because they have such close contact with patients, psychiatric aides can have a great deal of influence on their patients’ outlook and treatment.

The usual educational requirement is simply a high school diploma and this is reflected in the average earnings of just over $11 an hour. It is important to note that for many aides this is simply an entry level job. Something to do to get a little experience perhaps, find out whether medicine is in fact the correct career choice and if it is, take advantage of the various training programs that can lead to either social or nursing work.

What I hope comes through clear and loud though is that all of these jobs depend quite heavily on the empathic qualities of those who do them. If you are considering one of the psychiatric jobs then please do take the EQSQ tests at the top. They really will help you to find out whether this is quite the correct career choice for you.

[tags]personality tests, education and training, EQSQ, psychiatric jobs, nursing, social work, medicine [/tags]

We’re all aware that there has, in the past, been discrimination against women in the jobs that they’ve been allowed to take. As recently as my grandmother’s youth the only acceptable careers for a middle class girl were nursing, teaching or being a mother. All excellent career choices of course but the limitation to just these three was, how shall we put this politely, somewhat restrictive?

Of course, things have changed now and while the world is not yet perfect (which, alas, it never will be) things are definitely better. What we’re trying to do is move from thinking about a career choice, a job or profession, from being something that men or women do to being something that those people best suited to it do. This is how we’re using the EQSQ tests at the top of the page, as a way to work out which is indeed a good career choice given the interests or brain type of each individual. We know that more women than men are empathzers, more men than women systemizers. We can also construct a number of scenes, think about some jobs, and place them as being suitable for systemizers or empathizers.

However, we do need to be careful when we do so. We need to make sure that we’re actually being scientific about it, not letting past attitudes color our thinking. This might surprise you a little, but it looks like computer and information system managers need a lot of empathic skills. We normally think of almost anything to do with computers as requiring systemizing skills, the very image of the computer geek is of course male. But programming itself, very much a systemizer’s skill, is very different from managing programmers. As the Bureau of Labor Statitics tells us:

 Computer and information systems managers need strong communication skills. They coordinate the activities of their unit with those of other units or organizations. They confer with top executives…

Communication? Coordination? Confering? These are empathizer’s skills. So if you take those tests up at the top there, the EQSQ ones, don’t then think that if you have a high EQ score that there’s no place in the computer industry for you. It depends on where in the industry, not the industry itself.

It could in fact be a very good career choice. The average earnings for these managers was $92,000 in 2004. And it isn’t just geeks who can apply.

[tags]personality tests, education and training, EQSQ, career choice, computer, software, sex [/tags]

Higher education and training are expensive, no doubt about it, so the big question has to be whether they are worth it. Fortunately I’m an economist of a type so I keep up with the latest papers on these sorts of things.

The first thing to do is actually measure the real cost of education and training. We’re all aware of the need to actually pay the college or school, whether it’s the local community college for a class or two, some online education or a full college degree.

On top of that there will be things like books and so on. But I also need to introduce you to an economic concept called “opportunity cost”. This is so important that the Chair of one economics department that I know actually defines an economist as someone who understands opportunity cost. Get this idea and you are one. Very simply, there are other things you can do with your time and money than get higher education and training. So the cost of getting such education and training is not only what you actually have to spend, it’s all the things you can’t do, the money you can’t earn, the beer you can’t drink while you study, as well.

That makes almost any form of education and training look incredibly expensive now doesn’t it? Well, there is some help at hand here because of course everything is terribly expensive when you look at it this way. Sitting in the rocking chair watching the world go by might seem costless but what about all the other things you could have been doing? The opportunity cost of that glass of iced tea in front of the house is exactly all those other things you can’t do at that time.
Good, now that you understand opportunity cost you’re now an economist. You’ll still have to go and get the grades in class and all as well of course before anyone will call you one, other than me and my friend but still, pretty easy subject really, isn’t it?

Being slightly more serious, what we really want to know is, will that education and training actually be worth it, even with this extra opportunity cost? I can’t be certain for everyone but for most people the answer should be yes. The “returns to education” as economists put it are pretty high.

For example, in the USA at the moment those with a college degree make 68% more money, on average, than those with only a high school diploma. I’ll return to this subject later but do remember, that 68% pay hike (on average!) lasts for the whole 40 years of working life. That’s a big chunk of change when you think about it.

[tags]personality tests, education and training, EQSQ, college degree, opportunity cost, economics, high school [/tags]

I’ve got to admit this looking at the type of people’s minds is fascinating stuff. I’ve been reading some of Simon Baron-Cohen’s scientific papers (I do it so you don’t have to!) to try and understand more about the ideas behind the EQSQ tests you can take at the top of the page. As we saw a couple of days ago, Baron-Cohen thinks that Asperger’s Syndrome and autism are an extreme form of the “male brain”. We’re also reasonably certain that most of these things, brain types and a lot of other things like intelligence, are inherited. So, is it possible that things like autism are also inherited? Seems reasonable, if many other things about the brain are.

So, he decided to do some tests. He works in higher education, at Cambridge University in England, so he thought a bit and used the work he had already done on Empathizing and Systemizing Quotients. That’s right, the same tests you can see at the top there, take them if you like! Now we’re using them the other way around, looking at the EQ and SQ scores to see which career or path through higher education someone might want to take. Baron-Cohen realized he could use them in the opposite way that we are.

If engineers, mathematicians and physicists are more likely to be systemizers than empathizers: well, actually, at the level of Cambridge, they’re almost certain to be systemizers. Then, and here’s the leap, if SQ and EQ are inherited, and autism really is an extreme form of that “male brain”, then we would expect to see more people with autism in the families of the engineers. What did he find? In the families of those students doing the programs suitable for systemizers 6 times more people with autism than in the students doing programs better for empathizers (literature was the one he used). Reasonable proof there then.

By the way, no, this doesn’t mean that if you are a systemizer then you have autism. Not the same thing at all. Remember, it’s an extreme, not a simple description.

A lot of science is what is called “obvious”. That’s because when you explain it to someone they go “Yeah, sure, that’s obvious”.  But somebody had to think of it first, before it was obvious, which is what has been done here.

Still, there is one good thing out of this for us. We get to use the tests to find out what type of higher education would be good for us, knowing that they’ve been scientifically tested.

[tags]personality tests, higher education, EQSQ,Asperger’s, career choice, autism, literature, maths, engineers [/tags]

The European Union released some statistics to mark International Women’s Day yesterday. The differences in hours worked, (the UK was about the only country where men and women have about the same amount of leisure time, who knew?) differences in pay (yes, there is something holding back women’s pay) and more to the point for us, in the programs that people take in higher education.

As you know, we expect more men than women to be systemizers and more women than men to be empathizers. We can also make some fairly simple distinctions between certain careers and higher education programs. While there are a lot, perhaps even most, that don’t fall simply or easily on one side or the other of the EQSQ tests, some are easy. Math and science will appeal most to systemizers while the liberal arts are more likely to interest empathizers. So here’s some of the numbers:

Women accounted for more than half of tertiary students in all Member States except Germany and Cyprus, where numbers were equal. Within science, mathematics and computing 37% of tertiary students were women in the EU25. Only Italy and Portugal had almost as many women as men studying science, mathematics and computing, while in the Netherlands fewer than a quarter of those studying these subjects were women. In all Member States more women than men studied humanities and arts, ranging from 54% in Slovakia to 80% in Latvia, compared to an EU25 average of 66%.

Tertiary is just the cute European way of saying college, higher education, means the same thing. One thing to understand about Europe is that the different countries are a lot more different than the US states. Latvia, for example, less than 20 years ago was still a communist dictatorship, so it’s not all that surprising to see them having very different numbers. Actually, Slovakia was too but of a very different sort.

But overall the results are about what we might expect. Those career paths, those higher education programs, which would appeal more to empathizers had more women in them. Those that would appeal more to systemizers had more men in them.

The most important thing that we have to remember though is that people do not have a high SQ because they are male: that’s only a probability. What we’re interested in is whether someone, the individual, is EQ or SQ. We’ll need to look at some more figures, probably ones more closely calculated to find the effects that we want, to really find out. But if those 37% of the people on science courses who are women all have a higher SQ than EQ (and so are systemizers by our tests) and we remember that the majority of all college students are women, then we can make a rough guess at the percentage of women who have “male type” brains. Just over 30% or so.

Looking the other way, at the men who do humanities and arts, we see roughly that same 30% of men who have “female type” brains.

Rather interesting I think, don’t you? How big those numbers are?

[tags]personality tests, higher education, EQSQ,European Union, career choice, International Women’s Day, arts, science, [/tags]

Regular readers will know that this blog is based upon the ideas of Simon Baron-Cohen. He’s the scientist who developed the EQSQ tests from which we get the blog name. That acronym stands for Empathizing Quotient and Systemizing Quotient. Quite simply, by asking a series of questions we try and work out whether you are more of an empathizer or sympathizer and these two are called “female type brain” and “male”. You can take the tests up at the top there and the important thing is the difference between the two numbers. Is your SQ higher than your EQ? Male type and vice versa. There’s also the balanced brain, where the scores are roughly equal. It’s worth a try as it can help with career choices.
No particular type is better or worse than the other and having a male type brain isn’t the same as being male. While men are more likely to be male type this is only a probability and what we’re interested in is you, the individual. We can, for example, once we know your brain type, help with some guidance about what sort of careers might interest you, what you might be good at, what sort of education or career choice you should have.

All of that is by way of background explanation. What Baron-Cohen does is go further than this: he thinks that the same sort of analysis of brain types might be a clue to Asperger’s Syndrome and other types of autism. He’s not quite claiming it as a law yet, just putting it forward as an interesting idea, but there does seem to be a lot interesting in it.

Leaving aside all of the old jokes about men and male type brains (”He doesn’t seem to care” “He never listens” “He never seems to know what I’m feeling”) it is true that systemizers, which most men are, are less interested in emotions than empathizers, which is what most (perhaps many is more accurate for both) women are. Baron-Cohen looks at this and says that perhaps autism is simply an extreme type of the male brain. Very interested, extremely interested, in systems. How the water flows out of a tap, how the sunlight comes in through the window, these sorts of things. Also extremely uninterested in people, their feelings and emotions. So uninterested that they don’t really interact with other people at all.

That’s a pretty good description of the symptoms of autism: who knew that working out a likely explanation for such a disease could also help people in their career choices?

[tags]personality tests, education, EQSQ, Asperger’s Syndrome, career choice, autism, medicine,[/tags]

One of the grand desires of the education system today is to try and get away from the idea of sex based education. No, I’m not talking about education about sex, rather, that rather stale idea that boys should study one set of subjects while girls should study another. Which is rather where I think our EQSQ tests could help in school psychology.

Now that we’ve got over the idea that girls should study cooking while boys do the woodwork, that girls should do literature while the boys science, what we’re actually interested in is which subjects should each individual study? Now it’s absolutely true that when we measure the empathizing quotient and the sympathizing one we end up with labels like “male brain”, “female” and “balanced”. But these are just that, names, and while we expect to see more boys with the male type and girls with the female that’s not the end of the story, far from it.

What we’re much more interested in is which type of brain does the individual have? Not so much “Johnny’s a boy so he should do science” but “Joanna’s a systemizer so she should do science”. Just like my boss did in fact.

There’s another part to this sort of school psychology as well. We’re not only interested in those who would be good at a subject. We’re also very interested in those who are bad at one. When we talk about “school” rather than “college” we’re aware that there’s a certain basic minimum that everyone needs to learn. It doesn’t matter how much of an empathizer Jules is, he’s still got to learn the basic math otherwise he just won’t be able to make sense of the big wide world out there.

So, just a thought really, but we might well find our tests (available for free up at the top of the page there folks!) useful in two ways. To tell us which subjects students should study because they’ll be good at them and to tell us which, at a more basic level, they should study because they’ll be bad at them but they still need to know them.

[tags]personality tests, education, EQSQ, school psychology, career choice, high school, college,[/tags]

Yes, I know, economists are often thought of as less than human, spawn of the devil even (it’s OK, I’m allowed to say this, I am one). All these models of how the world works and not enough looking out the window to see how the ideas actually affect real people. While I would, at another time and place, defend the profession from these slurs it is absolutely true that we are lacking in those empathic qualities. Rather like mathematicians, if the real world doesn’t measure up to the model than it’s the real world that’s wrong.
How about this as a description of how economists work? From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Economists have structured work schedules. They often work alone, writing reports, preparing statistical charts, and using computers…

Sounds like typical systemizer’s type work, doesn’t it? As we saw from my own EQSQ test results (SQ twice EQ, it’s, as we know, the difference between them that is important,) I seem to be well suited to my profession. Little interest in people and working in a job that requires little contact with them, sitting hermit-like with my computer. So would this be a suitable career choice for you? Rather depends on your scores on the EQSQ tests at the top of the page.
We can go further, as with our story of the (excellent, BTW, far better than I) female research economist. Not only is she one of the only 19% of the profession that are female, she also shows other features of the male type brain like excellence at map reading. Much better at that than most men actually.

So we seem to have found a profession that is for those who are highly systematic, those with male type brains. (We must note, that, as always, we mean male type, not male, brains. There are plenty of men who are terrible economists as the entire profession of politicians shows us.)

But is this SQ type profession very well paid? Are we correct in thinking that it’s a man’s world, that it is male type brains that get rewarded? Certainly, the top 10% do very well, over $130,000 a year. But that figure is inflated because a lot work on Wall Street, a very highly paid place. The starting salary with the Federal Government for someone with a Bachelor’s was $25,000, rather less than a decent nurse (a decidedly empathic profession) earns.

Hhmm. I think we need rather more data points here, some more professions that we can identify as EQ or SQ. Can we get some nomination form you as to career choices? Which careers, which choices, do you think require more empathy than systemizing? Or if you prefer, which careers and choices are highly or lowly paid and we’ll then try and work out whether they lean towards the EQ or SQ.
[tags]personality tests, education, EQSQ, economics, career choice, work, income, pay,[/tags]