Higher education: signaling vs learning

This paper presents evidence in favor of the signaling (as opposed to human capital building) model of elite higher education. Of course, the data is quite crude and different fields may tilt more in one direction or the other. For example, I think most science and engineering students who attend MIT or Caltech are doing it because they feel it will develop their human capital (i.e., they will learn more and receive a perhaps painfully rigorous education) than because of the signaling value, although the latter is non-negligible.

See earlier posts here.

Worker Signals Among New College Graduates: The Role of Selectivity and GPA

Brad Hershbein - The University of Michigan
October, 2011

Abstract
Recent studies have found a large earnings premium to attending a more selective college, but the mechanisms underlying this premium have received little attention and remain unclear. In order to shed light on this question, I develop a multi-dimensional signaling model relying on college grades and selectivity that rationalizes students' choices of effort and firms' wage-setting behavior. The model is then used to produce predictions of how the interaction of the signals should be related to wages. Using five data sets that span the early 1960s through the late 2000s, I show that the data support the predictions of the signaling model, with support growing stronger over time. I also discuss alternative explanations, including di fferent types of human capital models; provide robustness checks; and relate the findings to both the returns-to-college-quality and employer learning literatures.

From the introduction:

Recently, there has been a sizable interest in the return to attending a more selective or prestigious college. Students who attend more prestigious schools earn more over their lifetime, on average, than those who attend less selective schools, but the mechanism underlying this premium is not well understood. In particular, there is disagreement over whether the earnings di fference is primarily due to the college itself or whether it is driven by unobserved student characteristics. The first of these channels is consistent with human capital theory -- attending the more selective school actually makes the worker more productive -- and the second more closely accords with models of signaling -- more innately productive workers are more likely to attend more selective schools.

[It's also possible that attending the right school gives access to networks and valuable information about career paths; see here.]

Given that annual U.S. higher education expenditures are over $460 billion, but per-student expenditures increase dramatically with college selectivity, understanding why students who attend selective colleges earn more over their lifetimes has dramatic implications for how those dollars are optimally allocated. Recent theoretical work seeking to explain why students increasingly sort by ability across college selectivities suggests a positive complementarity in human capital acquisition between students' ability and the greater resources available at selective colleges, but these models have received little empirical attention. On the other hand, the relatively few studies that have attempted to measure student learning in college have found little di fference across di fferent types of colleges once pre-college characteristics are controlled for (Pascarella and Terenzini 2005; Arum and Roksa 2011). While it is not clear whether the "learning" measured in these studies is of the type that fi rms would care about, this evidence suggests that the return to selectivity is unlikely to be due to human capital alone and that the signaling mechanism is worth a more careful investigation.

Whither higher education?

John Hennessey (Stanford president) and Salman Khan (Khan Academy) discuss higher education and digital technology.

Learning or Credentialing? Signaling or Sorting?


 


Some comments:

 1. Internet technology can enhance learning. However, I think the largest impact will be on cognitively gifted or very motivated individuals who will be able to accelerate their education (see, e.g., Khan Academy). For average students, the main barriers to learning have to do with self-motivation and I am not sure that streaming video of lectures, or even a virtual classroom environment which allows rich interaction, will provide better stimulus than the traditional lecture. It seems to me that my intro students have trouble paying attention even when I am literally dancing around at the front of the class, telling jokes and working through elaborate physics demonstrations (which often include explosions or bouncing balls or colorful animations). Moving the lectures online will be cheaper, but not necessarily better -- a win for efficiency, perhaps, but no solution for the difficulty that the average individual has in mastering challenging material.

Ask yourself what the ideal learning environment would be for your child if cost were no object. I think it might be the Oxbridge tutorial system, where a real expert devotes their full attention to training a small number of students (perhaps even a single individual) in great depth. Almost as good would be training in an environment where the student to faculty ratio is low, and the faculty are very focused on pedagogy. Interactions with peers of similar (or superior) ability are as important as those with the tutor/instructor. This ideal limit is quite far from the online systems currently envisaged. Is America too poor to provide this old-fashioned but superior education to (say) the top 10 percent of students? I doubt it.

At the highest quality levels, educational productivity has increased little in the last 100 years. We might improve things around the edges by, say, having lectures from the top scholars available online, along with tools enabling students from different universities to exchange ideas and answer each other's questions. But I don't think we'll see substantive productivity improvement here until we -- gulp -- solve the AI problem and create robot genius professors. Only a small number of students could crowd around Feynman at Caltech's Physics X to hear him explain the EPR paradox. I don't expect that to change anytime soon. (You can record Feynman's comments about EPR; you can't allow thousands of students around the world to interact with him one on one.)


2. Credentialing is complex and even the system we have had in place for several generations is not well understood either by students or by employers. What are the key factors that employers need to determine about an applicant? Intelligence (reasonably well measured by simple tests; but even this is not widely acknowledged in broader society), Conscientiousness (difficult to measure without actually putting someone through a challenging program over a period of years), Ambition/Drive (similar to Conscientiousness), and finally: Creativity, Adaptability and Interpersonal Skills -- all extremely difficult to measure.

I am not sure that Internet technologies will really improve our Credentialing capabilities. We already have testing centers, GRE subject exams, Actuarial exams, narrow skill certifications like Microsoft MCSE, etc. It's more a matter of cultural attitudes than anything else -- when will employers start accepting a high SAT score and some narrow skill certification in place of, say, an engineering degree from a well-known university? Has anyone done systematic research on the relative validities (predictive power) of different kinds of certification for a wide variety of employment settings? I only know of results for general cognitive ability (g).

Cognitive decline of the university population

Razib at GNXP provides some nice figures relevant to my previous post Decline of the humanities.

The figures show the distribution of vocabulary scores (General Social Survey (GSS) WORDSUM) of college graduates and those without college degrees for the periods 1974-1984 and 1998-2008. It looks like the average score for college graduates has dropped by a significant fraction of a standard deviation over 25 years. This effect is entirely predictable given the larger percentage of Americans attending college in recent times.





It should not be surprising that a shrinking percentage of college students can write well or do basic mathematics, let alone appreciate Proust or quantum mechanics.

Additional years of education have not increased verbal abilities in the general population. This observation supports, at least in part, the signaling and sorting model of higher education (the primary value of credentials is that they reflect more or less invariant qualities such as IQ and Conscientiousness), as opposed to the model that higher education builds human capital.

Credentialism and elite employment

Want an elite job at the very pinnacle of 21st century capitalism? Read the rest of this post. [Additional remarks.]

Here's what I said in an earlier post How the world works: (see also Creators and Rulers.)

Go to the web sites of venture capital, private equity or hedge funds, or of Goldman Sachs, and you’ll find that HYPS alums, plus a few Ivies, plus MIT and Caltech, are grossly overrepresented. (Equivalently, look at the founding teams of venture funded startups.)

Most top firms only recruit at a few schools. A kid from a non-elite UG school has very little chance of finding a job at one of these places unless they first go to grad school at, e.g., HBS, HLS, or get a PhD from a top place. (By top place I don’t mean “gee US News says Ohio State’s Aero E program is top 5!” — I mean, e.g., a math PhD from Berkeley or a PhD in computer science from MIT — the traditional top dogs in academia.)

This is just how the world works. I won’t go into detail, but it’s actually somewhat rational for elite firms to operate this way ...

The paper below is by a Kellogg (Northwestern) management professor, Lauren Rivera. No offense to Rivera, because she gets things mainly right, but much of (good) social science seems like little more than documenting what is obvious to any moderately perceptive person with the relevant life experience. Bad social science, on the other hand, often means completely missing things that a moderately perceptive person would have noticed! ;-)

In reading the excerpts below, keep in mind Rivera's slightly different emphasis on law, consulting and I-banking, as opposed to hedge/venture funds and startups (more quant/technology focused) in my post.

Ivies, extracurriculars, and exclusion: Elite employers’ use of educational credentials

... In the following article, I analyze how hiring agents in top-tier professional service firms use education to recruit, assess, and select new hires. I find that educational credentials were the most common criteria employers used to solicit and screen resumes. However, it was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige. Employers privileged candidates who possessed a super-elite (e.g., top 5) university affiliation and attributed superior cognitive, cultural, and moral qualities to candidates who had been admitted to such an institution, regardless of their actual performance once there. However, attendance at a super-elite university was insufficient for success in resume screens. Importing the logic of elite university admissions, firms performed a secondary resume screen on the status and intensity of candidates’ extracurricular accomplishments and leisure pursuits. I discuss these findings in terms of the changing nature of credentialism and stratification in higher education to suggest that participation in formalized extracurricular activities has become a new credential of moral character that has monetary conversion value in labor markets.

Below are some excerpts from the paper.

... So-called “public Ivies” such as University of Michigan and Berkeley were not considered elite or even prestigious in the minds of evaluators (in contrast, these “state schools” were frequently described pejoratively as “safety schools” that were “just okay”). Even Ivy League designation was insufficient for inclusion in the super-elite. For undergraduate institutions, “top-tier” typically included only Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and potentially Wharton (University of Pennsylvania's Business School). By contrast, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and University of Pennsylvania (general studies) were frequently described as “second tier” schools that were filled primarily with candidates who “didn’t get in” to a super-elite school.

Definitions of “top-tier” were even narrower for professional schools, primarily referring to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and to a lesser extent Columbia law schools, and Harvard, Wharton (University of Pennsylvania), and Stanford business schools.7 A consulting director (white, female) illustrates, “Going to a major university is important. Being at the big top four schools is important. Even it's a little more important being at Harvard or Stanford [for MBAs]; you know it's just better chances for somebody.” A consultant (Asian-American, male) described of being at a “top” school, “It's light-years different whether or not we are going to consider your resume.”

Evaluators relied so intensely on “school” as a criterion of evaluation not because they believed that the content of elite curricula better prepared students for life in their firms – in fact, evaluators tended to believe that elite and, in particular, super-elite instruction was “too abstract,” “overly theoretical,” or even “useless” compared to the more “practical” and “relevant” training offered at “lesser” institutions – but rather due to the strong cultural meanings and character judgments evaluators attributed to admission and enrollment at an elite school. I discuss the meanings evaluators attributed to educational prestige in their order of prevalence among respondents.

Educational credentials = signaling proxy for brainpower.

In line with human capital, screening, and signaling accounts of the role of educational credentials in hiring (see Bills, 2003 for review), participants overwhelmingly believed the prestige of one's educational credentials was an indicator of their underlying intelligence. Evaluators believed that educational prestige was a signal of general rather than job-specific skills, most notably the ability to learn quickly. An attorney (white, female) described, “I’m looking for sponges. You know a kid from Harvard's gonna pick stuff up fast.” However, it was not the content of an elite education that employers valued but rather the perceived rigor of these institutions’ admissions processes. According to this logic, the more prestigious a school, the higher its “bar” for admission, and thus the “smarter” its student body. A consultant (white, male) explained, “The top schools are more selective, they’re reputed to be top schools because they do draw a more select student body who tend to be smarter and more able.” A law firm partner (white, male) agreed, “If they’re getting into a top-tier law school, I assume that person has more intellectual horsepower and, you know, is more committed than somebody who goes to a second or third tier law school.”

In addition to such an intelligence-based perspective on university admissions, evaluators frequently adopted an instrumental and unconstrained view of university enrollment, perceiving that students typically “go to the best school they got into” (lawyer, Hispanic, male). Consequently, in the minds of evaluators, prestige rankings provided a quick way to sort candidates by “brainpower.” When sorting the “mock” resumes, an investment banking recruiter (white, female) charged with screening resumes at her firm revealed how such assumptions played out in application review. She remarked, “Her [Sarah's] grades are lower but she went to Harvard so she's definitely well-endowed in the brain category…Jonathan… went to Princeton, so he clearly didn’t get the short end of the stick in terms of smarts.” This halo effect of school prestige, combined with the prevalent belief that the daily work performed within professional service firms was “not rocket science” (see Rivera, 2010a) gave evaluators confidence that the possession of an elite credential was a sufficient signal of a candidate's ability to perform the analytical capacities of the job. Even in the quantitatively rigorous field of consulting [HA HA HA], a junior partner (white, male) asserted, “I’ve come to the stage where I trust that if the person has gone to Wharton, they can do math.”

By contrast, failure to attend an “elite” school, as conceptualized by evaluators, was an indicator of intellectual failure, regardless of a student's grades or standardized test scores. Many evaluators believed that high achieving students at lesser ranked institutions “didn’t get in to a good school,” must have “slipped up,” or otherwise warranted a “question mark” around their analytical abilities. ...

An investment banker (white, female) expressed a sentiment that was common across firms, “The best kid in the country may be at like Bowling Green, right. But to go to Bowling Green, interview 20 kids just to find that one needle in the haystack doesn’t make sense, when you can go to Harvard it's like 30 kids that are all super qualified and great.”

The finding that elite employers largely restrict the bounds of competition to students at the nation's most elite universities is important because large-scale studies of status attainment have historically focused on estimating the effect of years of schooling or college completion rather than institutional prestige in explaining occupational outcomes. ...

Rocket scientists need not apply:

... By contrast, those without significant extracurricular experiences or those who participated in activities that were primarily academically or pre-professionally oriented were perceived to be “boring,” “tools,” “bookworms,” or “nerds” who might turn out to be “corporate drones” if hired. A consultant (white, male) articulated the essence of this sentiment: "We like to interview at schools like Harvard and Yale, but people who have like 4.0s and are in the engineering department but you know don’t have any friends, have huge glasses, read their textbooks all day, those people have no chance here…I have always said, [my firm] is like a fraternity of smart people." ...

A banker (white, male) summarized the tradeoff evaluators believed they were facing, “I would trade an outgoing, friendly confident person for a rocket scientist any day.”

Here's an article about the research in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

If you want to get a job at the very best law firm, investment bank, or consultancy, here’s what you do:

1. Go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or (maybe) Stanford. If you’re a business student, attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania will work, too, but don’t show up with a diploma from Dartmouth or MIT. No one cares about those places.

2. Don’t work your rear off for a 4.0. Better to graduate with 3.7 and a bunch of really awesome extracurriculars. And by “really awesome” I mean literally climbing Everest or winning an Olympic medal. Playing intramurals doesn’t cut it.

That’s the upshot of an enlightening/depressing study about the ridiculously narrow-minded people who make hiring decisions at the aforementioned elite companies. The author of this study—Lauren Rivera, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University—gained inside access to the hiring process at one such (unnamed) business, and picked the brains of recruiters at other firms.

The portrait that emerges is of a culture that’s insanely obsessed with pedigree. These firms pour resources into recruiting students from “target schools” (i.e., Harvard, Yale, Princeton) and then more or less ignore everybody else. Here’s a manager from a top investment bank describing what happens to the resume of someone who went to, say, Rutgers: “I’m just being really honest, it pretty much goes into a black hole.”

What’s surprising isn’t that students from elite universities have a leg up; it’s that students from other colleges don’t have a chance, even if those colleges are what the rest of us might consider elite. Here’s what a top consultant had to say about M.I.T.:

You will find it when you go to like career fairs or something and you know someone will show up and say, you know, “Hey, I didn’t go to HBS [Harvard Business School] but, you know, I am an engineer at M.I.T. and I heard about this fair and I wanted to come meet you in New York.” God bless him for the effort but, you know, it’s just not going to work.

There are exceptions, but only if the candidate has some personal connection with the firm. And the list of super-elite schools varies somewhat depending on the field. For instance, Columbia might be considered elite by some investment banks, but others describe it as ”second-tier” or “just okay.”

So going to Harvard is a prerequisite. But you also need to prove, in the words of the recruiters, that you’re not “boring,” a “tool,” or a ”bookworm.” This is where your leisure pursuits come in. Among the acceptable extra-curricular activities listed in the paper: traveling with a world-renowned orchestra and building houses in Costa Rica. It’s good to play sports, but they have to be the right ones. Being on the crew team is acceptable; being on the ping-pong team is not. Ideally, you should be a national or Olympic champion. And if you like hiking, you should summit some impressive peak. ...

Figure from the paper listing top signals used by recruiters: school prestige, extracurriculars, grades, employment prestige.

An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy (Kenny Xu)

Kenny Xu is a brave young man. His new book An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy expertly documents a number of unpleasant facts about American society that most major media outlets, education leaders, and social justice advocates have been obfuscating or outright suppressing for decades.

1. Asian Americans (not foreign students from Asia, but individuals of Asian heritage who are US citizens or permanent residents) have been discriminated against in admission to elite institutions of higher education for over 30 years. 

To put it bluntly, Asian Americans must, on average, outperform all other groups in order to have an equal chance of admission to universities like Harvard or Yale. If one were to replace Asian Americans with Jews in the previous sentence, it would describe the situation in the early 20th century. Looking back, we are rightfully ashamed and outraged at the conduct of elite universities during this period. Future Americans, and observers all over the world, will eventually have the same reaction to how Asian Americans are treated today by these same institutions.

2. Asian American success, e.g., as measured using metrics such as income, wealth, or education, is problematic for simplistic narratives that emphasize race and "white supremacy" over a more realistic and multifaceted analysis of American society.

3. Efforts to guarantee equal outcomes, as opposed to equal opportunities, are anti-meritocratic and corrosive to social cohesion, undermine basic notions of fairness, and handicap the United States in scientific and technological competition with other nations.

The Table of Contents, reproduced below, gives an idea of the important topics covered. Xu had an insider's view of the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard trial, now awaiting appeal to the Supreme Court. He also describes the successful effort by a grass roots coalition of Asian Americans to defeat CA Proposition 16, which would have reinstated racial preferences in the public sector (including college admissions) which were prohibited by Proposition 209 in 1996.

Over the years I have had many conversations on this topic with well-meaning (but often poorly informed) parents of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I cannot help but ask these people

Are you OK with discrimination against your child? What did they do to deserve it? 

Are you going to let virtue-signaling administrators at the university devalue the hard work and hard-won accomplishments of your son or daughter? Are you going to do anything about it?

and I cannot help but think

If you won't do anything about it, then f*ck you. Your kids deserve better parents.

Kenny calls it a Fight for Meritocracy. That's what it is -- a fight. Don't forget that Meritocracy is just a fancy word for fairness. It's a fight for your kid, and all kids, to be treated fairly.

I highly recommend the book. These issues are of special concern to Asian Americans, but should be of interest to anyone who wants to know what is really happening in American education today.

Related posts: discrimination against Asian Americans at elite US universities, on meritocracy, and UC faculty report on the use of SAT in admissions.

Imperial exams and human capital

The dangers of rent seeking and the educational signaling trap. Although the imperial examinations were probably g loaded (and hence supplied the bureaucracy with talented administrators for hundreds of years), it would have been better to examine candidates on useful knowledge, which every participant would then acquire to some degree.

See also Les Grandes Ecoles Chinoises and History Repeats.

Farewell to Confucianism: The Modernizing Effect of Dismantling China’s Imperial Examination System

Ying Bai
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Imperial China employed a civil examination system to select scholar bureaucrats as ruling elites. This institution dissuaded high-performing individuals from pursuing some modernization activities, such as establishing modern firms or studying overseas. This study uses prefecture-level panel data from 1896-1910 to compare the effects of the chance of passing the civil examination on modernization before and after the abolition of the examination system. Its findings show that prefectures with higher quotas of successful candidates tended to establish more modern firms and send more students to Japan once the examination system was abolished. As higher quotas were assigned to prefectures that had an agricultural tax in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1643) of more than 150,000 stones, I adopt a regression discontinuity design to generate an instrument to resolve the potential endogeneity, and find that the results remain robust.

From the paper:

Rent seeking is costly to economic growth if “the ablest young people become rent seekers [rather] than producers” (Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny 1991: 529). Theoretical studies suggest that if a society specifies a higher payoff for rent seeking rather than productive activities, more talent would be allocated in unproductive directions (Acemoglu 1995; Baumol 1990; Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny 1991, 1993). This was the case in late Imperial China, when a large part of the ruling class – scholar bureaucrats – was selected on the basis of the imperial civil examination.1 The Chinese elites were provided with great incentives to invest in a traditional education and take the civil examination, and hence few incentives to study other “useful knowledge” (Kuznets 1965), such as Western science and technology.2 Thus the civil examination constituted an institutional obstacle to the rise of modern science and industry (Baumol 1990; Clark and Feenstra 2003; Huff 2003; Lin 1995).

This paper identifies the negative incentive effect of the civil exam on modernization by exploring the impact of the system’s abolition in 1904-05. The main empirical difficulty is that the abolition was universal, with no regional variation in policy implementation. To better understand the modernizing effect of the system’s abolition, I employ a simple conceptual framework that incorporates two choices open to Chinese elites: to learn from the West and pursue some modernization activities or to invest in preparing for the civil examination. In this model, the elites with a greater chance of passing the examination would be less likely to learn from the West; they would tend to pursue more modernization activities after its abolition. Accordingly, the regions with a higher chance of passing the exam should be those with a larger increase in modernization activities after the abolition, which makes it possible to employ a difference-in-differences (DID) method to identify the causal effect of abolishing the civil examination on modernization.

I exploit the variation in the probability of passing the examination among prefectures – an administrative level between the provincial and county levels. To control the regional composition of successful candidates, the central government of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) allocated a quota of successful candidates to each prefecture.3 In terms of the chances of individual participants – measured by the ratio of quotas to population – there were great inequalities among the regions (Chang 1955). To measure the level of modernization activities in a region, I employ (1) the number of newly modern private firms (per million inhabitants) above a designated size that has equipping steam engine or electricity as a proxy for the adoption of Western technology and (2) the number of new Chinese students in Japan – the most import host country of Chinese overseas students (per million inhabitants) as a proxy of learning Western science. Though the two measures might capture other things, for instance entrepreneurship or human capital accumulation, the two activities are both intense in modern science and technology, and thus employed as the proxies of modernization. ...

From Credentialism and elite employment:

Evaluators relied so intensely on “school” as a criterion of evaluation not because they believed that the content of elite curricula better prepared students for life in their firms – in fact, evaluators tended to believe that elite and, in particular, super-elite instruction was “too abstract,” “overly theoretical,” or even “useless” compared to the more “practical” and “relevant” training offered at “lesser” institutions – but rather due to the strong cultural meanings and character judgments evaluators attributed to admission and enrollment at an elite school. I discuss the meanings evaluators attributed to educational prestige in their order of prevalence among respondents. ...

Higher education bubble?

What are the economic returns from a college degree, net of individual ability? Does college add value, or is it mainly a signaling device (e.g., for intelligence and work ethic)?

Results from two new studies are discussed here and here in the Times.





The obvious adjustment that one would like to see is discussed in the comments by one of the researchers (Stephen Rose of Georgetown; second link above):

... smarter people do go to college therefore the results are biased to show that BA graduates make more than those with a HS diploma. There are education data sets that do have a "skill" measure along with earnings and degrees. Using the best statistical approaches reveals that the educational premium is still large after adjusting for differences in ability (the premium declines by about a third).

It would be nice to see this analysis. Does "ability" mean IQ? College attainment also filters for conscientiousness (does it build conscientiousness, or just select for it?), which may account for another chunk of the income premium. But I would guess there is still some added value left even after these adjustments. If half of the effect in the figures above remains after controlling for ability and conscientiousness, then college is a worthwhile investment in purely economic terms (e.g., a lifetime income boost of $300k vs tuition and lost income of about $100k).

Laughlin interview

I highly recommend this interview with Bob Laughlin (1998 Nobel for fractional quantum hall effect). Laughlin discusses topics ranging from energy and carbon emissions (topic of his new book) to globalization and innovation (he was President of KAIST for 2 years) to philosophy of science (emergent phenomena, Confucianism, Monism!). He even notes that elite higher education is a signaling racket :-)

[About 1 hour into the podcast. Discusses flash memory, blue diodes, flat screen displays.]

... All I can tell you is that this is playing out now and we'll see. ... Maybe it's true you can do without all that manufacturing capability. However, this is not what we are talking about. What we are talking about is innovation and American innovation. I think American innovation is not nearly as great as the proponents say it is. Because they are not telling the truth.

Shout out to Tiko:

Laughlin Nobel biography: ... A few days after the Nobel Prize announcement I got the following wonderful e-mail from Andrew Tikofsky, one of my best graduate students, who is now on Wall Street:

Hi Bob, Ian McDonald, Steve Strong, and I are getting together for a beer near Grand Central Station this coming Tuesday in honor of your prize. You are cordially invited to attend.