Service Learning in Public Economics

Last Thursday we talked about arguments concerning the redistribution of income in society.  Okay, we didn’t just talk about these arguments, we actually had them. There’s such diversity of opinion in this classroom (as our blog reveals at times), and debates about both theory and policy are always lively and well-informed.  I’m often amazed by how much independent reading these students have done, and how quickly and enthusiastically they connect what they’re learning in economics to what they’re learning in other departments. (Recollection of readings and discussions in Dr. David Schwartz’s Ethics and Public Life course figured heavily into Thursday’s discussion.)

We also mapped out how we’d like our research to progess between now and the end of the semester.   Building from their research proposals, the students will write a collaborative research paper and deliver an oral presentation of our results to the LNDF and hopefully to leaders at the Yoder Center. In their paper and presentation, the class will also make recommendations for how this project should progress throughout the summer and the next academic year. 

In her April 4th blog, Sarah mentioned that we’re not going door-to-door collecting our neighborhood and residential satisfaction surveys (which was what we originally planned to do). Instead, we are using the Yoder Center and getting help from the Johnson Health Center. We’ve got surveys and collection boxes at both places, and we have been able to directly assist some citizens in the completion of the questionnaires.  Since Johnson offers services to more than Tinbridge residents, we’re actually going to be able to collect and compare demographic and neighborhood satisfation data for a variety of Lynchburg communities. So far, our response rate (from approaching people individually) has been great.  People want to be asked what they think of their houses and communities.

On April 2, we dropped our survey materials off at Johnson and met some of its very helpful staff.  In the hour before we could show up at the Yoder Center, we stopped at the Starlight Cafe on the 500-block of 5th street to see area commercial development and squeeze in a table-top lecture on measures of income inequality. (This class was particularly keen on learning more about the Gini coefficient, and it wasn’t just the coffee talking! I’ve got to credit their interest to my colleague John  Abell’s poverty assignment in another class.)  After visiting Starlight, we  headed to the Yoder Center to meet  its director, Aubrey Barbour.  We learned more about the Center and Tinbridge and got his support and advice on our survey and methods. 

The following week, we visited Johnson Health Center to collect surveys, and two of us attended the monthly neighborhood meeting at the Yoder Center.  We were given time to talk about our survey and administer it, and we chose to stay beyond that time.  Before we were introduced, a police officer gave a crime report for the area and took questions and concerns from the attendees. Neighbors later spoke about the community garden, a visit from the Food Bank, and the upcoming Run for the Roses, a local race to raise funds for an extension to the Yoder Center.  The extension will allow students who don’t have homework to play in the Center while not distracting those who do.   

As you may have sensed from Sarah’s last blog, we are now focusing our study of neighborhood and residential satisfaction on the Tinbridge Hill neighborhood of Lynchburg rather than the College Hill area.  Never fear!  We expected change! (And this redirection is a relatively easy one given how easy it is to identify homes to survey with the City’s online GIS maps.) 

The research process, while still a process, takes twists and turns, and the sooner you accept that as part of the experience of creating knowledge, the sooner you can make thoughtful progress.  What makes this course both exciting and challenging for me as a teacher is that I am working alongside my students on this research. This means that, like them, I can’t always anticipate the nature of the twists and turns, I don’t have the answers tucked away in a file cabinet, and, as I know they’re discovering,  it’s sometime necessary for them to challenge the methods and intepretations I suggest by critically evaluating them and offering alternative ideas. 

After taking into consideration the level and concentration of LNDF activity in these neighborhoods, Laura decided it would be best if we focused on Tinbridge.  This will allow us to better understand the overall effects of the LNDF on residential satisfaction and also allow us to determine if the effects vary across neighborhoods by holding our results up against Denise’s.

On our visit with Laura, she insisted that we meet Aubrey Barbour, a Tinbridge resident and community leader who sits on the board of the LNDF.  As luck would have it, we bumped into him that very day at the Yoder Center, Tinbridge’s community hall!  We’re hoping to get to know him better and to get his input on our project. 

Tinbridge is home to the Legacy Museum and Old CityCemetery and is near the part of the Blackwater Creek Trail.

On the 5th we visited the Lynchburg Neighborhood Development Foundation (LNDF) for the first time.  Executive Director Laura Dupuy described the purpose of the LNDF and shared details of some of its more recent projects (not all of which are residential!). We updated her on our plans to build upon Denise Sewell’s honors and experiential learning research project on neighborhood satisfaction in College Hill (an area where the LNDF has put great effort into improving homeownership among low- to moderate-income citizens). She described how she saw this semester’s research as useful to the LNDF and offered some of her own ideas for how we could extend the work done last year.  We then toured some of the neighborhoods where the LNDF has restored homes.  I hope that our trip helped the students understand the value of our research to the community.

 Later in the week, students completed their first theory test for the class and got started on their first paper for the project–a research proposal.  By the end of the semester, we will deliver a formal research report to the LNDF and, from our results, make recommendations for future LNDF projects.   

Last Thursday was a beautiful day for our trip with Dr. Barnes.  He showed us some of the downtown developments along the riverfront, took us to the Community Planning and Development Department at City Hall, and showed us Monument Terrace, the downtown entrance to the Blackwater Creek Trail, and Old City Cemetery.  We visited 5th Street and discussed the intended effects of the new roundabout.  I appreciate being made to think about the level of coordination and range of talent that go into community planning and the provision of many of the public services that we enjoy and expect. 

I think that our service project will further strengthen our awareness of coordination across individuals with varied skill sets, and I hope it helps students reflect on their own interests and talents when researching opportunities available to them after graduation.  A few years ago, during a day at the LNDF, students quickly listed what they thought were many of the needs of LNDF clients. They asked Laura Dupuy (the executive director) what number and which of these needs (not all of which were directly related to housing) the LNDF itself actually served. Although not an economist by training, Laura bluntly offered a textbook reponse–the LNDF specializes in what it knows it can do best.  Laura hopes that by doing so, the LNDF can have the  greatest positive impact in its neighborhoods

The simplicity of her answer took many students by surprise. When we’re thinking of creating change in our communities, we can be quick to identify needs in our society (and sometimes also their causes and interrelationships) and to celebrate our ability to identify them, but much more is required to begin to meet these needs.  Laura’s response got many students thinking about two needs of their own–the needs to reflect and to firm up the language they use to describe their personal and career goals.   So you can list many causes of poverty?  Great.  So you can identify many problems with poverty?  Great.  So you want to alleviate poverty?  Great.  HOW ARE YOU GOING TO FOCUS YOUR EFFORTS?  For the alleviation of poverty or the achievement of any other aim, what role will your personal and academic strengths play in determining your approach to your goals? What are the opportunity costs associated with each possible direction you can take, and where do you have a comparative advantage? How will you spend your time in college so you can explore the answers to these questions?  Yes, having given some thought to these questions may impress a potential employer or graduate school, but it will be in part because you will have directed yourself to those prospective opportunities that are best in line with who you are and how you truly want to grow. 

Employers like economics majors, but few jobs for these majors actually have the word “economist” in their titles.  However, the skills and abilities taught in the major are valued across many lines of work.  Today, this semester’s students are going to visit the LNDF for the first time.  I’m sure they’ll continue to recognize that many community issues can be viewed through the lenses of multiple disciplines, and I hope they see again the unique skills that an economics background can bring to these issues. 

I really enjoyed last week’s lively debates about the virtues and shortcomings of the Edgeworth Box and the utility possibilities curve, and of the role of government when markets function efficiently.  And I wonder if the full significance of our discussion of public goods will become more apparent on our upcoming trips.

In the classtime that remained last week, we continued planning our research project.  Past students of this class studied if and to what extent the LNDF’s restoration of condemned homes changed surrounding property values.  Last year, Denise Sewell added to our knowledge of the effects of the LNDF’s efforts by launching an examination of neighborhood and residential satisfaction in the College Hill area, a neighborhood of focus for the LNDF.  This semester, we are enhancing this work and expanding her sample size.  In last week’s class, we completed our Institutional Review Board paperwork.  Unlike many undergradaute research projects in economics classrooms, we won’t be using already assembled data.  We’re going to be visiting residents of College Hill and surveying them.  So we spent a lot of last week revising our questionnaire so as to collect the most meaningful information necessary to test our hypotheses.

We’ll be taking our first field trip this week.  Our tour guide will be Rick Barnes, Professor of Psychology and Environmental Studies at Randolph College.  Dr. Barnes is a member of the Lynchburg City Planning Commission, and he’s graciously offered to take us on a downtown tour.  He’ll point out and discuss some of the public/private partnerships in Lynchburg.  We’ll go from the riverfront and Main Street up to 5th Street.  To prepare, we’re familiarizing ourselves with the Downtown/Riverfront Master Plan, the 5th Street Master Plan, and the Midtown Plan, all available at the Community Development Department’s webpage.

 Economists argue that higher education is both a consumption good and an investment good.  It is a consumption good in the sense that people choose colleges in part based on what they are able to experience while they are at them.   College is an investment good in the sense that individuals choose colleges in part based on what future payoffs—monetary and otherwise– they expect to receive from their education. I asked my students to think about what consumption benefits they hope to receive from participating in this particular course and why, as well as what investment benefits they hope to experience.            

I’m anxious to hear their answers.  I expect that some of my course goals and objectives are in sync with what they themselves identify as the consumption and investment benefits of this class. The last time I taught this class though, the journals, even when no specific topic was assigned, helped me see some benefits and some types of learning that I hadn’t even imagined.  I’m hoping this semester’s blog will help me in the same way.            

Although I’m not a student and am more directly a producer of higher education than a consumer of it, I do anticipate receiving some “here and now” benefits from this class, as well as some investment benefits. It’s hard for me to disentangle them, but I’ll try. And while I can carry on about the benefits I hope my students receive, since I’ve asked everyone else to focus on personal benefits, I’ll focus on them myself.

This semester, some of the consumption benefits I’m most looking forward to are related to the applied service project.  I’m eager to learn from, and better know, members of the community who are interested in the same things that I am.  I get in touch with economics in a different way when I’m interacting with professionals who value economists’ skills in their profession but who aren’t in academia and don’t have job titles with the word “economist” in them.  Classes like this remind me of the value of economics but also of a liberal arts education in general—a productive and meaningful life involves coordination between lots of flexible-minded people, each with specific skills but each sharing some broad knowledge and an appreciation for the insights gleaned from either others’ backgrounds.  I’m looking forward to getting my class “beyond the red brick wall” so that we can all experience and observe these benefits firsthand.

The investment benefits I hope to receive are of two types—those related to my professional development (both my teaching and my research) and those related to the simple fact that I am a Lynchburg citizen.  This class allows me to explore some less traditional methods of teaching and learning.  I hope that I can gain experience with them that can influence changes and revisions to other courses I teach.  I expect that the contacts we make and what we learn about the roles for economists in our communities will make me a stronger academic advisor to my majors. I also hope that I can develop the public economics and service learning elements of my long-term research agenda with the research experiences we have as a class.  From the “Lynchburg citizen” angle, I hope that our service plays a part in making Lynchburg a better place to live and work.    

Welcome to the reflection blog for Randolph College’s Econ 217 (Economics of the Public Sector).  Public economics is about the taxing and spending behaviors of governments.   At RC, we augment this by learning about the role that Lynchburg-area non-profits and community groups play in assisting our local community with the achievement of social welfare objectives.  

In our economics department, this is a service-learning class, which means it is a class where we conduct a service project that satifies the academic objectives of the course while also serving a genuine need of an organization.  For the past several years, students enrolled in this one-semester class have been conducting student/faculty collaborative research for the Lynchburg Neighborhood Development Foundation, an area non-profit that works to increase home ownership among low and moderate income Lynchburg citizens.  Past RC and R-MWC honors students, independent study students, and experiential learning students have also participated in this research.   To date, our work with the LNDF has included helping them identify area Census tracts most in need of housing assistance, measure the effects of the restoration of condemned homes on surrounding property values, and understand the effects of LNDF efforts on residential and neighborhood satisfaction.  This semester’s class will continue the residential and neighborhood satisfaction project.

We’re blogging as a way to reflect on all aspects this course, from the standard theory lectures to the field trips, and from the development of a research proposal to the actual data collection, analysis, and interpretation.  Rachel, Sarah, Jared, and I will each be blogging weekly to help both ourselves and others understand this experience.  Your comments are always invited!