The Effectiveness of Economics Instruction in Two-Year Colleges Revisited

Several studies of the teaching of economics in two-year colleges have concluded that students in these institutions learn less than those in the four-year schools. Labinski comments on some of these pieces of research, and then reports his own findings which raise doubts about the hypothesis that inadequate instruction explains the relatively poor performance by junior college students. He discusses four alternative hypotheses, considering the different objectives in two-year colleges, inadequate sampling in the earlier studies, and the possibility that the TUCE has a cultural bias.