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Notes -
I actually don’t think the AP would scale well at all. Think about how many people fail out of college because they don’t go to lectures or keep up with assignments. Then take away their financial skin in the game, deduct a couple years of life experience such as intro jobs, and force them to stay on “campus” all day. It’d be a bloodbath.
The staffing issue isn’t great either. I’ve never met a professor who’d rather teach freshman lectures than more selective classes. Is that because of the interest of the subject, or because monologuing to 200 people is boring and/or stressful? Either way, there’d be less desire to maximize AP class sizes.
High school also precludes the usual university staffing solution of underpaid TAs. Schedule flexibility is much lower, and there’s no carrot of scholarships or research spots. Without TAs, good luck grading the assignments of giant lecture sections.
In my opinion, one of the more valuable skills from AP is an asking-questions kind of relationship with the teacher. That’s the kind of thing which gets people going to office hours or research assistants in college. Large lectures are a hard limit to that given a high-school schedule.
Most of these problems are much, much worse if you’re simultaneously slashing wages. The market price for a teacher in Chicago accounts for cost of living, Union efforts, enjoyability of the job and the leisure time…force that to match Florida, and you’ll find people would rather be in Florida.
Cost of living isn’t much higher in Chicago/Illinois. And Florida has better academic performance when adjusting for race. It’s mostly just unions.
I’m seeing Chicago as slightly cheaper than Miami, but more expensive than all the other listed Florida cities, which are more comparable to Houston or Richmond.
But my point stands. You are paying teachers to live in Illinois rather than somewhere with a comparable cost but no snow, better beaches, and different politics. I’m sure we can model some of the difference as due to unions, and some fraction of that as self-perpetuating overhead rather than an actual service that people would pay for. How much? I think if you cut wages to Florida levels, the marginal teach would feel much better about moving to Florida. Or Albequerque, or anywhere with similar pay.
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