The sad fate of ugly doclings

Okonomos

Beauty, it seems, plays a major role in students' ratings of their professors

Other than the fact that they are all economists and they all taught at the Delhi School of Economics, what do Amartya Sen, Mrinal Datta-Chaudhury, the late Eva Colorni, Prannoy Roy and Kaushik Basu have in common? I'll tell you "" uncommon good looks.

And what does this have to do with anything?

Plenty, say Daniel S Hamermesh and Amy M Parker in a recent paper* on the effect of looks on popularity amongst students.

Thus, they examine the impact of professors' looks on their instructional ratings and find that "instructors who are viewed as better looking receive higher instructional ratings, with the impact of a move from the 10th to the 90th percentile of beauty being substantial. This impact exists within university departments and even within particular courses, and is larger for male than for female instructors."

This paper, in case you are wondering, is the result of the increasing interest amongst economists on how beauty "" yes, beauty "" affects earnings. The issue at hand is, all other things including teaching quality being the same, why do some teachers earn more than the rest?

One possible answer say Hamermesh and Parker, is that "ascriptive characteristics, such as beauty, trigger positive responses by students and lead them to evaluate some teachers more favourably, so that their beauty earns them higher economic returns." This seems to be especially true of undergraduate students.

Does being beautiful or handsome make professors "more productive in the classroom"? Or do students react to "an irrelevant characteristic"? The authors are honest enough to admit that their results "overstate the impact of beauty." But they do add that if good looks add to self-confidence because you are treated better by students it is their looks that determine success."

The ugly sods may well ask, "instructional ratings may putatively reflect productivity, but do they really do so?" The answer: no one knows. That is, student ratings may not be an entirely reliable guide to instructional ability. Even so, they continue to be used by university managements in the US to set salaries.

So are students discriminating against the ugly ones? It would certainly seem so because it may well be that case that students listen more intently to a good looking professor than to an ugly one, and thereby learn more.

The authors do not ask, as they should have, if this is a case of market failure. The reason is that in a system like the American one where the nature of a professor's contract, how much he or she earns, and how long they stay on in the job is determined by the demand for their classes (that is, student numbers in their classes), the student ratings system has obvious flaws arising from personal biases.

One argument against it, being a case of market failure, is that if good packaging in merchandise trade does not point to market failure, it should not do so in teaching either. That is, just as good packaging cannot for long hide bad products, a stunner cannot for long hide the fact that a person is a lousy expositor. Brains must eventually triumph over beauty.

But does the reverse hold true as well? Do students eventually figure out that some ugly professors are also damned good teachers? I am sure economists are beavering away at finding an answer.

In the meantime, all I can suggest to the ones not blessed with beauty or even good looks is that they should not take chances. They should consult the nearest plastic surgeon. Who knows what a tuck here and lift there might do for them?

Besides, plastic surgery would also provide, as it were, a basis for a second difference test, you know, the before and after thing?

Any takers, then?

*Beauty in the Classroom: Professors' Pulchritude and Putative Pedagogical Productivity, NBER Working Paper No. 9853, July 2003.