Is quantitative data more important than qualitative?
A. I’m a quantitative person myself, so I think it’s a mistake to only do qualitative analysis. But, as a person who is also an educator, I don’t think numbers summarize everything that goes on in an institution of higher education. I tend to think they’re complementary to each other. But I also think that if you don’t have some hard numbers, you don’t tend to ask some hard questions. In general, adding more quantitative analysis has been really useful to higher education. Q. Do you think that economists tend to do a better job at higher education research than do others, like, say, humanities researchers? A. We each tend to bring our own methodological strengths to the analyses. I do think economists do probably do a better job at understanding the finances of higher education … and we tend to be good at seeing the similarities between institutions of higher education and other types of organizations. But I’m not under the impression that we do the best job — we ought to do what we’r
