So Professor Dr. President Boston Fed Reserve chair Paxon, what the heck do we call you?

You can call me Chris, that's fine.

Chris Paxon is an economist first and foremost.

She does also sit on a few important boards, the Boston Federal Reserve and the Association

of American Universities.

And in her spare time, she is President of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island,

and the eight schools in the Ivy League.

But again, she is also an economist.

Being an economist in this role is really useful because, you know, what am I trying to

jump, trying to build an organization in collaboration with lots of other people?

Resource allocation is everything.

You're thinking on the margin, you're thinking about alternatives, you're trying to figure

out how you're going to get the biggest impact for every dollar that you spend.

These are kind of economics-y type questions.

We wanted to speak with Paxon because we thought she could answer a lot of our questions

about college generally.

This is the third episode in a series we're calling Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School.

We have learned quite a bit so far.

We've learned that American higher education is particularly market-driven and therefore

has many of the best universities in the world, but that these top schools, including

Brown, are better at producing research than they are at moving students up the income

ladder.

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