Freakonomics Radio - 158. Is Learning a Foreign Language Really Worth It?

Episode Date: March 6, 2014

Yes, it expands the mind but we usually don't retain much -- and then there's the opportunity cost.

Hey, podcast listeners, you are about to hear an episode about the ROI or return on investment of studying a foreign language, which might lead you to think, hey, what's the ROI on listening to a Freakonomics radio podcast? Well, if it's anything above zero, then we hope that you'll consider making a contribution to keep this public radio podcast free and easy. Just go to Freakonomics.com and click on Donate. Merci beaucoup, todah rabah, and engte uye erive achme. The average American student will study a foreign language for two or three years.

Little Red Schoolhouse is a well-regarded private school in Manhattan with a progressive style. Here, kids start with a second language in pre-kindergarten and go all the way through graduation. Okay, we're at Little Red Elizabeth Irwin, and we're going to be in a classroom of fourth grade Spanish learners. Kids at Little Red start out studying Spanish. And as they get older, they can either stick with Spanish or take Mandarin or French. How are they doing so far? Compared to like a normal Spanish-speaking person in Peru, I'd say we're pretty bad.

But like for a person in fourth grade who's learning Spanish, I could say we're pretty good. They are good. And they have big dreams about what learning a foreign language will help them accomplish. If you have like a big business deal with someone and they don't speak English, then you could make like a lot of money. I think I might want to work at a pastry shop or a bakery,

and maybe there'll be Chinese or French people so I could talk to them, like make another bread roll or something like that in a different language. I might work at a store because then people who speak other languages might ask you questions. So I'm going to be a world-traveling architect, or I might be a scientist, or I might be a mechanic, or I might be a person who invents a car and gets millions of dollars. On today's show, we're asking, what is the value of learning a second language? It started with an email from a listener named Doug Amann. He wrote to say, I'm very curious how it came to be that teaching students a foreign language has

reached the status it has in the U.S. My oldest daughter is a college freshman, He goes on. What on earth is going on? How did it ever get this far? In a day and age where schools at every level are complaining about limited resources, why on earth do we continue to force these kids to study a foreign language that few will ever use and virtually all do not retain? Or to put it in economic terms, where is the ROI? Okay, we'll bite. Hey, kid, what is the ROI on learning a foreign language? If you learn, like, Spanish, for example, in this school, maybe 20 years later you could become a billionaire in another country.

But very rare. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. On today's show, we're talking about learning a foreign language, like Mandarin. When I asked him, I was asking him how old he was. So when he said, he's saying that I'm 14. Why do we do this, teach our kids a second language? The answer might seem obvious. Like all education, it stretches your brain on any number of dimensions. But let's try to quantify

it a bit more than that. We'll start with Boaz Qesar. He's a psychology professor at the University of Chicago. His specialty is communication. Really, studying communication is entirely autobiographical because I realize that I'm different when I'm using almost any language other than Hebrew. Qesar is from Israel. His particular interest in communication has to do with how our decision-making is affected when we operate in a foreign language. Things like making investments.

I'm much more likely to invest in the stock market when I do it in English. If I think about it in Hebrew, I feel that I become more conservative. So that's surprising. But maybe he thought it was just him. So he ran an experiment with University of Chicago students. It was a little game with money. So imagine I give you $20. Here's the way Kaysar's game works.

If he gives you $20, you will play a game with 20 rounds, dollar a round. In each round, you can either keep the dollar, just put it in your pocket, or put the dollar on the table and flip a round. In each round, you can either keep the dollar, just put it in your pocket, or put the dollar on the table and flip a coin. If it's tails, you lose the dollar. But if it's heads, you get $2.50, meaning your original dollar back and you win a dollar and a half. So you don't need to know a lot of math to realize that the expected value is positive. In other words, that on average, you're better off with a bet than pocketing the dollar. Now, what does this have to do with a foreign language? We were interested to see what happened when you make this decision when you're using a foreign

language. So the researchers had some students play in English and other students play in a foreign language, Spanish. And it turns out, indeed, people were like almost 20 percentage points more willing to take bets. They were significantly more willing to take the risk in a foreign language.

That isn't at all the result that he was expecting. I was actually stunned that it happened because it's really the same person. All that person does is use Spanish now and it's the same dollar, it's the same person and it was just randomly the case that you're doing it in Spanish. Now, it could be that people just didn't understand

as well in a second language. This was more of a comprehension issue than a risk issue. But Quesar, at least, was persuaded that he was on to something. Because of that, we started thinking that maybe it's an even stronger and more pervasive phenomenon than we even think, and not just about risk. And indeed, we find that there's all sorts of systematic differences

that exist when you're using a foreign language. For instance? find that there's all sorts of systematic differences that exist when you're using a foreign language. For instance? Like when we ask people to think about moral dilemmas. So would you sacrifice one person to save five? You've heard this kind of dilemma before, right? A bus driver, let's say, is going to run over five people and kill them. So do you go ahead and kill the driver before he can kill the other five?

Now, normally, people are reluctant to say yes. But if you ask them in a foreign language... We found that people are twice as likely to do that, to actually go for the utilitarian option to sacrifice one person to save five. Now, we didn't do this for real, but I used hypothetical scenarios, but still they said, yes, I will do that. So why might this happen? Now, the reason this could be interesting is that we know that the foreign language is much less emotional. It gives you less emotional resonance when you use it. The same word, love and amor, even though you know exactly the meaning and you know the meaning, when the

meaning is identical, you still, if you're a native English speaker, you get a lot more out of love. And that's been demonstrated in all sorts of ways. There are also physiological reactions, so you can show that people's arousal is higher when they use their native tongue when these kind of emotional-related words are used. And so, Kesar says, when people think in a foreign language,

they're more reflective about their choices, they're more likely to engage in cost-benefit analysis, in a way, and less likely to be swayed by all sorts of emotional reactions that they might have in general. From Kesar's point of view, this is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. In fact, his experimental examples aren't very consistent. At least it strikes me that way. In one instance, the foreign language seems to increase your appetite for risk. In another, it makes you more reflective. But what matters is that the language always seems to affect something in the way you think or process information or make a decision. And that really is the point of the argument in favor of teaching a foreign language to kids because learning a foreign language changes the brain.

Now, the evidence for this is pretty compelling. Bilingual kids have been shown to have better memory and executive function. There is some evidence that being bilingual stalls the onset of Alzheimer's disease. And there are other more utilitarian pluses, as the fourth graders at Little Red Schoolhouse reminded us. Well, I think a good thing that comes from learning a foreign language is that you can speak to more people. You know how to speak to other people. If they don't know how to speak your language, you just go right into their language. And also, it sort of just makes you smarter to know all these different languages, and it helps your education.

Okay, so that's all good stuff. But coming up on Freakonomics Radio, what about the opportunity cost of all that time spent learning a second language? There are so many kids who remain barely literate and numerate in their own language. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. I'd like you to meet Albert Saiz. Albert Saiz. All right, let me just try the whole thing. I'd like you to meet Albert Saiz. I'm sorry.

I've been called almost everything, so I don't mind it. Sorry, Albert Saif. It's a Spanish name, and it's pronounced Saif, exactly like the agricultural tool you use to mow the grass. But it's spelled S-A-I-Z. S-A-I-Z, yeah. And again, you know, I got all types of mispronunciations, so I'm used to whatever you say. Scythe is from Barcelona, and he's an economist at MIT where he teaches urban planning.

On today's show, we are asking about the return on investment of learning a foreign language. And when you know it, Scythe has calculated exactly that. He tracked about 9,000 college graduates to see how a foreign language affected their wages. He was surprised by what he found. Yeah, unfortunately, and I have to say, of course, because, you know, I tried to speak three, I was pretty disappointed. And actually, we found a very, very small return. What we did find is that after controlling for a host of characteristics and using a lot of experimental research designs that basically are trying to compare people who are identical for everything

except for the second language, we do tend to find a premium in the labor market of about 2% of wages. In other words, if you speak a second language, you can expect to earn, on average, and that's across many, many different people, on average, you can be expected to earn about 2% higher wages. To contextualize this, think about your income or your wage being about $30,000. Then you would expect to earn about $600 more per year. Now, that's not nothing.

There are a lot of things you can do that won't increase your earnings by even 2%, but still, that's not a huge premium. And I hate to tell this to our young Spanish speakers back at the Little Red Schoolhouse in New York. ¿Cuáles animales que te gustan mucho? But there's a rank order in terms of how different foreign languages translate into higher earnings. We know that the lowest return is Spanish, where you get about 1.5 percent, and then French, 2.7 percent, and then German, 4 percent. So, you know, learning a second language, it's something that's worth to do by itself.

But as a financial decision, probably if you're focusing on financial returns, they're relatively low. And you should focus on languages that are rarely spoken in the United States. OK, so the financial returns to learning a foreign language are not so large, which leads some economists to think that it's mostly a waste of time. Makes me think that people are spending three years of their lives to acquire very few skills. That's Brian Kaplan at George Mason University. All the study seems to totally fail to teach people how to fluently speak foreign languages. So what we can actually see in the data is that under 1% of Americans have learned to speak a foreign language very well in school. And this is very well according to them.

So since people tend to exaggerate how good they are at things, if under 1% claim that they learned to speak a foreign language very well in school, then God knows how few actually did. Kaplan tells us that about a quarter of Americans say they speak a language other than English. And the people who say they speak it well tended to learn it at home, not at school. And all that school instruction does not come cheap in money or time. It's pretty close to about one-sixth the time that students are are spending in high school, assuming that they start their foreign language in high school. So maybe if you average over junior high and high school, then you might be spending a total of about a twelfth of your time. So I think a pretty reasonable first pass is to say that the cost of foreign language study in U.S. schools is about a twelfth of the cost of junior high and high school. And

when you multiply that by the total amount of spending, that is a lot. And again, remember, there's something else that students will be learning during that time. There are so many kids who remain barely literate and numerate in their own language. And that's something where, yes, it's true. It would probably not dramatically change their ability to read and write just to go and take the time on foreign language and putting it into that. But that's a skill that actually really does pay in the world. So it's really worth thinking about doing that. So as Brian Kaplan sees it, learning a foreign language, especially in school, just may not be worth it. Unless that foreign language is English. Remember what Albert Seith told us.

His study of college graduates found only a 2% wage premium for learning a foreign language. But those were American college graduates. I can tell you that there's research in other countries. Actually, the findings in the United States do contrast with what other people following the same methodology found in Turkey, in Russia, and in Israel. In these three countries, actually speaking English, which would be the second language,

was associated with a substantial return of around 10% to 20%. So it's really, I think, English-speaking countries where that effect is relatively low. And again, I think the explanation is very clear. English, it's the lingua franca. Even Brian Kaplan, our language skeptic, is not so surprised by the English language premium. Right. The incentive of real life is a very strong one. I just want to understand why do so many people on earth learn English? Because there are a lot of jobs on earth you can get because you learn English.

And it also opens a lot of doors, opens doors for you in terms of things you can read, movies you can watch, people that you can talk to, you know, tourism, all of these things. These are all doors that are opened by English. Once when I was in Guatemala, I was actually asking them, so how much does English improve your life here? Being able to speak English improve your lives here. And all the Guatemalans that I talked to, who of course did speak very good English, said, I mean, it's night and day. It's really the doorway into the international world if you can speak English here. And by the way, Brian Kaplan, for all that he sounds like a language skeptic, or at the very least a language utilitarian, in real life, he's a language romantic. He was in college.

He fell in love with German. The literature. Yeah, I can read Nietzsche in German. The cuisine. Eis Palatschinka, which is kind of a fancy sundae. It's really good. German music. My favorite composer is Richard Wagner, of course.

But still, the economist in him trumps the romantic. But again, for me, it fits the basic story of, look, if people either are going to get some big career benefit out of it or it enriches their personal life, then foreign language study is great. But if it's a language that doesn't really help their career, they're not going to use it and they're not happy when they're there. I really do not see the point. It seems cruel to me. For what it's worth, we get emails all the time from listeners in foreign countries who tell us that they listen to this Freakonomics Radio podcast in order to learn English. So I have two things to say to you people. One, good luck with that. And two, you're welcome.

Adios, amigos. Adios, amigos. Adios. by Queen. And then we listen to the Queen's song, Backwards. Okay? Listen to it again. Listen for the words, It's fun to smoke marijuana. And what can this teach us about mind reading? That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions.

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