Bryan Caplan’s book, _The Case Against Education_, is out: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076ZY8S8J/. (Libertarian scholars like to bite the hand that feeds them. J... Brennan is also evidently working on a book designed to undermine higher education.) I read Bryan’s ms. in progress, and it was excellent – very clear, compelling, and interesting.
Thesis: The economic value of education is mainly due to signaling.
Explanation: Education pays off for students because getting a degree signals to employers that you have certain desirable traits, such as intelligence, perseverance, and the ability to follow instructions. It’s not that college *gives* you those traits; it’s just that those who lack them don’t complete a college degree. College generally does not teach useful skills.
Evidence: Caplan reviews a ton of scholarly evidence, which is collectively very compelling. I can’t summarize it here. But a few interesting observations:
(a) Education is one of very few products where the buyer doesn’t seem to want it. If you cancel class, the students aren’t angry; they’re happy. For what other product would the customer be happy if they didn’t receive it? The evidence is that students don’t want to be educated; they’re not paying for knowledge.
(b) Students hardly remember anything they learn in a typical college (or even high school) class. Six months after the class is over, they’re going to have forgotten most of what the course was about. (Exception: basic reading and arithmetic skills.) This is widely recognized. So it can’t be that the economic value of schooling is due to the valuable information one learns.
(c) Just look at a typical college class. We teach all kinds of obviously impractical subjects. (Exceptions: engineering, business.)
(d) A favorite claim of educators: “We don’t teach people what to think; we teach them *how* to think.” Problem: there is virtually no empirical evidence that we actually succeed in doing this. People in educational psychology have studied “transfer of learning”: roughly, the extent to which students transfer lessons they learned in one context to a slightly different context; that is, the extent to which their learning generalizes to make them better at tasks they weren’t explicitly taught to do. The results are generally negative: transfer of learning typically just does not happen, as far as we can measure. Given this, the idea that we make people generally better at thinking is only a wishful assertion.
And that is how the claims on behalf of education generally are: hopes with no empirical support. Everything that we can measure says that schooling is (with a few exceptions) ineffective, so wishful defenders of schooling move to claims of unmeasurable, unobservable benefits.
(e) Statistically, almost all of the economic value of schooling accrues *at the end*. If you complete 3.5 years of your degree program but don’t get the degree, you get little economic value (little increase to your expected earnings). You get the big bump in earnings when you get the diploma. This is hard to square with the theory that the economic value of education is due to learning useful information and skills (do colleges wait until the very end to confer the useful information and skills?).
Implications:
(a) More education won’t obviously increase productivity for society. Getting a degree increases your earnings, not by making you more productive, but merely by enabling you to outcompete other candidates for a job. If everyone gets more schooling, that will just raise the bar for what you have to do to edge out other candidates.
(b) It doesn’t really matter (to the economic function of schooling, or what the students are really paying for) *what* we educators teach, or how well we teach the material. We only need to make it sufficiently challenging that it qualifies as a test of general intelligence, perseverance, and similar traits. (Whew! that makes me feel better.)
My comment: Most of the above is summary of Caplan (except implication b above, which I think I added). But I think Caplan makes a powerful case. We educators, for obvious reasons, would not *like* to believe all this. But we should fight against our own biases to try to evaluate the argument objectively.
Ver maisExplanation: Education pays off for students because getting a degree signals to employers that you have certain desirable traits, such as intelligence, perseverance, and the ability to follow instructions. It’s not that college *gives* you those traits; it’s just that those who lack them don’t complete a college degree. College generally does not teach useful skills.
Evidence: Caplan reviews a ton of scholarly evidence, which is collectively very compelling. I can’t summarize it here. But a few interesting observations:
(a) Education is one of very few products where the buyer doesn’t seem to want it. If you cancel class, the students aren’t angry; they’re happy. For what other product would the customer be happy if they didn’t receive it? The evidence is that students don’t want to be educated; they’re not paying for knowledge.
(b) Students hardly remember anything they learn in a typical college (or even high school) class. Six months after the class is over, they’re going to have forgotten most of what the course was about. (Exception: basic reading and arithmetic skills.) This is widely recognized. So it can’t be that the economic value of schooling is due to the valuable information one learns.
(c) Just look at a typical college class. We teach all kinds of obviously impractical subjects. (Exceptions: engineering, business.)
(d) A favorite claim of educators: “We don’t teach people what to think; we teach them *how* to think.” Problem: there is virtually no empirical evidence that we actually succeed in doing this. People in educational psychology have studied “transfer of learning”: roughly, the extent to which students transfer lessons they learned in one context to a slightly different context; that is, the extent to which their learning generalizes to make them better at tasks they weren’t explicitly taught to do. The results are generally negative: transfer of learning typically just does not happen, as far as we can measure. Given this, the idea that we make people generally better at thinking is only a wishful assertion.
And that is how the claims on behalf of education generally are: hopes with no empirical support. Everything that we can measure says that schooling is (with a few exceptions) ineffective, so wishful defenders of schooling move to claims of unmeasurable, unobservable benefits.
(e) Statistically, almost all of the economic value of schooling accrues *at the end*. If you complete 3.5 years of your degree program but don’t get the degree, you get little economic value (little increase to your expected earnings). You get the big bump in earnings when you get the diploma. This is hard to square with the theory that the economic value of education is due to learning useful information and skills (do colleges wait until the very end to confer the useful information and skills?).
Implications:
(a) More education won’t obviously increase productivity for society. Getting a degree increases your earnings, not by making you more productive, but merely by enabling you to outcompete other candidates for a job. If everyone gets more schooling, that will just raise the bar for what you have to do to edge out other candidates.
(b) It doesn’t really matter (to the economic function of schooling, or what the students are really paying for) *what* we educators teach, or how well we teach the material. We only need to make it sufficiently challenging that it qualifies as a test of general intelligence, perseverance, and similar traits. (Whew! that makes me feel better.)
My comment: Most of the above is summary of Caplan (except implication b above, which I think I added). But I think Caplan makes a powerful case. We educators, for obvious reasons, would not *like* to believe all this. But we should fight against our own biases to try to evaluate the argument objectively.
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