Typical students burn thousands of hours studying material that neither raises their productivity nor enriches their lives. …
[W]hy [then] do employers bid so lavishly for educated labor? …
The answer is a single word I seek to burn into your mind: signaling. Even if what a student learned in school is utterly useless, employers will happily pay extra if their scholastic achievement provides information about their productivity. … Your educational record reveals much about your ability and character. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 1-3]
[D]espite the chasm between what students learn and what workers do, academic success is a strong signal of worker productivity. The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you reveal by mastering them. …
Practical relevance makes little difference … [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 13-14]
“From the standpoint of most teachers, right up to and including the level of teachers of college undergraduates, the ideal student is well behaved, unaggressive, docile, patient, meticulous, and empathetic in the sense of intuiting the response to the teacher that is most likely to please the teacher.” [Richard Posner, “The New Gender Gap in Education”] …
[E]ducation signals not just intelligence, but conscientiousness—the student’s discipline, work ethic, commitment to quality, and so forth. …
[E]ducation also signals conformity—the worker’s grasp of and submission to social expectations.
Actually, that’s an understatement. In our society, educational achievement is a social expectation. Model workers are supposed to pursue and obtain traditional credentials …
The road to academic success is paved with the trinity of intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity. The stronger your academic record, the greater employers’ confidence you have the whole package.
Why do employers seek this package? Because the road to academic success and the road to job success are paved with the same materials. … If you lack the right stuff to succeed in school, you probably lack the right stuff to succeed in the labor market. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 10, 16-18]
[This book] claims … at least one-third of student’s time in school [and the financial reward students enjoy] is signaling. …
Personally, I think the true fraction exceeds 50%. Probably more like 80%. … [W]hen you reflect on your firsthand experience with school and work, one-third signaling is the lowest share you can plausibly maintain. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 4-5]
“Why education pays” is a thorny real-world issue, not a calculus problem. And to repeat, this book claims that “education is mostly signaling,” never “education is all signaling.” Its verdict rests on a package of arguments, all of which suggest education as we know it is closer to pure signaling than to pure human capital. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, p. 118]
The amount of education you need to get a job really has risen more than the amount of education you need to do a job. …
In our society, education is a seal of approval. Employers know it. Workers know it. As seals proliferate, workers need extra seals to upstage the competition. You’ll never apply most of what you study, but so what? Academic success opens doors. A dysfunctional game, but if you refuse to play, the labor market brands you a loser. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, p. 108]
For some jobs, the economic premium for a degree is produced by the actual education that has gone into getting the degree. Lawyers, physicians, and engineers can earn their high incomes only by deploying knowledge and skills that take years to acquire, and degrees in law, medicine, and engineering still signify competence in those knowledges and skills. But for many other jobs, the economic premium for the BA is created by a brutal fact of life about the American job market: Employers do not even interview applicants who do not hold a BA. Even more brutal, the advantage conferred by the BA often has nothing to do with content of the education. Employers do not value what the student learned, just that the student has a degree.
Employers value the BA because it is a no-cost (for them) screening device for academic ability and perseverance. The more people who go to college, the more sense it makes for employers to require a BA. … Knowing this, large numbers of students are in college to buy their admission ticket—the BA. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, p. 92]
If teachers were honest with ourselves, we would be slower to self-congratulate. Do we really transform waiters into economic consultants—or merely evaluate whether waiters have the right stuff to be economic consultants?
By analogy, both sculptors and appraisers have the power to raise the market value of a piece of stone. The sculptor raises the market value of a piece of stone by shaping it. The appraiser raises the market value of a piece of stone by judging it. Teachers need to ask ourselves, “How much of what we do is sculpting, and how much is appraising?” And if we won’t ask ourselves, our alumni need to ask for us. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, p. 30]
Education definitely can be good for the soul. But that hardly shows actually existing education achieves this noble end. In practice, education often turns out to be a neglectful or abusive mother rather than a nourishing one. …
To be a worthwhile end-in-itself … education must meet higher standards. To plausibly qualify as a merit good, it needs three ingredients.
[W]orthy content. Learning about great ideas and glorious culture uplifts the soul. …
[S]killful pedagogy. Learning from enthusiastic teachers who have mastered their subjects uplifts the soul. …
[E]ager students. … Force-feeding great ideas and glorious culture to students who couldn’t care less [does not uplift their souls]. Indeed, the charade degrades students, teachers, and the subjects themselves. …
How does actually existing education measure up against these standards of merit? As long as you’ve had a vaguely typical education, you already know the answer. The content of education is mixed at best: pockets of greatness, surrounded by insipid busywork. The pedagogy is poor: frankly, most teachers are boring. The students are worse: no matter how great their teachers, few yearn for the life of the mind. … Harvard University’s Steven Pinker sadly reports that the best students in the world yawn at the best teachers in the world:
“A few weeks into every semester, I face a lecture hall that is half-empty, despite the fact that I am repeatedly voted a Harvard Yearbook Favorite Professor, that the lectures are not video-recorded, and that they are the only source of certain material that will be on the exam. I don’t take it personally; it’s common knowledge that Harvard students stay away from lectures in droves, burning a fifty-dollar bill from their parents’ wallets every time they do.” [“The Trouble With Harvard”, 2014] [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 240-241]
What makes vocational ed’s social return so ample? Status is zero-sum; skill is not. Conventional education mostly helps students by raising their status, but average status cannot rise. Vocational education mostly helps students by building their skills—and average skill can rise. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, p. 229]
Popular support for education subsidies rests on the [fallacy of composition]. The person who gets more education, gets a better job. It works, you see it plainly. Yet it does not follow that if everyone gets more education, everyone gets a better job. In the signaling model, subsidizing everyone’s schooling to improve our jobs is like urging everyone to stand up at a concert to improve our views. Both are “smart for one, dumb for all.” [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 5-6]
It is tempting to infer the major premium is all about skills: signaling may explain why fine arts majors earn more than high school grads, but human capital explains why engineers earn more than dance majors.
On inspection, however, the skill acquisition story is overrated. About three-quarters of STEM majors—and half of engineers—end up in jobs that don’t use their specialized training. STEM degrees impress a wide swath of employers, opening doors to careers in not only technology, but finance and business. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, p. 190]
There are many good reasons for gaining academic qualifications. The process should be inherently worthwhile and the best programs are. But academic qualifications are also a form of currency: they have an exchange rate in the market place for jobs or higher education. Like all currencies, their value can go up or down according to market conditions and how much currency is in circulation. University degrees used to have a high market value in part because relatively few people had them. The growth in population combined with the expansion of professional and administrative work means that unprecedented numbers of people are now going to college. …
As a result, the market value of degrees is tumbling. Something more is needed to edge ahead of the crowd …
The current assumption is that by expanding education and raising standards all will be well. The end game assumes that when everyone has a PhD, there will be a return to full employment. But there won’t. The markets will reconfigure as the currency rates fall and employers will look for something else. They are doing this already. The issue is not that academic standards are falling. The real issue is that the very foundations upon which our current systems of education are built are shifting beneath our feet. [Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: The Power of Being Creative, Capstone, 2011, pp. 51-53]
We have to admit academic success is a great way to get a good job, but a poor way to learn how to do a good job. If everyone got a college degree, the result would not be great jobs for all, but runaway credential inflation. Trying to spread success with education spreads education but not success. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, p. 289]
Related:
– What is motivation? How can we cultivate it in ourselves and others?
– Do we really value education? Why do we value it?
– What is the reality of the university?