“School Is Expensive. Is It Worth It?” (WSJ) is a response to The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan, an economics professor.
Thus Mr. Caplan’s case against education begins by acknowledging the case in favor of getting one. “It is individually very fruitful, and individually lucrative,” he says. Full-time workers with a bachelor’s degree, on average, “are making 73% more than high-school graduates.” Workers who finished high school but not college earn 30% more than high-school dropouts. Part of the difference is mere correlation: Mr. Caplan says if you adjust for pre-existing advantages like intelligence and family background, one-fifth to two-fifths of the education premium goes away. Even so, it really does pay to finish school.
Mr. Caplan believes these signals [of having been smart, diligent, and conformist enough to finish a college degree] are reliable, that college graduates generally do make better employees than nongraduates. Thus it is rational for employers to favor them, and for young people to go through school. Yet the system as a whole is dysfunctional, he argues, because the signaling game is zero-sum. He illustrates the point with another analogy: If everyone at a concert is sitting, and you want to see better, you can stand up. “But if everyone stands up, everyone does not see better.”
The advantage of having a credential, that is, comes at the expense of those who lack it, pushing them to pursue it simply to keep up. The result is “credential inflation.” Today a college degree is a prerequisite for jobs that didn’t previously require one—secretary, rental-car clerk, high-end waiter. And to return to the concert analogy, if you’re unable to stand, you’re objectively worse off than before. “People who are in the bottom 25% of math scores—their odds of finishing college, if they start, are usually like 5% or 10%,” Mr. Caplan says. They end up saddled with debt and shut out of jobs they may be perfectly capable of performing.
The irrational actor in this whole drama, Mr. Caplan says, is the voter, who almost without exception wants to keep the tax money flowing. “Only about 5% of Americans say that we should spend less on education,” he says. Even among self-identified “strong Republicans,” the figure is a mere 12%.
The professor is down on Internet education:
“Online education is only a viable competitor if you think that the main thing going on in schools is teaching useful skills,” Mr. Caplan says. He doubts that any internet certificate can supplant the signaling function, especially when it comes to conformity: “If your new, weird signal of conformity attracts a bunch of nonconformists, it fails as a signal of conformity.”
But he is up on getting a job as a teacher:
“I’m not one of these professors that resents teaching or dislikes teaching. I love it,” he says. “Maybe most of the students aren’t that interested,” but if “there’s one person in the room that cares, that person to me is the center of the universe.”
If you look at “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football)” and similar chronicles of how American college students actually spend their days, it is tough to believe that anyone ever thought that using tax dollars to subsidize majors other than science and engineering was going to make society wealthier. Other scholars have pointed out that Americans don’t come out of a typical college program with measurably better critical thinking or writing skills than when they went in (see my reviews of Academically Adrift and Higher Education?) But maybe The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money is the first to point out the zero-sum nature of college credentials? That, even if the problems identified by other scholars were fixed and college were somehow made intellectually rigorous, college for everyone still wouldn’t provide a huge boost to GDP.
Why do you need a college education to pick vegetables, clean the toilet, operate machinery, put nails in wood or work in the assembly line? What is the sense of spending $200,000 to get someone through college only to work those jobs? If they don’t work those jobs then who is going to do them? They do need to be done!
College should be reserved for the segment of the population which can and will work in a capacity that justifies a college education. Public subsidy of college education should mirror the industrial and economic needs for specific majors. Economically useless majors like Women’s Studies, Music or Art History should be a LUXURY that is not subsidized or facilitated by public funds. A society where everyone goes to college is a society where half the population does not have a job. A society where the majority of college grads majored in something useless is a society of parasites to the nanny state. College education should be scarce and competitively fought over. If you want in, study harder and be smarter. If you can’t, won’t or are plain stupid go work in the fields, go work in the factory or go clean the toilet.
The Bennett Hypothesis has been proven correct: the main result of subsidizing education is that education will get more expensive.
My corollary is that education will also degrade in quality for the better students when resources are used to accomodate those students who would not otherwise be in college without subsidy or remedial help.
(Re-)read Plato’s Apology (it is short), where Socrates defends himself against accusations of impiety. Pay special attention to his examination of three types of wisdom: that of the philosopher, the poet, and the craftsmen. Socrates dismissive remarks about those who would be paid to instruct are particularly germane to this discussion.
Finally, a truly disruptive thought: what if we stopped making education compulsory, and rescinded the labour laws barring children from working?
While researching this book, he also wrote or spoke on EconTalk about how most people who are C students In high school will not finish college. This was just the probability, not absolute. So he wrote that it was bad advice to tell those students to go to college, because they would most likely accumulate a few few years student debt with out getting any pay boost for getting the sheepskin.
The problem with any attempt to rationalize education in the US is that it bumps into racial politics. You can’t have a system where 90 percent of blacks are funneled into vocational training and college is limited to whites, Jews, and Asians in STEM majors.
I am reading the book, and while interesting, I don’t expect anything to change soon. The signaling is real, and not easily replaced.
The whole topic of different capabilities for different individuals is also basically taboo, as has been pointed out.
Furthermore, there are too many people currently benefitting from the situation. See previous post on Oregon pensions, for an outrageous example.
Some progress has occurred, playoffs have replaced the college bowl process for determining the football national champion! And we are employing a lot of trade people building stadiums instead of those boring bridges.
Charles Greene: I don’t see how what you’re saying is true. Universities could have affirmative action type things even if the majority of people were not encouraged/expected to attend college.
Why not introduce national standardised exams at the end of high school, like A levels and equivalents in the UK and commonwealth countries? Certainly removes some of the signalling value – many employers in the UK want to see A level results for entry level hiring.
Bob – Haven’t you heard? Standardized tests are racist.
Of course, college is very important. Where else would a horny white suburban boy learn about the wisdom of a Latina woman with a richness of her experience, to paraphrase a US justice and a scholar (doubly a sage according to her self-referential quote). So that when he emotionally says “Oh, f*ck …”, he knows what he says.