Debating the Signaling Model of Education

I haven't read Caplan and Dickens' full exchange, but I doubt that the present article adds much to the discussion. The author emphasizes two points:

1. A cheaper and shorter academic program will not attract a lower caliber of student as long as it is challenging enough.

2. "Many blue collar and service jobs have extremely boring and unpleasant elements that are hard for workers to avoid. If your goal is to signal conscientiousness and conformity, a year of good performance at McDonald’s is probably a better signal than a year of academic success at most colleges."

The first point relies on intelligence and short-term effort being the relevant criteria. But Caplan's assertion is that conscientiousness and conformity are the characteristics that employees seek to signal. Those characteristics may be better evidenced by sustained effort. In any case, at some point, a distance run of increasing intensity but decreasing length becomes a sprint, a completely different sport. As you shorten the length of your education, eventually you'll get something that is more like an IQ test or other standardized test than a 4-year degree.

The second point seems to be totally unsubstantiated. If you take (present and former) fast food workers as your hiring pool, you find you've eliminated practically none of the loafers. That a potential recruit has both a PhD and a previous career at McDonald's could well be a sign of something good, but I doubt it could be concluded that the recruit was particularly conscientious during the McDonald's stage of his career. Work at McDonald's is closely supervised, requires little concentration, and never demands any effort outside of scheduled work hours. The necessary work ethic is not at all the same as that for the high-autonomy jobs sought by university graduates. The babysitting example is even more specious. Responsible for an infant, behind the wheel of a car, operating power tools, most functional human beings manage to bring to bear the requisite level of care. It's harder to do when lives aren't imminently at risk.

But the biggest fallacy is that manual labour is strictly harder than mental labour. Mental labour doesn't usually make you physically uncomfortable or physically tired, but in some important way, thinking is the hardest kind of work there is. At the very least, physical laziness and mental laziness in a potential employee are statistically independent events.

A good way to do a cheaper and better signal is to contribute something back to the community. In the good old days, people volunteered for various things in their city/state/country. These days, you can easily contribute code to an open source project, or run user groups. An engineer can hack together a cool DIY project and let the internet run with it. Are you a writer? Publish using on-demand services like Lulu.

The key part to this is marketing and raising awareness. Without harping too much: social media makes marketing for one-person projects doable.