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Comment by ismail | Hacker News Reader

Does education = learning, and does education result in knowledge, does education = benefit to society?

The reason I ask is: we did an exercise recently where we had to go through the various assumptions for a product. The assumptions we made were

1: education = better outcomes

2: more education = better

3: formal higher education is necessary for getting a job

4: people actually need to get jobs

I am not convinced these are true.

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Agreed. When I have traveled to Nepal, a very poor country some children speak very good English, so that implies a certain level of education, yet there are very few opportunities for them there.

Someone who has a lot less education in the UK would likely have far more opportunities.

Then you have to ask yourself where that belief comes from for each item try hard to disprove it. It is only based on opinion to a certain point.

The book I linked to in another comment collects relevant studies. To try to summarize, a degree does seem to matter to getting a better job (especially a bachelor's or a high school diploma); but an incremental year of schooling matters disproportionately less, and the bulk of the benefit was in the degree (the sheepskin effect); a more-educated populace does not make a country richer, among current nations; and intangible benefits are dubious when you measure the outcomes on adults, whether it's knowledge of facts, skills, preferences for more-elevated art, or even political indoctrination. The idea that the economic benefit of education is mostly signaling makes sense of the fact that people consume more and more schooling in the face of its ineffectiveness.

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