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Comment by ttcbj | Hacker News Reader

Well, this vs. the parent comment is the true crux of the matter. Is college more about signaling, or is it more about giving people valuable skills? I agree Caplan makes a very compelling case for signaling, based primarily on the observable behavior of people in the system.

My pet educational reform is not 'free college for everyone', but rather that the gov't would pay out a percentage of the increase in W2 earnings before/after the education to the educational institution for a few years. The gov't would pay it, so it is not indentured servitude.

In order to get paid, the institutions would need to raise the W2 earnings of people who attended. I'd also like to see a requirement that the payouts be publicly reported, so that reports could identify which institutions were high achieving in this regard.

I personally think that reform might focus the system more on improved skills, and less on signaling and a fight for improved US news rankings.

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What you’re getting at makes sense — the benefits to education are broadly distributed but there’s uncertainty to who exactly will receive them. It makes sense to diversify those risks.

But where do W2 earnings come from? The old boy network? Various kinds of privilege? Are you just creating an incentive to turbocharge existing patterns of discrimination? Elite colleges already do this by means of their endowments. If you’re the heir to a huge fortune, the college is happy to admit you, with the expectation that you’ll pay for a building with your name on it around the time your kids are applying.

Is college more about signaling, or is it more about giving people valuable skills?

Lumping all college degrees together confuses the issue. A computer science degree from a top-25 university gives you valuable skills. A philosophy degree from a non-top-25 university gives you no valuable skills.

Colleges like to describe all degrees as if they are similar, because most degrees give you no valuable skills, but the existence of really valuable degrees gives all degrees some signaling value.

Considering how there's a lot of developers doing just fine without having any degree in Computer Science, let alone a "top 25 university", I'd argue that a degree in Philosophy is more valuable.

How many people reading this right now make a very good living writing software without a “computer science degree from a top 25 university”? To what extent are those degrees also just for sorting?

A serious university comp sci program teaches you a lot. This is part of the difference between programmer and software engineer. Going to college allows you to gain advanced kmowledge and ideally do reseach of your own.

A philosophy education teaches a lot too. The discussion here is about what markets value and why that matters and why it doesn’t. I think trying to align education with private gain is the wrong approach. Society should promote human flourishing, not just numbers on a bank statement.

Ok, so who's going to pay the philosophy major? He's not necessarily worth that much. On the other hand, he's worth a lot of he learns something more practical. What would you classify as human flourishing? I think humans have flourished because of advancements in digital technology. Also, "society" is not a concrete individual that can do valuing. Again, who's going to pay a philosophy major?

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