Education does not equate to a successful job. I know a few career students that acquire one useless degree after another because every time they try to get a job they find no one is hiring.
Yes it does, statistically speaking.
Career academics are a tiny minority of the population. The median salary of a BS degree in the US is 2x over non-degree holders. The median salary of an advanced degree is 3x. Twice the salary for having a 4 year degree, that is enormous.
These stats were published very recently by the St. Louis Fed: https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
Before I saw the statistics I would not have believed the difference is anywhere near as large as 2x.
The average person who is capable of getting a Bachelor’s degree but doesn’t is very distant from the average high school graduate. And if you drop out of college after two years because you can’t cut it your labour market outcome is only very slightly better than a high school grad but your debt load of half of a college grad.
But, I’m curious, what does it actually matter in this context, if any non-zero portion of it is causation? This thread is discussing whether people are better off getting some education, whether they should spend their UBI income in search of opportunity via education, and whether going to school is a “work disincentive”. (Seem like the opposite to me.) They’re attempting to improve their lot via schooling, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that more education will, statistically, improve their lot at least somewhat.
Some of education’s pay off is privately and socially useful, increases in human capital, some of it is privately useful but socially useless or counter productive, wasteful signaling in an arms race, like that which leads to people who would have stopped with a Bachelor’s a generation ago getting a Master’s now.
Insofar as education is socially wasteful we should discourage it, not encourage it, tax it, not subsidize it.
What is your metric of social waste, and why do you think education has enough to worry about compared all the millions of other socially wasteful things we do when not working?
Us GDP per capita is not going down, and education rates are going up. Both monotonically since the 70s, despite the supposed degree requirements of bank tellers. That alone — the economy — seems to squarely contradict the notion that school is somehow bad for us.
If you’re measuring social productivity in terms of capital, I think you’re failing to account for the increase in income tax the government receives from the average 2x higher salary of educated people. That extra income tax is so much money, it could fund education for every man, woman, and child in the US, and still have 90% of it left for the socially productive spending we do now on such things as maintaining the military industrial complex. We are being taxed for education already, and we are still better off.
It seems like you might also be ignoring the social evidence for education in countries where it is subsidized, like Norway, Finland and others.
If you give everyone a Bachelor’s degree they will not become 2x as productive. The people are different. The education is less important than the difference in the people. Education is not making them that much more productive. It’s certifying them as already being more productive.
The evidence for the economic effects of evidence is really weak. Richer countries spend more on education but the extra spending on education follows the getting rich, not the other way round. Ghana is a lot more educated now than 1950’s France, and a lot poorer. China’s massive economic growth from the 1980’s to the 2000s was based on a populace that mostly hadn’t finished primary school.
Regarding other first world countries the US is far, far richer than them[1] and has a better education system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
How do you measure productivity? And (asking again, since you didn’t answer) how do you measure social waste? Where is the evidence of your claims?
If what you claimed is true, then if the rate of education were to go up, then the income premium for education would go down, because you’re saying the income premium is correlation and not causation of education’s effect on society. But education rates have been going up for the last 50 years and the income premium for education is stable, despite more people being educated. Why?
> Richer countries spend more on education but the extra spending on education follows the getting rich, not the other way around
Your argument is that education is an economic drain. Where is the evidence of that? Even if true that wealth precedes education (and citation is needed there), your argument here is contradicting your earlier argument that education is socially wasteful - countries are getting richer and staying richer with increased education rates, regardless of whether it’s causation or correlation.
Ghana is an outlier with political issues not representative of most of the world, it doesn’t prove much about education. China’s massive economic growth coincides with an increase in education, framing it as being “based” on an uneducated populace because their education rate was lower at the start seems like it’s dodging the inconvenient fact that their education rates have risen while their economy has grown? Why are you so convinced that education is not even part of the cause for their economic growth, or anyone else’s?
You seem to be claiming that education teaches nothing of economic value, does not help people personally gain any skills, does not help people improve their productivity? Is that what you’re saying, and if so why?
That's the entire point. We can't quantify if education actually makes people more productive and if it does, is that productivity applied to helping or hurting society. For example, an aspiring software dev could get educated in computer science which would increase their productivity (provided they actually learned something which is not a given). However, they could become a white or black hat hacker with differing effects on society. Another scenario is that a person doesn't know what they want to do and so they take a variety of courses until they find something they like. A lot of that education is wasted energy that doesn't help anyone if they can't use it.
If you define educational productivity as GDP or income, or in financial terms, then the evidence is pretty clear and very strong that education doesn’t hurt. For education to not improve “productivity”, then you must be defining productivity some other way that you’re expecting me to intuit. I’m only hearing some rationalizing for why you’re ignoring the data we actually have.
The Fed study I posted does attempt to quantify the causal effect of education, and so do quite a few other studies. I recommend doing some research about what has been done to find out how this issue has been quantified already. I have looked into quite a few of these studies and their methodologies, and I haven’t seen a single one claim that education has zero or negative causal effect, even when their summary leans toward the income premium being more correlation than causation. All of them conclude it’s a mix, and there’s a positive contribution from the act of attending school, learning history and skills, gaining independence, etc. I don’t think education is by any means 100% efficient, whatever that would even mean, but claiming it’s zero or negative is really extreme, especially if you can’t produce any evidence.
The only thing that betters society is the positive application of knowledge to creating something of value for others. It's not enough to learn a topic, you must actually apply it make a difference.
We're talking about institutional education, not gaining more information. So in this discussion we're not talking about people spending their money to become more informed on Kardashians. We're talking about them going to school. As far as I'm aware, there's no school that teaches the history of the Kardashians.
At any rate, I believe the poster you responded to was using hyperbole to equate "history of the Kardashians" with some degree that he or she deems "equally as useless."
Instead of the usual "basket weaving" as an example of a useless field of study, he used "history of the Kardashians."
> The only thing that betters society is the positive application of knowledge
To apply knowledge, you have to first acquire it. How do you propose to do so without education?
Eventually we'll look back at college (including trades) education being free like we look now on elementary education being free.
Education conveys benefits besides merely financial: a technician might receive no financial benefit from knowing about DNA, nuclear fission and distance to Mars. However, these people make life choices informed by their general knowledge, they vote on policy, they act when Covid-19 is in the news.
If we take your perspective far enough, we will have a society of idiot savants that are clueless outside if their narrow speciality.
Try reasoning from the other end: is a society of uneducated people likely to be successful in the 21st century?