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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

>" His spreadsheets don't answer many questions I might have about such systemic changes, for example, would the reduction in college graduates reduce our nation's economic competitiveness? If it did, how would that effect overall quality of life for average Americans? I don't find compelling answers to these questions in his spreadsheets."

His book talked about those things; the spreadsheets are just him 'showing his work'. I think Caplan is trying to highlight that despite the fact that many challenged his conclusions, almost nobody challenged his logic or calculations.

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Probably because any attempt to even reduce the topic to a spreadsheet is a case of "not even wrong".

When someone says that they proved that say, studying art doesn't matter, with math, you don't bother arguing with their math.

>"Probably because any attempt to even reduce the topic to a spreadsheet is a case of "not even wrong"."

But he didn't reduce it to a spreadsheet, he wrote a very thorough book.

>"When someone says that they proved that say, studying art doesn't matter, with math, you don't bother arguing with their math."

I am not sure what you think Caplan says. His book is mostly about the signalling and human capital models of education. The vast majority of post-secondary students say they attend post-secondary education in order to increase their future earnings, so Caplan calculates the financial impact of various degrees, and then figures out how much is attributable to the various factors.

> His book is mostly about the signalling and human capital models of education. The vast majority of post-secondary students say they attend post-secondary education in order to increase their future earnings

So what about the partying, making friends for life, and learning to be an adult?

What about care-free student life as a carrot to incentivise young adults to go into careers that might not be good for them personally, but good for society?

Or how about letting people have careers that are personally fulfilling, but not economically productive?

Taking a year abroad to study in the middle of whatever university education you're in is a financially stupid decision. And yet, one I recommend every single student to do, because it's fun.

A million years ago when I was nearing the end of high school, we all talked about which university educations were financially the best, and worst. Which educations "paid for themselves", and which ones didn't. Everyone knew. And then we all picked whatever we personally liked and thought we would enjoy working with in the future.

Caplan might be 100% right. And also 100% irrelevant.

If you read his book, like it was already suggested to you a couple of times, you'd know what he says about "care-free student life". This way, you would be able to address his actual positions, instead of arguing against a version of Caplan you've conjured in your mind, based on a single blog post and a few HN comments.

So what does he say about care-free student life?

Do your own homework?

There appears to be a bunch of people defending Caplan in this discussion, but most of that defence boils down to "read the entire book!"

No, I'm not going to do that. And if you've read the entire book, and think I'm an idiot at this point, you are free to say so and disengage from this discussion.

But the reason I'm so dismissive of his work is that the conclusion is ridiculous and the premise inherently flawed because education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.

And the reason I'm dismissive of the defenders is that no-one seems to be able to come up with a succinct rebuttal to the criticisms fielded by me and others in this discussion other than "read the entire book!"

> education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.

Any attempt at modeling any phenomena will fail to capture some aspect of that phenomena. So are you suggesting that all attempts at modeling are inherently flawed and must lead to ridiculous conclusions?

- To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph--

- O Captain! My Captain!

Right. But I didn’t assert that all things can be gainfully modeled.

I suggested that the non-specific incompleteness of a model isn’t a compelling reason not to use the model.

The person you were arguing with is saying that it's a compelling reason to not use the model because, I quote, the conclusions of the model are "batshit insane".

I think it's fair to say it's easy to over focus on the quantifiable, but arguably we also fail on even qualifying what exactly we concretely are trying to do. Like, what's the real purpose of school? Does it actually serve the goals that we often talk about - is it readying students to be good, engaged citizens, or particularly good workers? Of course, a simple numeric score would just be the fraction of the goals achieved / every goal, and that'd certainly capture something important about the education system.

> [S]chool inculcates many attitudes that, regardless of their moral worth, impede on-the-job success. If you’re preparing kids for their adult roles, a year of work experience instills more suitable discipline and socialization than a year of school.

> The imperfect overlap between the school ethic and the work ethic is especially blatant in modern American colleges. Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying.98 Since the early 1960s, effort collapsed across the board. “Full-time” college students average 27 hours of academic work per week—and only 14 hours of studying. (...)

> What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa frostily remark in their Academically Adrift:

>> If we presume that students are sleeping eight hours a night, which is a generous assumption given their tardiness and at times disheveled appearance in early morning classes, that leaves 85 hours a week for other activities. . . . What is this additional time spent on? It seems to be spent mostly on socializing and recreation.

> A week in modern college is a great way to teach students that life is a picnic:

>> A recent study of University of California undergraduates reported that while students spent thirteen hours a week studying, they also spent twelve hours socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies, and three hours on other forms of entertainment.

> Instead of making students conform and submit, college showers students with acceptance. This doesn’t merely fail to prepare students for their future roles; it actively unprepares them. College raises students’ expectations to unrealistic heights, leaving future employers the chore of dragging graduates back down to earth.

His book discusses your other points too, I strongly recommend it.

> > What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression.

If you think this is a bad thing, you are well and truly lost.

> If you think this is a bad thing, you are well and truly lost.

Well, you were claiming that the book/study did not take this into account so GP posted evidence that the book/study does indeed address your concerns.

Whether it is a bad thing or not is irrelevant to the concern you expressed, to wit - that the socialisation and play is not addressed by the study.

> Well, you were claiming that the book/study did not take this into account

No, I did not.

> Whether it is a bad thing or not is irrelevant to the concern you expressed

No, the entire point of me asking about it is because I think it has value to people making educational choices.

> that the socialisation and play is not addressed by the study.

Yes, and the way the study addresses this is batshit insane, unless you are an unfeeling utilitarian robot.

>> Well, you were claiming that the book/study did not take this into account

> No, I did not.

So how exactly is the reader supposed to interpret this statement of yours:

> So what about the partying, making friends for life, and learning to be an adult?

> What about care-free student life as a carrot to incentivise young adults to go into careers that might not be good for them personally, but good for society?

When someone looks at a study and says "What about $FOO", they generally mean "Why is $FOO not addressed?", and not "Your conclusions about $FOO are wrong".

You said

> "What about $FOO"

but you meant

> "Your $FOO conclusions are wrong"

Is this correct?

? So your sentence does not make logical sense to me? Did you mean before the 1960s people would spend 40h _plus_ studying. Because the way you write it is that fifty years ago college was 40h (in-class and studying), and now it is 27h in class + 14h studying (41h) so nothing changed.

I believe the author meant "old.class + old.study = 40" vs "new.class + new.study = 27" (where new.study = 14). It took me a re-read to come to that conclusion.

Ah ok, I see now how this can be read that way. Anyway I question the math. Fulltime enrolment is 15 credits which typically is considered 45h of work a week (1h in-class + 2h studying). What we also shouldn't forget is that on top of that students typically have a job as well.

I'm not sure I agree, I think school does an excellent job at instilling subservience/deference to authority that a year of on the job training, while effective, cannot quite replicate. What's learnt easily is often forgotten easiy, and I think that applies to the levels of compliance we need for the modern workforce.

If Caplan is right it should be a personal choice not subsidized by government

It's entirely possible for Caplan to be correct about his material analysis, and that still not be the right conclusion.

If the government doesn't subsidise education, then anything that doesn't promise a return is financially debilitating. Personal choice can't exist when your ability to eat and pay rent rely upon you making a specific decision.

If you don't believe that humanities education has any kind of broader social value, then that's a whole other argument to make.

> It's entirely possible for Caplan to be correct about his material analysis, and that still not be the right conclusion.

How do the critics know that it is not the right conclusion? Where are their numbers that support their conclusion.

Look, I understand research is hard and that it may occasionally result in an incorrect conclusion from the data that was gathered. It happens.

But it is not logically consistent to call the conclusion wrong when there is no data to support that position.

That sounds like a utilitarian dystopia.

Where I'm from, universities don't charge tuition, but you still get a small allowance as a student, and you can add on to that with a student loan to cover living costs. Loan interest and repayments are the same for everyone and based on your salary, it's all backed by the government, and if you don't pay back your loans before the age of 65, your loan is forgiven.

Given all of this, it is much easier to calculate if an education is "worth it" or not than in the US market, because you can look at average salary progression in different fields to do a pretty good estimate of whether or not you'll repay your student loan before retirement. These calculations are routinely done by unions and career guides and university recruiters, and the usual suspects are worth it; STEM education, medicine, MBAs etc, while the more liberal-artsy you get, the more likely you are to never ever repay your student debt and therefore be a "bad" investment of educational budgets.

And you know what? I'm fine with that. I'm fine with government subsidizing all of these "bad" educational programmes. For the fun of it. For the hell of it. Because some people like it. I am happily paying taxes so that someone else can get an education in ancient Peruvian anthropology with a minor in medieval French poetry for the absolute sheer fucking delight of it.

The goal of society is happiness, not productivity.

> Given all of this, it is much easier to calculate if an education is "worth it" or not than in the US market, because you can look at average salary progression in different fields to do a pretty good estimate of whether or not you'll repay your student loan before retirement.

It's harder than you think. You also need to take into account probability of actually finishing the degree vs dropping out (which depends on your individual ability, preferences, and other aspects), likelihood of actually getting a job in the field after completing a degree (e.g. there are many more people with a diploma in History than there are jobs in that field), job satisfaction (some jobs tend to have much lower or higher job satisfaction than others, which often is not clear to high-schoolers, and which results in wide discrepancies of monetary compensation, to make up for low or high job satisfaction), and other things too.

The entire subject of this conversation, Caplan's spreadsheet, is exactly his attempt to estimate all of that.

> The entire subject of this conversation, Caplan's spreadsheet, is exactly his attempt to estimate all of that.

Yes, but what I'm saying is that I don't care! People don't care! If you make your educational decisions based on optimizing the rat-race and delaying gratification in favour of some future calculated benefit, you're also the kind of person who has no idea what to do with it when you get there!

My counter-argument isn't rational or analytical or quantifiable, it's irrational! Emotional! Caplan might be correct. But boring.

That only begs another question: if the point of education is not learning things and building human capital, but rather play and self-expression, why do we put on the charade of classes and exams? If play and self-expression is so important for young adults, why would anyone think that college as it actually exists is the best way for them to get it? Why does the state subsidize college education, instead of private businesses, which offer 4 year programs specifically designed to allow attendees have lives full of fun and joy, without stressing them with memorizing of useless (to them) facts that they'll permanently forget as soon as they leave the examination room? I mean, I have a lot of good ideas for a 4 year self-actualization program, why won't government give people non-dischargeable $100k+ loans to attend it?

> if the point of education is not learning things and building human capital, but rather play and self-expression

Wow, that's the falsest false dichotomy I've seen in a long time.

Por que no los dos?

> If you make your educational decisions based on optimizing the rat-race and delaying gratification in favour of some future calculated benefit, you're also the kind of person who has no idea what to do with it when you get there!

Do you have any data to support your conclusion?

I would, with a straight face, suggest everyone is wrong and the real purpose of education should be building better voters.

> I am happily paying taxes so that someone else can get an education in ancient Peruvian anthropology with a minor in medieval French poetry for the absolute sheer fucking delight of it.

Oh, I love this. What a droll, dull world without this attitude. Many of our societies are rich beyond imagination; we have more than enough to support all sorts of activities which don’t directly increase someone’s wealth.

It’s one thing about a rich society without a public safety net: people are more jealous and resentful of perceived freeloaders, i.e., anyone not directly employed in the increase of capital.

> The goal of society is happiness, not productivity.

Who are you to decide?

>I am not sure what you think Caplan says. His book is mostly about the signalling and human capital models of education. The vast majority of post-secondary students say they attend post-secondary education in order to increase their future earnings, so Caplan calculates the financial impact of various degrees, and then figures out how much is attributable to the various factors.

So I was quite intrigued when I read the post initially and thought this is about the sociatal implications of education. I thought his "conclusions" go squarely against what I know about education, i.e. there are strong historical and geographical correlation with education, gdp, child mortality rates, child birth rates etc. (most actually correlate more with female education than male education), Roslings work is a good reference here. I was considering reading the book to see what the calculations are and how they refute those correlations.

Now from what you're saying, he actually wrote a book with a click-bait title and which is about something very different from what the title implies (I guess "on the financial return of investment of a college education" would not have gotten the attention he wanted). And now he is complaining that education researchers are not engaging? I mean first, as far as I know most education research is not primarily interested in the financial ROIs of education (which is also highly country dependent), but if anything with the broad sociatal implications, but why should even those that might be interested engage if judging by the title Caplan is mainly interested in artificial controversy.

As a side note, why is this even economics, I would have more put this under business/MBA type calculations. Maybe I'm biased by the German system where economics is Volkswirtschaftslehre and Business is BWL, i.e. economics is to do with the economy of countries/states/peoples?

> I was considering reading the book to see what the calculations are and how they refute those correlations.

He talks about this stuff too, for example, as education is correlated with health, he also estimates health benefits in his return to education calculations.

The problem with many correlations that you mention is that they are, indeed, just correlation. There is scant evidence on there being casual relationship, or, for that matter, the direction of causality (eg., couldn’t it be that more prosperity allows people to consume more formal education, rather than formal education bringing about prosperity?).

> Now from what you're saying, he actually wrote a book with a click-bait title and which is about something very different from what the title implies (I guess "on the financial return of investment of a college education" would not have gotten the attention he wanted). And now he is complaining that education researchers are not engaging?

Financial return to education is just one chapter of his book. The book is actually really detailed, and covers multitude of aspects. In fact, in the very blog post you are commenting under, Caplan in explicitly says:

> Some critics called me a philistine: “Education isn’t about making money; it’s about becoming a whole person.” Never mind that I wrote a whole chapter against this misinterpretation.

Of course, nobody expects you to actually have read his book before you can express an opinion about topics it concerns, but maybe, before accusing him of clickbait and stirring artificial controversy, or his alleged bitterness that ed researchers are not engaging (he’s not even saying that, by the way), at least read the article you’re commenting under.

> As a side note, why is this even economics

This is a trend in academia over past decade or two. Basically, the traditional social science fields are so degenerate, dysfunctional, and ideologically rigid, that a lot of quantitatively-minded people who are keenly interested in social science topics, but are repelled by the reality of academic environment, instead flock to Economics, where rigor is higher, and ideology is less rigidly constraining.

Look at new papers on NBER, for example:

https://www.nber.org/papers

Half of them is just social science dressed as economics. That’s why Econ departments are growing.

>> I was considering reading the book to see what the calculations are and how they refute those correlations.

> He talks about this stuff too, for example, as education is correlated with health, he also estimates health benefits in his return to education calculations.

> The problem with many correlations that you mention is that they are, indeed, just correlation. There is scant evidence on there being casual relationship, or, for that matter, the direction of causality (eg., couldn’t it be that more prosperity allows people to consume more formal education, rather than formal education bringing about prosperity?).

Actually there is plenty of evidence that there is a causal relationship, again Rosling is a good resource. There are many countries who moved out of poverty by investing heavily in education, Sweden (where Rosling was from is one of them). I think when there is such a significant correlation if you want to dismiss it you need to bring some pretty good arguments.

>> Now from what you're saying, he actually wrote a book with a click-bait title and which is about something very different from what the title implies (I guess "on the financial return of investment of a college education" would not have gotten the attention he wanted). And now he is complaining that education researchers are not engaging?

>Financial return to education is just one chapter of his book. The book is actually really detailed, and covers multitude of aspects. In fact, in the very blog post you are commenting under, Caplan in explicitly says:

> Some critics called me a philistine: “Education isn’t about making money; it’s about becoming a whole person.” Never mind that I wrote a whole chapter against this misinterpretation.

But that part wasn't my point, my point was is it good for society.

> Of course, nobody expects you to actually have read his book before you can express an opinion about topics it concerns, but maybe, before accusing him of clickbait and stirring artificial controversy, or his alleged bitterness that ed researchers are not engaging (he’s not even saying that, by the way), at least read the article you’re commenting under.

Hold up, I've simply based my assessment of what you said:

> The vast majority of post-secondary students say they attend post-secondary education in order to increase their future earnings, so Caplan calculates the financial impact of various degrees, and then figures out how much is attributable to the various factors.

Now you're saying that this isn't the case and accuse me about jumping to conclusions. I actually am interested in the book, now that you said it is not just about personal ROI.

> But that part wasn't my point, my point was is it good for society.

I believe the point might be that it's perhaps not so simple as "good for society" or "bad for society". Water is good for a human right up until the point that they drown in it. Does this make water good for humans, bad for humans, or is a binary answer too simple?

> His book talked about those things; the spreadsheets are just him 'showing his work'. I think Caplan is trying to highlight that despite the fact that many challenged his conclusions, almost nobody challenged his logic or calculations.

Hermitian909 said "the spreadsheets are flawed by not including calculations for these additional levels of effect," and that claim seems pretty compelling: the calculations may be perfectly accurate and also perfectly useless because they say nothing about greater societal effects if everyone changed their behavior.

The problem of individual strategy given the current system vs the question of what the system should be is a classic one, and the latter is far more complicated to compute. The "Moneyball"/baseball stats revolution shows a bit of this: as the things that were initially undervalued were no longer undervalued, "smart teams" had to continue changing. The system wasn't static.

You say he talks about those things in his book in addition, but you can't call that "showing his work" if the work shown doesn't include the most relevant parts.

>"You say he talks about those things in his book in addition, but you can't call that "showing his work" if the work shown doesn't include the most relevant parts."

The spreadsheet and book are complementary; you won't really understand either without reading both. In order to understand 'the work', you also have to know the question and the final answer.

Because a majority of people are "feelers" (by nature) - they feel first, then run it through reasoning. An immature person of this nature would feel first, and then never proceed to use logic.

In the same manner that a mature thinker uses logic first, then feels. An immature one may think, yet never also run the thoughts through the "feels department".

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