Does Education Matter? Tests from Extensions of Schooling in 1919-22, 47 and 72
papers.ssrn.com
papers.ssrn.com
As for College, it is a lot of signaling, but it also gives practice taking in lots of new information when the expectations of performance are much higher and much closer to that of a typical professional job. It takes that low bar of high school and adds onto it significantly, and the hope is that even if the information was not useful, the ability to assimilate a few books worth of information within in a few weeks of starting a new job will not be a new experience.
Many countries have literacy rates near 100%. The European country I am in now has a 99% literacy rate.
If the benefit of high school is "raising the baseline just a little", we should ask ourselves whether "just a little" benefit justifies the cost. Education is not free, so it needs to move the needle.
One way to measure the benefit is to look at outcomes of interest after long time has passed, so this study did that. There was no effect, casting doubt to earlier studies that found large effects. One strength of this study is that they work with complete data, unlike previous studies which mostly worked with sampled panels. This suggests sampling bias as a mechanism to explain previous studies.
I disagreed with some of the harsher recommendations but found the data compelling.
https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...
Rather, the argument is that while wedding rings would always be somewhat expensive, currently it is too expensive because purchase of wedding rings is subsidized by public tax. So public subsidy of wedding rings should stop. Then it would be as expensive as needed to signal, instead of being crazy expensive, and public money won't be wasted.
Caltech's engineering program had tests that were open book open note. Memorization would not work. You had to actually understand it.
Posts like yours make me appreciate Caltech.
P.S. My first job was designing the 757 stabilizer jackscrew assembly. I was flying on a 757 just the other day, 40 years later. How marvelous! It's a great airplane.
P.P.S. We had a few "formula memorizers" and "formula pluggers" at Boeing. I was often assigned to go over their work and fix it. Nobody trusted them.
Because I started there as a newbie along with the formula pluggers. I could see what I could do vs what they could do. For example, one task required coming up with the spinning moment of inertia of the jackscrew assembly. A plugger sat a couple rows away, and looked at it, and asked "what book did you get that formula out of?" I said it wasn't in a book, so I used calculus. He just stared at me. He was a nice enough fellow, but didn't seem real interested in engineering, and would try to get by doing as little as possible.
I discovered that an undergraduate degree at Caltech conferred math skills that other universities put off until masters. Because I'd fix the math work of some of them, too. Over time, I was trusted more and more with more advanced work. The pluggers weren't.
I was an average student at Caltech.
I have little idea how Caltech compares today. But I've run into the formula pluggers in diverse engineering areas ever since. They would have all flunked out of Caltech.
I'm not sure why you question the notion that being able to understand where formulas come from is far more valuable than just memorizing them.
I'm sure there are other great universities that educate engineers that actually understand what they're doing rather than plugging in a formula. But I have no personal experience with them.
Wasn't your point that Caltech would have taught them not to be formula-pluggers?
It was just a school, man, relax, you're not actually better than other people.
My point in posting this here is not to brag, but to point out that a college education doesn't have to consist of memorizing formulas. If a particular college program requires that, there are better choices.
Being able to derive the formulas means one knows their limitations. It also means that one can derive a needed formula when it is not in the book. This means that one can solve a significantly larger set of engineering problems.
In aircraft design, this leads to lighter and less expensive parts without sacrificing strength or utility. It's an objectively better design.
Making one who can do this objectively a better engineer.
When I hear people like you I always wonder how the human race is supposed to be doomed by a lack of intelligent people, yet somehow throughout history no such constraints are observable.
In the past people had lots of preconceptions of what black people couldn't do, you're doing the same and believing it is socially acceptable. The human brain is amazing, just because someone's brain scores worse than another in some motivation and culture test doesn't mean they are incapable of absurdly broad and vague things like "advanced concepts".
...with current educational methods, that basically expect all students to "teach themselves on their own". Modern-day educators aren't even trying to meaningfully engage students who respond well to more direct forms of instruction, because that would involve actual, verifiable effort and "demean" their role.
For a metaphor of education, I'd say people are like Turing machines. (A) If there is one person who can learn a concept, then any of them can; (B) some are faster than others; and, (C) the "optimal in practice" state is usually limited by need and not capability (i.e., using modern laptops too just check emails and browse the web).
>but saying this in higher education circles is akin to burning a Koran in Mecca.
I'm not a fan of preemptive impersonations of Copernicus. I'd rather read what people said and judge that.
Anyone can learn anything. But to what depth and degree within the time they have on Earth? What can they accomplish with their present knowhow or lack there of? These questions have measurable outputs. It's not enough to rely on potential. At some point, one should know his bearings and limitations.
> But it's a continuous scale, not a yes/no thing. And interest in the subject plays a big role.
Ability itself may follow a continuum, however sufficiency is digital.
In reality, even the best universities have more than a few horrible professors, and a student that’s struggling in class may actually just be going through a rough patch.
I am always dismayed at anti-intellectual perspectives and approaches to education.
My view is perhaps a bit of a "no true Scotsman", but I think if we're not measuring positive outcomes from more education, we're either not educating effectively, or we're not measuring the right outcomes.
It's also admittedly true that it will almost certainly never be possible to "properly educate" everyone, but I do think we'd do a heck of a lot better if society valued "education for the sake of education" as much as it valued the Superbowl, or the Kardashians, or whatever mindless vacuous thing is hot on TikTok these days.
What the heck happened to being curious about the magical wonders of the world? Why do people not care about science, maths and technology? It boggles and frustrates my mind!
I remember instances of finally understanding something, and the feeling that somebody had suddenly turned the lights on.
The concept that you can battle inflation by passing laws strikes my as deluded in the extreme. Battling inflation comes from sound economic principles (that you learn from your mother, not some economist). You simply can't will away inflation.
If you really want to battle inflation, just follow Warren Buffett's suggestion: you're no longer eligible for re-election if inflation exceeded 5% during your tenancy.
The linked study essentially does so in it’s very title.
I too would expect a difference in outcomes between more and less compulsory schooling. But I would expect it from the non-education related impacts of it (I.e. de-facto childcare and keeping the kids/teens from engaging in as much long-term harmful activities)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/29/so-is-it-nat...
> Plomin’s argument is that, in a society with universal education, the greatest part of the variation in learning abilities is accounted for by genetics, not home environment or quality of school – these factors, he says, do have an effect but it’s much smaller than is popularly believed.
It's important to recognize that in this model, the hypothetical control group is also treated with a very high quality[1], universal, education.
> He finds that genetic heritability accounts for 50% of the psychological differences between us, from personality to mental abilities. But that leaves 50% that should be accounted for by the environment. However, Plomin argues, research shows that most of that 50% is not attributable to the type of environmental influences that can be planned for or readily affected – ie it’s made up of unpredictable events. And of the environmental influences that can be moderated, much of it, he argues, is really an expression of genetics.
I'm not sure where that 50% figure comes from, it seems rather generous. Nonetheless, I'll accept it for argument's sake. It's not unreasonable to split nature and nurture roughly 50-50 as a sort of rough bayesian prior.
Nonetheless, this touches on genetics as a confounding factor for environmental factors. More on this here: [2]
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I could go fishing for papers that contradict yours, but I think it's perhaps more helpful to switch perspectives a bit. Think of this as extra information, not a rebuttal. At the international scale, access to education's impact on vertical mobility is huge, and this difference overshadows the influence of genetics.[3][4] IMO the macro perspective on education helps!
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Edit/addendum. I did go on a little fishing expedition, and found this very helpful: [5]
Selected extracts:
> When environments are homogeneous for all, all individual differences become heritable. [...] Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches.
> The discovery that all behavior is partially heritable transformed psychology, but, ironically, it also transformed behavior genetics. Once we accept that basically everything—not only schizophrenia and intelligence, but also marital status and television watching—is heritable, it becomes clear that specific estimates of heritability are not very important. The omnipresence of genetic influences does not demonstrate that behavior is “less psychological” or “more biologically determined” than had originally been thought; rather it shows that behavior arises from factors intrinsic as well as extrinsic to the individual. The real implications of heritability lie not in questions of relative biological determinism but in revealing the need to understand both the mechanisms through which the individual, whether consciously or not, directs his or her own life course and his or her power to do so.
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[1] from a historical perspective
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-020-00079-z
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/better-learning
The reality is that money and land are used as weapons to distort any concept of letting genes express themselves in a non distorted environment. Humanity has never suffered from a lack of "good genetics", the entire point of "genetics" is to ensure compatibility with the surrounding environment.
Poverty by far exceeds what is explainable by genes.
It’s not any less disturbing. We like to think of ourselves as individuals with free will, but between genetics and environment, we are at best steering the car, not building the roads.