Attention Caplanites: School Is Less Wasteful Than You Think
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infovores.substack.com
Of course signaling is not wasteful. Caplan, like any good economist, would readily agree (prices as signals is a cornerstone in microeconomic theory). Employers need a mechanism to identify who is worth hiring, which for entry level jobs is typically the college degree. The problem is that a college degree is an extraordinarily expensive signaling device to obtain, and in a population saturated with college degrees they become less meaningful, and those without degrees have no chance at competing even if they would be better suited for a particular job.
To me, The Case Against Education is a prompt to identify or create more efficient signals. In regular conversation it seems like most people agree that college is too expensive and really you're just in it for the "piece of paper" at the end, yet when you formalize the arguments folks get defensive and will pontificate on the intangible value of a liberal arts education.
Any argument for the intangible benefits of a liberal arts education must, at minimum, recognize that these are all secondary benefits. Any degree without a clear path to a well paying career is, based on the cost of tuition, a luxury good. This is true regardless of whether the tuition is paid by loans or taxes.
The problem is that America is infested with rent seeking parasites who have turned every social good into a scam. Our healthcare system is the most expensive in the world, and yet we have a lower life expectancy than Cuba. We have the most expensive education system in the world, with little to show for it.
Why are we devaluing education itself, just because far too many colleges are being run by despicable businessmen? Why are we accepting their rigged game as fixed? Boomers went to college for next to nothing. Gen X didn’t have to pay that much either. The neoliberal corruption of higher education, from a social good into a scam, is a very recent phenomenon.
The root of the rot is all the pointless add-on services. Colleges don’t need to run dorms, meal plans, health centers, or any of that. The only thing that should be offered is academics. 18 year olds can go to war. They can manage to live independently, and the ones who can’t will receive Darwin Awards.
In terms of America having little to show for the Education system, a disproportionate number of the top colleges and universities are in the US.
A personal anecdote on this point: I enlisted in the US Navy after failing out of UIUC because I preferred to smoke weed and play video games instead of going to class. While on active duty I resumed my studies with online classes at military-friendly Strayer University, which accepted CLEP exams as credit for many lower level courses. I ended up taking like 8 different exams to take care of all my general requirements like sociology and Western civilization, each of which cost $0 thanks to military reimbursement.
I suppose it is indeed the benchmark, but standardized testing has mixed results.
Aircraft pilot testing is, I believe, somewhat standardized and does demonstrate that at least when you it you met some baseline level of safety.
The bar exam shows you have some baseline level of competency (as a non-lawyer who never read any law I am sure I would not pass) but I doubt it’s especially predictive as to how good a lawyer you will be.
I took the SAT and got into a bunch of schools, but I was struck by how it didn’t seem to reflect much of anything we learned in school, except some of the math (we were not given any sat prep nor encouraged to get any). Note: I know MIT says SAT is somewhat predictive as to whether you will graduate, so…?
I wonder about these full-cohort tests that control school admissions, such as in China, Korea, Japan, or France. Are the “winners” actually better in some useful way or is it simply a sorting hat that bins students into institutions with good/mediocre/bad networks?
Another fun part is that it limits how much a motivated high school can do regarding unfair grading: In my year, the average grades in high school and the grades in the University test, while relatively correlated, had some very big outliers.
Do note that in Spain, more than a matter of which university you'll go to, it's also a matter of which major you'll be allowed to study. In general, high paying, low unemployment majors are basically unachievable by someone that tested badly, or had bad high school grades. So it's not a matter if you are going to the right university, but whether you can study anything you care about at all. I had friends that liked computer science, but were C students, so they had no prayer of studying CS. And also note that, even after you get into college, chances of flunking out are very high. About 15% of students are expelled every year from that CS program, to which you have to add the ones that drop out voluntarily.
So more than sorting people into colleges, there's a whole lot of sorting into just getting a useful degree in a timely fashion.
I can't speak to the latter three, but for China it's in large part whether you tested into a good middle school (at age 10 or whatever), and then tested into a good high school, and then spent a sufficient amount of time (read: 20hrs/day) cramming in the ~year before the exam supported by your good high school.
Or have rich parents to pay your way into the good high school, or pay for top end tutoring / cram school if that route of corruption isn't available.
Or I guess live in an area where the gap between <City Name> #1 High School and the next one down isn't as stark
> Or have rich parents
So sounds like a useful test then: actual knowledge or skill is at best second order, but ability to fit into the upper tier networks has been demonstrated.
No, it's not. And your anecdote proves it.
Or rather, standardized testing just show how well you do on an exam. That means it tests how smart you are, and how well you can study the material on the test.
But (according to Caplan) that's barely the point in the kind of signalling education is good for. You could mostly just give people an IQ test as part of your hiring process.
Education takes years doing mostly pointless tasks, so that you can signal your long term _conformity_. You might be able to see how an employer might value someone who can credibly show that they can be a good cog in the machine for a long time (even if they don't see the point of the machine).
Not allowed. Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
"What Congress has forbidden is giving these devices and mechanisms controlling force unless they are demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance. Congress has not commanded that the less qualified be preferred over the better qualified simply because of minority origins. Far from disparaging job qualifications as such, Congress has made such qualifications the controlling factor, so that race, religion, nationality, and sex become irrelevant. What Congress has commanded is that any tests used must measure the person for the job and not the person in the abstract."
So I guess under that decision, they considered IQ tests as measuring the person in the abstract.
If I remember right, Bryan Caplan addresses this court case in his book already.
They've had to come up with all these ridiculous interview techniques when a simple "what's your IQ" would suffice.
Also persistence—that you started doing something that would take 4 (or more) years, and stuck with it when it got hard.
The signaling value of a traditional degree will go up if fewer people acquire it, so the optimal outcome for parents anxious about their own children's future prospects is that other people's children should consider vocational education or go straight from high school into the work force.
I say this aware that many high school grads without academic inclinations are nudged toward universities by default, to their irritation and to the detriment of their more seriously academic classmates. I don't see how to fix it until/unless the labor market gets tight enough to squeak. Until then, every small move to fix the problem will raise the reward for "defecting" back toward earning a degree as a signal.
My favourite policy suggestion for that: make it so that student loans can be discharged in a bankruptcy like any other loan. (Or more precisely, new student loans taken on after the new policy takes effect. No retro-active loan forgiveness.)
It's my favourite policy suggestion, because it's a common populist complaint that student loans stay with you forever. So my suggestion looks like it's giving in to that populist sentiment.
What is actually does: most students have no assets just after graduation, so bankruptcy is 'free' for them. Thus lenders can't count on getting the loans repaid, and thus won't loan as freely. Cutting off the spigot of student loan money will bring down the price of education.
What kind of spending are you talking about? Total spending (both private and public), or just official government spending?
I agree that all comparisons should be done on a per capita basis or as a proportion of GDP.
Please - let's approach this question with an open mind - there are plenty of alternative approaches worth considering just from other parts of the globe.
Presumably people don't do that because having a bankruptcy on your record comes with consequences. It might even disqualify you from persuing certain careers.
if you have a reasonable student loan balance and a solid job offer (maybe you got a stem degree from a public university), it would still be much better to make payments and have access to other credit.
Which is realistically a worst case scenario because there will always be someone who will try to figure out how to correctly evaluate the lending risk of people who are all equally handed free money and thus for whom the bankruptcy signal doesn't differentiate much.
And as a fresh college graduate I'm necessarily the most mobile I will likely ever be in my life, with no kids yet and maximum disposable income relative to my needs at this time of young adulthood, thus unlikely to be able or interested in looking for a settle-down home anyway for several years?
better believe I'll take that deal, or I would if I was back in that age group and stage of life.
total in-state tuition for a four year degree is ~$40k. that's not nothing, but at least for me, getting that wiped out in exchange for no house, driving a shitbox to work, and even getting extra scrutiny on rental applications would not have been a good start to my 20s.
if I went to a private school, wanted to be a teacher, etc, the calculus might be different.
Obviously there's the option of a less expensive State School like one of the CSUS or a Cal Poly, as well as clever short circuiting of the tuition by taking Community College equivalents where possible but if you're going to get everything forgiven at the end of college then why bother with all that.
If anything, you can argue that the signalling works even if we severely tax education. And as the signalling arms race is a negative externality on society, we _should_ tax education. (Or rather, we should tax capital-E Education that is useful for signalling, like university degrees. Libraries and Wikipedia don't need to be taxed.)
He says that education should at least either teach you something useful or be fun for the student. You seem to have had both. (I also liked attending university to study math, but high school was a waste of time.)
What Caplan argues against is subsidising boring, tedious education for people who don't want to be there. People who just want their piece of paper at the end.
I’d hate to have college only be for people with means to pay. But I think tuition fee increases have far outpaced inflation.
Of course, it’s a logical response because the neoliberal university saddles students with far too much debt. 90% of what an American university does today is useless waste. Most classes are taught by starving grad students and adjuncts. Running the courses themselves are a rounding error on budgets. Administrators are robbing the kids blind. Education is an afterthought at many institutions.
You don’t have to look very far for ways out of this crisis. Look to European universities and their four-figure semester tuition bills, even for foreigners. Look at community colleges, which don’t have dorms, lazy rivers, hundreds of parasitic administrators who do nothing, or Kafkaesque admissions processes. Look at how much more affordable online courses are, from highly respected public universities, when you excise all the useless overhead.
The administrator or professional management model is more efficient, but relies on the right people in the right roles and admin bloat can occur.
But the students who apply to Harvard and fail to get in probably go to schools that are only a little less prestigious than Harvard, instead. Like, I didn't apply to Harvard, but I did apply to Princeton -- and got rejected. I went to Williams College instead. If my income is similar to a Princeton's student's post-graduation, is that because I did it all on my own, or is it because Williams is also a highly prestigious school that provides similar benefits to Princeton, albeit perhaps a bit less?
Steve Case and George Steinbrenner both managed.
No. People who apply to Harvard and do get in, but decide to go to some other college do as well as those apply to Harvard and do get in and go to Harvard.
The ability to get in to Harvard predicts outcomes, actually going there does not predict outcomes.
Painting higher education with such a broad brush is guaranteed to create an intractable debate. There are students for whom college is a necessary and beneficial step towards a successful career, and students for whom college becomes an albatross of debt with little tangible benefit. Identifying the conditions which give rise to the worst-case outcomes seems like a more worthwhile course of inquiry.
This feels to be a weak argument against on the job training. I'd go so far as to say it is gross negligence in how little folks realize a lot of doing your job is a performance and best taught to someone.
We can easily see this in many entry level jobs. Starting any fast food job, you would expect someone to train you on how to prepare the food and package it for delivery. Sadly, I can't think of many times after that that I was given training. Yes, many on call rotations would have a shadowing period, but often that was less training and more venting from whoever you were shadowing.
Why do we in the software industry think that teaching and learning is so far removed from the jobs that we have? I've been a skeptic of "mentorship" things where the idea seems to be "hope that something comes out of it," but at least there is hope in those ideas. The alternative seems to be to hope that the current styles and ideas will work. With the goal of finding a style and idea that you can hire for and then push all responsibility onto the folks walking in the door that day.
> But while Caplanites readily assert this point to explain why the signal from education can’t easily be replaced by market alternatives, they conspicuously neglect the challenge it poses to their broader assault on schooling’s societal worth: so long as otherwise useless and arbitrary curricula succeed at teaching students to conform, they still contribute to human capital formation.
A counter argument - schools do not teach students to play by the rules (even if they want to), they teach students how to cheat and not get caught. A business doesn't want employees who can hit KPIs by gaming the system, a business wants employees who will earnestly do their jobs in a way that improves their numbers (and unless you're in sales, there's very rarely a good KPI).
The anti-Caplan article then explains that cheating can be rampant. I don't think this is the type of conformity most businesses want (even if they might end up rewarding it).
I agree with the argument against Fadeout though - students might forget everything they learnt at college because they never really need it, but retain what they learnt in high school because they needed to use it in college.
There could be an argument to make college shorter. Would a 2 year degree be any worse than a 4 year degree, assuming the students are aiming for a career where don't need any of the more specialised skills a professional degree would require? Australia does fine with 3 year degrees, and I don't think anyone would advocate for 5 year generalist degrees (with a straight face) so what's so magic about 4 year degrees?
That said, I don't get the argument against fadeout. You lose what you don't use. Pretty much period. Nobody is shocked that they have a hard time jumping back into anything physical after a while; why would mental be any different?
There is a good section in Peak that goes over testing the brain sizes of people testing to be cab drivers in London. Those that pass the test to get the job have measurably bigger parts of the brain that are responsible for navigation. Those that have retired have similarly enlarged sections of their brain, if not as large. This seems to be physical evidence of fadeout in our brains.
On the other hand, university-bound students there do an extra year of (very academically-focused) secondary school, so they arrive more prepared for tertiary education than US students (by and large) are.
I prefer the British system, too, but getting to it in the US would require changing more than just US colleges' time-tables or courses of study.
First, I think our K-12 education fails Americans in a lot of ways. Many classes are taught following some traditional pedagogy that doesn’t provide students with the actually useful skills they need in life. I went to a highly ranked high school, aced all my standardized tests, AP exams, and attended a top college, but I didn’t realize how high school failed me until I struggled in college during my early years. The two examples I think about the most are math and writing.
For math, the only proofs we ever did were in geometry class, using the two column style. We did not explicitly learn how formal logic worked, nor did we learn how to write “paragraph” proofs which are what every professor and math textbook expects you to understand. Every proof was a two column proof because, I assume, that was much easier to grade. However, more importantly, we did not prove _anything_ after geometry class. Because I was “good at math,” I took geometry my freshman year of high school, and took AP Calculus BC by the time I graduated. Despite doing well in those classes, I struggled in both college-level calculus, differential equations, and the “discrete math for computer science” class. If we were asked to prove something, I basically didn’t know how to do it (it had been three years since I even thought about proofs!). If it was a computational problem, I could only do it via memorizing an algorithm because I didn’t have the built up mathematical familiarity to figure things out on the fly.
I spent a summer basically going back to basics on my own when I felt like I had to in order to learn the topics in which I was interested, and on the other end I really felt robbed. I didn’t feel smarter than I was in high school, I just felt like I hadn’t been prepared to do these proofs nor had they motivated why I should care about a lot of the math we learned. Instead of spending months on algorithms for solving integrals, basic analysis would have been both more useful and better explained where these rules were coming from. The curriculum past geometry, containing trigonometry, pre-calculus, Calculus AB, and Calculus BC felt like it could have been hugely compressed (on day 1, we were told the first half of BC would just be a review of AB, and I don’t even remember what we covered in pre-calculus beyond explaining what a function is). My period of self-study ended, I was much more academically successful, had no further problems with math, better appreciated the subject, and overall felt more capable of using math to solve problems.
Second, with writing, we were highly encouraged to just churn out pages. I was writing a 10 page history essay every week. While our teachers were fairly good at getting us to go do research, the only way we could hit the expected page count was to write things in the most drawn out and convoluted way possible. Even then, I still felt like I had a cheat code others didn’t in my class by going to a physical library and checking out academic books on the topic instead of relying on two books and a bunch of internet sources. It felt like I was able to find more relevant information for my arguments than half of my peers. In college, I had to totally relearn how to structure and write an essay because the challenge switched from filling pages to writing the best argument possible in a small number of pages. In this instance, I felt like I got a good basic education in high school of how to analyze history, but a terrible education of how to articulate my analysis.
Ultimately, my feeling is that high school fails us. Success in college and beyond required me unlearning the compilation of bad habits that made me very successful in high school. I’m sure that I had peers who came in and were ready to go right off the bat, but I doubt I was alone in this. In fact, from the amount of people I have seen online complaining about how they should have learned how to file taxes in high school (like they’d retain that information), I feel like I was better off than a lot of people. Theoretically, the liberal arts education our K-12 program aspires to give students should equip graduates with the skills to conduct the basic research (I.e., Google these days), understand the instructions (critical reading), and fill out the appropriate paperwork (basic math). Moreover, many jobs don’t require beyond those skills as a foundation to learn the task-specific skills you learn on the job and not in college anyway. I’ve even known a lawyer or two that maintained a quality high school grad would have no problem with law school.
My conclusion is that, in additional to social signaling, college has become a way to compensate for a poor K-12 education. A lot of your tuition is spent fixing poor skills as opposed to broadening horizons. A college graduate with a decent GPA likely needs far less handholding than an 18 year old fresh out of high school, and that’s highly desirable to companies when hiring.
This ends my slightly drunk, sunburned rant.
I could’ve benefited from a more rigorous education that taught me how to study for mastery. As someone who was considered “gifted” in elementary school who skipped middle school, had a 4.0 GPA in high school, and started university at 16, I’m sorry to say that I didn’t truly learn how to study until graduate school, where doing research requires absolute mastery of the topic being researched. I was never challenged in high school or even at the community college courses I took as a high school student. I was challenged during my undergrad years at Cal Poly and started earning grades I’ve never seen before (the only grade below an A- I earned before Cal Poly was a B+ I earned in sixth grade for math, which saddened me and instilled a dislike for the subject until high school when I had some wonderful math teachers). But I chalked this up not to my study habits, but due to the higher standard of education at the school. I was able to eke by with a > 3.0 GPA that was good enough for admission to a PhD program, but I was unprepared for the even tougher level of rigor, and then family drama pulled the rug under me..., but I digress.
I have no regrets; I have a good job and I know how to learn things much more efficiently than during my student days. But I wish I learned how to truly study during my childhood instead of coasting on my good memory; I’d probably be further in my career had I learned this much earlier.