(2018-02-16) Why This Economist Thinks Public Education Is Mostly Pointless

Why this economist (Bryan Caplan, badly debated by Sean Illing) thinks public education is mostly pointless

Education (Schooling) is a waste of time and money because so much of the payoff for education isn’t really coming from learning useful job skills. Nor is it coming from students savoring the educational experience. Rather, most of what’s going on is that people are showing off — or, as economists call it, they are “signaling.” They are trying to impress future employers by showing how dedicated they are.

Are we talking about higher education here or are we talking about K-12 education? Or is it all of the above?

I want to say all of the above, but we don’t really have that much data for anything before high school. I focused on high school and beyond. Kindergarten through 8th grade tends to serve as a daycare center for kids while their parents are at work. The educational waste really becomes a problem in high school because at that age kids could be doing something far more productive, like an apprenticeship or a vocational school (VoTech).

if education isn’t actually training you for a job and you don’t actually enjoy it, I’d say it’s wasteful.

I have a whole chapter on these broader social types of education, and you actually say something that almost no one else who makes the argument does, which is that we’ve got to actually look at the empirical evidence and see whether the existing system succeeds.

So the question is, do we actually end up turning students into good citizens? Here, there’s quite a bit of evidence that says college doesn’t transform you much politically, and that it doesn’t cultivate good citizens in the way you described above.

It’s not that college education doesn’t impact people at all — surely it does. But the effects are a lot smaller than people believe.

How do we teach students how to think? I looked at the educational psychology literature very closely and what I found is that they want to believe that it’s possible to teach people how to think or how to learn but, after 100 years of studying it, they have no idea how to do it. They’re almost in despair about it

I think our quality of thinking would stay about the same because I don’t think the current system is improving it, but we would save a lot of resources, and people could start their lives at a much earlier age, which I’d consider a big improvement. There are a ton of resources being wasted right now, resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.

This is why cutting education across the board is the only way to level the playing field, because it changes what the degrees mean and the way employers think about who’s worthy of being interviewed or hired. In a world where no nurses have bachelor’s degrees, hospitals can’t say, “We only interview nurses with bachelor’s degrees.”