Like the students in Jared Lucas’s class, I have been thinking a lot about Bryan Caplan’s insights on schooling in The Case Against Education. I got to about page 120 and then my plane landed, but I read it the way I read every book I write a review on: every page and every footnote.
And my reaction to it is similar to, though less extreme than, the way Robert E. Lucas thinks about economic growth:
Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what, exactly? If not, what is it about the “nature of India” that makes it so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else. (Lucas 1988, p. 5; italics in original)
Once I’ve started thinking about Bryan’s insights, I realize that they explain so much: why people go to school despite forgetting almost everything they learn and why they celebrate when a professor cancels a class they’ve paid for, to name two.
Bryan’s book also caused me to look back on various interactions I’ve had with young people deciding whether to go to college. One such incident comes to mind.
For about 2 decades, my daughter and I took a father/daughter trip every summer. When she was in her mid-teens, the trip we usually took was to go rafting on the American River in California. One particular time in the late 1990s we got talking to the rafting guide, who had just finished high school and was planning to go on to college. He told me that someone from the Silicon Valley had been a customer a week earlier and had been so impressed by him that he asked the young man about his computer skills. Whatever the 18-year old answered must have worked because the Silicon Valley guy told him that if he scrapped his plans for college, he could work at the man’s firm in Silicon Valley for $60K a year.
The young man told me he found it tempting and that, because I was a college professor, he would value my advice. I said “Take the job. Most people go to college to get a job like that and you can go directly to the job and can skip 4 years of living like an undergrad and piling up debt.”
One other customer in the raft, a woman about my age, piped up, “I disagree. Go to college and get the degree and you’ll have something to fall back on.”
I responded, “If he gets the job and it works out, his income could rise by 50% over 5 years and he could save a lot of money. Then if he loses the job and can’t find another one, he can ‘fall back’ on going to college.”
I don’t know what the young man did.
My friend David Seltzer shared a more extreme story that makes the same point. This one is about the NBA and the NCAA:
[Name deleted] is upset with the one and done policy the NCAA has allowed for basketball players. His argument: those players are there for an EDUCATION. His raised voice, not mine. My point, if a degreed education raises one’s earnings over a working life, then one-and-done sends a player to the NBA with a first year salary of $900k. If he delays, his opportunity cost is at least the first year and the risk of injury. I suspect the player will barely recover the foregone earnings. I pointed out that Gates and Zuckerberg were two-and-done at Harvard, no less, and Jobs left Reed College after six months. Finally, I don’t know of any college grads coming out of “top tier” universities whose starting salaries approach 900k.
READER COMMENTS
Nick
Mar 27 2019 at 9:50pm
I wrote this on Dr Caplan’s article but seems relevant here as well.
Consider it with a grain of salt, I’m no economist, but here’s my takeaway about the education system. I’m a professional Software Engineer with a graduate degree in Engineering.
It has been my observation that even the “real” degrees like Computer Science are filled with unnecessary material that drags an average student through eight whole semesters. The most necessary components, programming, algorithms, data structures and databases are covered fairly early in the program and most of the advanced material is mostly unnecessary and can be learned on the job. The material covered is not wholly useless, but it’s not terribly useful for the average professional programmer either. That said, the degrees usually leave the student wanting in fairly important skills like Coding practices, System Design, Version Controlling, Project Management, current technologies and others. Modern Software Engineering projects would startle a new graduate when he encounters them for the first time. I was, and every single friend of mine who studied CS with me was.
I think the signalling model is largely true, if not completely. If I’m cut some slack, I would insinuate that the proponents of Human Capital model are dissatisfied of the human being. I would go so far as to claim that they believe that humans need to be perfected into “ideal” and “responsible” participants in the “democratic procedure” instead of being free to mind their own business. Is this tendency totalitarian? I wouldn’t go so far, but it’s not a delight either.
Matthias Görgens
Mar 28 2019 at 5:36am
For software, most people would probably benefit more from eg a one year course of the basics. Then start work and take one day a week or so studying more advanced subjects, ideally as they come up at the job.
A lot of more advanced topics in computing are surpringly applicable, if you can recognize the opportunities.
Roger Sweeny
Mar 28 2019 at 1:54pm
<i>The most necessary components … are covered fairly early in the program and most of the advanced material is mostly unnecessary and can be learned on the job.</i>
The same has been said for law school, sometimes by law professors, sometimes even in published articles. Will three years be reduced to two? Would a car company willingly give up one third of its revenue?
Cliff
Mar 29 2019 at 1:39am
Law is an interesting case because you are actually paid by your client to learn on the job. No one expects you to know all the law- there’s too much of it. So you do research on what the law is and the client pays you for it. So yes, law school is pretty wasteful. You need to learn how to read and understand and research the law, and how to explain it persuasively in a brief. But a lot of law school is about learning the law itself, which is unnecessary beyond some background basics.
Alan Goldhammer
Mar 28 2019 at 12:54pm
I am not a fan of Professor Caplan’s book and the reasons are detailed here. David’s post is interesting but narrowly focused with two examples that fall into ‘The Black Swan” category. Software programing can be self taught and there are lots of folks who can make an OK living. App development is not going to get you the riches that Gates got when he developed DOS and there are as many tech failures as there are successes so one needs to choose carefully. Look at finance which is heavily dominated by quant PhD math and physics people these days. Do you think a self taught programmer will get his/her foot in the door of one of the big hedge funds?
The basketball player analogy, while intriguing, ignores the vast number of players who from an early age think they will play in the NBA. Just looking at Division 1 schools there are approximately 1450 players on “scholarship” and out of that how many fall into the $900K/year category (let’s ignore the number of foreign born/trained players who are drafted by NBA teams without having attended a US college)? The odds are way against this (it’s even stacked against one and done players unless they are hugely talented). The NBA along with the NFL are brilliant, relying on colleges to train athletes for employment without having to contribute anything. At least high school baseball players can still sign a professional contract without having to go to college, but then baseball teams spend a lot of money on the minor league training system that football and basketball (the effectiveness of the NBA Dev League is still unknown).
robc
Mar 28 2019 at 5:02pm
I am surprised more 1 and done type players don’t follow what Brandon Jennings did. Instead of 1 year in college, he played 1 year of pro ball in Italy before being drafted #10 overall.
$1.65 million for that year seems a safer bet than a year of college ball.
He had the $1.65M to pay for college if he was injured.
David Seltzer
Mar 28 2019 at 6:45pm
YUP!!
David Seltzer
Mar 28 2019 at 6:43pm
Fair point Alan. The argument for the one and done was simply that a player stay in school instead of capitalizing or at least trying to capitalize on a $900k earnings capture. As for graduating with a reasonable education, there is some evidence Black male athletes graduate at lower rates than other student-athletes, Black non-athletes and undergrads in general. If the opportunity to play in the NBA after a year in school comes calling, well it seems reasonable they take it.
Mark Brophy
Mar 28 2019 at 11:03pm
A self-taught programmer won’t get a job a big hedge fund or any other job requiring heavy math usage but most other programming jobs, the vast majority, are suitable.
Mark Z
Mar 29 2019 at 2:04am
I read your critique of Bryan’s book and it seems like mostly personal anecdotes and ad hominems.
With respect to David’s post, I think David may well be wrong here, but that doesn’t mean Bryan isn’t right (and I think he is). Spending money on higher education, from the individual’s standpoint, is often worth it precisely because of its signaling value – but it not worth it from ‘society’s’ standpoint. You remark in your critique that you don’t think the question of whether education’s value is primarily in signaling matters because even if it is signaling, that just means there are ‘systemic problems’ in the education system, and we should presumably focus on fixing them rather than dismantling. But there’s an obvious problem here: you assume that there is a cost-efficient way for the state to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on education, and we just haven’t found it. When one fails to successfully perform a task repeatedly, one ought to consider the possibility that there is no way (or no way that’s worth it) to perform that task, rather than committing to trying new approaches ad infinitam. When one considers that, if Bryan is right about signaling, a myriad of institutions the world over have converged on a similar set of failing strategies, it seems rather likely that it’s because there is no way for institutions to do what you want them to do, or no way that would be worth the expense.
On a second point, you criticize Bryan’s dismissal of liberal arts education. Personally, I love history, the fine arts, and literature, and I agree with Bryan entirely. I doubt we should devote any public funding whatsoever to such topics. This is for two reasons: 1) there’s no reason a few major institutions should decide what constitutes ‘culture’, what’s a worthwhile expenditure of time or money. This idea that we are inducing some ‘spiritual’ growth by making students read a hallowed set of books strikes me as a secular religion of sorts. Having the state make students (or pay students to) read Dostoevsky because I think he’s profound is not qualitatively different from forcing them to read the bible because I think it’s profound. 2) I don’t think sponsoring the learning of these disciplines makes people better people, or more attuned to truth, and not doing so doesn’t turn them into mindless drones. Being made to read Jane Austen when you’d rather read graphic novels does little beyond reducing one’s enjoyment of one’s time and making one better able to grasp some high cultural idioms (which are only high cultural idioms because everyone else had to read Jane Austen too, whether they wanted to or not).
David Henderson
Mar 29 2019 at 9:21am
Alan,
You missed my point, and it probably has to do with the fact that you think I’m generalizing from a few examples. I’m not.
I agree with you that to get a foot in the door with a lot of jobs, you need to get a degree. Indeed, that’s Bryan Caplan’s point.
My point is narrower and that’s why I chose the rafting guide example. He not only got his foot in the door but also was offered a well-paying job without going to college.
The reason I said that Bryan’s book has made me look at a lot of things in a new way is that it has freed me from thinking about college the way I thought about it. I loved college and I was probably in the 5 or 10 percent who benefited from it not just in the job I got but also from what I learned. But since most people who want to finish college want to do so so that they can get a job, I’ve started thinking more about how they can get the job without college. I was not generalizing, as you seem to think, about college basketball players. I was discussing, with what I understood to be David Seltzer’s example, about an actual human being who was given a chance to make $900K by skipping college. I’m assuming he was talking about an actual case.
Arthur
Apr 1 2019 at 7:15pm
College can provide training and can certainly be helpful but experience is what matters.
I recall a man showing up to a job interview who brought along a project he had personally built. This wasn’t a diploma but an actual success. He was hired on the spot.
Many jobs require a college degree. Accountants need five years of college – for what? A school teacher takes a regimented four-year course and only spends 12-1 semester in a class. Is it any wonder our schools are so poor?
As the cost of college has far outstripped the value it provides I think more people will continue to eschew college and gravitate towards other forms of training and development of experience. Businesses that can hire a reasonably trained individual at a lower price will be all too willing to take that chance as they will be forming them to their business in the first place.
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