I received two compelling emails from Northwestern University student Davis Parks, who recently read my Case Against Education. Reprinted with his bold permission.
Email #1
Dear Professor Caplan,
I hope this email finds you well in the new year! I may not have a PhD—or even a BA as of now—which makes my opinion irrelevant to academics, but I found your book to be a soberingly accurate depiction of my experience with the education system. I was devastated by the “Afterward” to see that critics had dismissed all the research in favor of optimism that defies all common sense.
As a student at Northwestern University who’s finished a triple major in econ, stats and math but can’t graduate, I’ve found myself disenchanted with (and frankly insulted by) the education system. I’ve finished all the relevant coursework in 7 quarters (2 1/3 years), but they have an arbitrary 9 quarter requirement that “is an important component of that undergraduate experience” according to the Provost (that sounds like an admission that signaling is more important than academic credentials!). When my labor economics professor mentioned your work in class, I joked that I should get your book after I saw its title. My dad took that seriously and put it under the Christmas tree.
I wanted to personally thank you for writing “The Case Against Education.” I’ve found it comforting to know that I’m not alone in this belief. Your position is so similar to the one I’ve developed that, while reading your book, I felt like someone had transcribed and compiled all my futile Facebook comments from the past 6 months. It’s relieving to know that I’m not (that) crazy and to know that there’s at least one academic out there willing to admit what seems obvious to those who aren’t blinded by the glow of the ivory tower.
I initially wrote out a super long email detailing my experience growing up in the first generation to have technology embedded in their education. I thought my own experience would vindicate your personal stance on the wonders of instant-access education for the “eager student” who wants to learn. But I’ll save that because I’m sure you’re busy in preparation for the next semester.
Thank you again for your work! You’ve given me great inspiration in the past week.
Take care,
Davis Parks
Email #2
Thank you for replying! I’ll have to stop by George Mason if I’m ever out visiting my uncle in Manassas!
Feel free to use anything I said. There’s no need to anonymize—I’ve gotten to the point where it’s not worth hiding my beliefs to fit in.
For a little context, I loved class in high school, but I skipped several grades of math by watching lectures on YouTube. As you said, we’re at a point where anyone who wants to learn can learn. After years of being told by teachers to go into engineering, I thankfully realized I’m interested in statistics far more than hard science. That led to me taking the first actuary exam in high school, getting the top score. But of course, I was unable to get an internship because employers love college credentials.
Fast forward to 2020 and NU suspended in-person classes for four consecutive quarters. I took the time to take extra classes thinking they’d let me graduate early given that the school offered an inferior product for over a year. But as I said, they deem the “college experience” to be an important part of the diploma. It’s all absurd because I only need two classes per quarter and I can even take one pass/fail (ahem, I mean “pass/not pass”) and fail it without impacting my GPA. Pragmatically, I have no reason to not find full-time employment. The “college experience” does have a $10k+ opportunity cost per quarter after all.
It prompts the question: what do supporters of higher education think I’m getting out of this? It’s clearly not capital gains, since I already took the classes necessary to get a triple major. It’s clearly not the college experience, since the cost/benefit analysis makes employment more beneficial for me than being on campus. It’s clearly not nourishment of the soul, since I’m dedicated enough to learn things that interest me from the internet or even a book like yours.
Ironically, college only ever made me “hate” math because it mutated math from fun problem solving to 20 hours of tedious proofs per week. Even my labor econ professor decided to give us exams worth 84% of the grade with multiple choice questions like, “Was the ratio of earnings of latina women to white women higher or lower in 1980 than in 2010?” I was a bit jealous of your class when you mentioned that your labor econ exams are open notes. I’m not sure what I accomplished by memorizing those random facts only to have forgotten them in the past two weeks. Instead of rehashing random stats I learned in class, I spent my time watching lawyers on YouTube and listening to oral arguments from SCOTUS because law is one of my few remaining interests that hasn’t been polluted by academia. It’s becoming a running joke that I should try to pass the bar exam without going to law school. What can you possibly get from a classroom in today’s world that you can’t get online for cheaper and better quality?
Thank you again for replying! No professor at my school will admit how ridiculous it is that I have to pay for classes I have no incentive to attend. I’m desperately hoping that my generation is the one that finally says enough is enough.
Best,
Davis Parks
READER COMMENTS
Austin Middleton
Jan 6 2022 at 10:35am
David,
Having sat for more than one of his courses, I can attest that Caplan conducting open-note exams is less of a mercy and more of a threat.
😀
David Henderson
Jan 6 2022 at 10:38am
Very impressive. Thanks for posting.
zeke5123
Jan 6 2022 at 11:06am
One of the biggest differences between law school and college was grading. In college, there was always numerous busy work + exams + papers. Functionally, if you just tried hard you were assured a B / B+. If you actually learned, even at a relatively basic level, the material and put forth some effort, then you’d easily get an A-/A.
So, the grading system was all geared towards demonstrating basic understanding and rewarding hard work (e.g., closed notes exams).
Contrast with law school where there was a lot of assigned reading, but no papers, etc. Instead, there was always a single exam at the end of the semester that was open notes. To do well, you needed to (i) write in an organized fashion, (ii) question the facts, (iii) understand the basic law, and (iv) be able to apply the facts (or questions about the facts) to the law. This format rewarded understanding over merely working hard.
William Kiely
Jan 6 2022 at 11:25am
Not to detract from Davis Parks’ achievements, but he may be interested in knowing that the philospher Nick Bostrom (author of Superintelligence, Astronomical Waste, The Simulation Argument, The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, and other highly influential works) obtained four undergraduate degrees in three years (or so) according to his CV:
“1992 – 1994:
BA in Philosophy, Mathematics, Mathematical Logic, Artificial Intelligence
Undergraduate performance set national record in Sweden (AFAIK).”
Presumably Davis knows best whether pursuing a fourth degree is worth the signaling value for him at this point. I don’t know whether it was important to Bostrom’s success in his career.
Davis Parks
Jan 6 2022 at 12:32pm
There’s actually an involved reason for not pursuing more education which I didn’t get into here.
As I alluded, I’ve been studying to become an actuary which is a field where you have to study for and pass 10 exams. I passed 2 before college but between covid shutdowns and increased class work, I never got to the 3rd.
I asked my employer from an internship if I should use the time to pursue a masters. He informed me that not only is further education useless, but it looks bad to employers because they think you’re avoiding the actuary exams.
I heavily debated tacking on a philosophy major or minor (or something along those lines). But it came down to, it’s much more beneficial to take the third exam this March and treat that as an extra class.
When you do the cost/benefit analysis, there’s no career incentive to take more college classes than you have to which is why I’m fed up. The system is structured to get you more to the “on-campus experience” yet it incentivizes the opposite. You’re more or less paying to not develop important skills.
Lillian T
Jan 6 2022 at 4:56pm
I empathize with this, though as a double languages major I can’t say my signals are as strong! I picked my majors because I speak both relatively well – took two years worth of community college courses in high school, transferred in, and with a course overload am graduating in 3 semesters total… I thought the lectures about “slowing down to enjoy life” would end in high school, but they followed me to university! If Northwestern is anything like UVA, the ‘college experience’ is an unenviable mix of alcoholism and depravity propped up by absurd endowments.
Definitely agree that you’re incentivized not to learn. As soon as grades are on the line, I switch to obsessive GPA calculation mode. Any learning I do has to have a payoff within the signaling game or it just isn’t worth it.
Davis Parks
Jan 6 2022 at 6:00pm
You make a great point about the college experience being filled with depravity. I’ve had the same experience where I’ve skipped out on parties my friends went to out of moral convictions about that life style. It’s a bit ironic that college incentivizes you to spend time around drunk people over taking additional classes as I did. It’s just another thing that makes you question their intentions with respect to the betterment of the students.
Dylan
Jan 6 2022 at 6:39pm
Learning how to spend time around drunk people is a pretty important skill, arguably more important than half of the classes you take in university, and the skill tends to last longer than classroom knowledge.
john hare
Jan 7 2022 at 4:17am
Mumble decades ago I was construction superintendent in a college town for a few months. Many of us quite enjoyed the “depravity” of young people doing the college experience. I don’t discuss certain aspects of the college experience with my granddaughters.
Alex
Jan 7 2022 at 9:30am
Davis, have you considered getting into machine learning? Someone with your stats background should be able to pick things up very quickly, and there are an unbelievable number of opportunities to build cool, impactful things.
Google has a pretty good “crash course” on the nuts and bolts of getting things running: https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course
I’m certainly not disparaging the actuarial career track – just pointing out that there are incredible opportunities in ML for someone with your skills and hustle. After getting a bit of practical experience, you would be in a great place to hack together some MVPs, apply to Y Combinator, and try your hand at a startup.
I think you’d also find that “startup culture” (which is not limited to the Silicon Valley area) is very friendly to your thinking on education and credentialism.
Jerry Parks
Jan 6 2022 at 12:35pm
Davis very seriously considered something like this–except he was looking at getting a masters. NU has a combo undergrad/grad Econ program. He could have worked the courses such that he would have completed all his Econ grad classes by the end of third year (9 quarters). The problem with this path is the university has a 12-quarter minimum requirement for this program.
nobody.really
Jan 7 2022 at 12:10am
[insert pun about “giving him the third degree” here]
astew
Jan 6 2022 at 11:27am
If they were serious about only graduating people that had the proper undergrad experience they would realize that suddenly transitioning to remote classes for a whole year also deprived students of the proper undergrad experience and they wouldn’t have let anyone graduate last year.
William Kiely
Jan 6 2022 at 11:39am
Perhaps of more relevance to Davis Parks than Nick Bostrom due to the majors: Leopold Aschenbrenner double-majored in Mathematics-Statistics and Economics, graduating from Columbia University as Valedictorian in 2021.
Jose Pablo
Jan 6 2022 at 1:25pm
Davis hit the nail on the head: I was impressed by The Case Against Education by how accurately describes my (and my friend’s) experience in college (and I am an engineer! I can’t imagine how precisely describes the experience of a graduate in “politics” or “Japanese philology”!).
I had forgotten the few things I learnt by the end of the summer of my senior year.
Fortunately, never ever in my professional life missed one of that few.
The main goal of education is providing employment to a lot of otherwise unemployable people. And, as Leonard Cohen, would say: Everybody Knows
Brian
Jan 6 2022 at 2:47pm
Davis,
Read Wickard v Filburn, Gonzalez v Raich, Buck v Bell and/or Helvering v Davis before you give the law too much credit? Legal sophistry is perhaps what spawned the idiocy you have encountered in the education system?
Best,
Brian Tracey
Davis
Jan 7 2022 at 8:57pm
Oh for sure. Complaining about bad legal sophistry is part of the fun of it all!
All I mean is that I haven’t had to do 20-40 hours of law homework per week the same way I had to do 20-40 hours of math homework per week all of last year (in addition to 20 hours of all other homework per week). Tedious assignments kill any joy you have for a subject.
Phil H
Jan 6 2022 at 8:05pm
Here is the standard response, which I believe has some force:
The educational policies of every institution have to be made to serve the greatest possible number of students. Inevitably that means that students who are atypical will run up against frustrating restrictions. The fact that Davis Parks has encountered frustrations is not necessarily a reason to think the university is badly calibrated (though it does offer an interesting lens for analysing university policies).
To Parks, I would gently suggest that actually, you’ve had a great time at university (for you) because of Covid, and the fact that the entire university isn’t perfectly geared to your needs shouldn’t leave you upset. It’s a slightly self-centered argument. You’ve already found lots of enterprising solutions to get around the frustrations, so you’re definitely winning thus far.
To Caplan/commenters here: Northwestern is a private university. This person bought a product that he is not, on reflection, perfectly happy with. This is how markets work! There is simply no libertarian angle here.
Jose Pablo
Jan 7 2022 at 11:00am
“This person bought a product that he is not, on reflection, perfectly happy with”
The problem is that the marketing of this product was/is extremely missleading, as Davis’ experience shows and Caplan book points out.
He thouhgt he was buying “human capital” that was going to be useful in the marketplace. He realized he was buying “signaling” and “rubber stamping” and saw clearly that the needs and requirements to get those two are quite different.
I can understand his frustration with the scam (private or public).
Davis Parks
Jan 7 2022 at 9:17pm
I admit their is an element of hypocrisy in my stance because I admittedly benefited from the online learning (for the reasons you say). That said, I still hold my two objections out of principle.
The first is the response of the university. They offered a product (three years of on-campus education) and they didn’t deliver it. They then deflect all the costs to the students. Very few of the restrictions were in response to state law. The school willingly chose to offer an inferior product and pass the burden onto the consumers. They could have easily remedied this for me by letting me graduate at no personal expense. In fact, it would have been economically beneficial for them to replace me with an eager full time student who would otherwise be rejected. This is a net loss for everyone involved with an easy remedy.
The second is the role of the government in education. Jose’s being charitable to me by calling this a scam. I feel scammed, but I admit I could have known better. The issue I have is that the government has given the schools, even private ones, monopolistic power. The argument, “There is simply no libertarian angle here,” isn’t true in my view. The libertarian angle is that the government needs to get out of the business of funding college. One of Caplan’s points in “Case Against Education” is that the federal education loans have an immense implicit tax on Americans. By making college “affordable,” they’ve more or less given established colleges a market edge over potential competitors.
I understand the belief that colleges are set up to “serve the greatest possible number of students.” But I don’t think that’s true. What is the practical benefit of a 9 quarter requirement for the students? This goes to Caplan’s view on signaling. If college were only about capital, you would graduate based upon your level of capital. But how does enrollment increase capital? It doesn’t force you to go to classes. The only thing it does is force you to pay the college more money.
This may be unpopular on a libertarian page, but I’m actually in favor of the government regulating businesses in situations with market inefficiencies. I could get behind regulations on graduation requirements to make college more reasonable. But the federal government should at the very least stop handing out loans.
Phil H
Jan 8 2022 at 10:35pm
That’s a fair response! Thank you for sharing your experiences with everyone. Not easy to have random strangers on the internet picking over your arguments…
steve
Jan 6 2022 at 10:46pm
Looks to me like Parks has had a great learning experience at a young age. Read the details on what you are agreeing to do. The school has likely calculated that they do best financially if students put in at least 9 quarters. Less turnover costs for them. Learn to read what you sign. It will do you well in the future. (After 3 years in the Navy I didnt think I was going to get a lot more out of it, but I signed a 4 year contract. I had to honor that.)
Steve
Davis
Jan 7 2022 at 9:23pm
Oh yes, I fully agree with this.
I think people misunderstand me as saying I think I deserve to be accommodated. I don’t think that. I think I could be accommodated if the school cared about its students. The real lesson I’ve really learned is that “progressive” schools talking about economic equity and the woes of capitalism and talking about being there to help students succeed… they’re full of BS. So I’m going to scream about this until people realize it and stop falling for the lie that I fell for.
Christina
Jan 7 2022 at 7:14am
Professor Caplan, I am now especially curious as to why you maintained a traditional timetable for your elder sons’ high school graduation, instead of graduating them early like so many homeschoolers do.
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