Economist Bryan Caplan thinks education is mostly pointless showing off | Hacker News Reader

Economist Bryan Caplan thinks education is mostly pointless showing off

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45 pointsdavizao410 comments

So, regardless of any of this, no-one is saying you should avoid getting formal education; for all sorts of reasons, Education benefits the person getting it. Or at least the fact that you don't learn anything isn't a reason for an individual to avoid it, from an economic perspective.

But Bryan Caplan is trying to get to the difficult policy question of "should we be trying to send everyone to college?"

So I listened to the podcast and most of the empirical evidence for this view boils down to this:

If you compare earnings, the first N years of high school/college are far less valuable to people than the actual event of graduating. This makes a pretty strong argument that in terms of employment, the value of education is signaling, rather than actual learning.

But my biggest complaint here is that even if you accept that most of the employment value of education is signaling (which I do), that does not preclude actually learning something from formal education and the signaling effect may be masking the society-wide return to education.

He's also pretty dismissive of the correlation between math/science scores & GDP, which I think support the model of signaling masking real societal return.

They also very briefly touch on the fact that not all majors are the same, and they even suggest that CS is a difficult major more similar to other Engineering courses than Economics, which is probably arguable ;) But I mention this since our experience in CS may not be a good basis on which to base any thinking on the policy, since most STEM graduates outside of engineering disciplines do not actually work in their field of study.

If the thesis is that education is worthless but the credential extremely valuable, then it actually says that the individual should invest more time and money in education because that is the only way to amass more credential value.

I would also argue that the colleges themselves are not optimizing their value as an investments for their students. It would be really interesting to see what would happen if school admins were compensated based on percentage of a students' future earnings.

I think there is value in school.

The people you meet, the range of ideas you are exposed to, the required work ethic, Ect. These all contribute to the development of the brain.

The podcast goes into how there is very little evidence that for the idea of transfer learning, i.e. learning one task helping other tasks. Being exposed to ideas in your chosen profession is probably useful, but there's basically no evidence for the idea that being well rounded helps after you control for intelligence.

Internet replaced all of the above.

Its just the current mass education system is more of a giant filter test than learning. Actual learning process is deeply personal and transformative. Instead this is a high-stress environment with little actual learning and more of performance show to force feed people with data in factory-like setting.

Those who learn for filter tests and those who learn out of interest for the subject are different people. Turns out the system is geared for the first type of people and their educated knowledge doesn't hold when they lose interest in it, they have to take "refresher courses" and "recertifications" for everything they learn.

Education is what you make of it. Make of that what you will.

This is personal view. Caplan's work is mostly about social view.

What is claimed is that while you can make good use of education, society as a whole loses.

This sounds similar to Peter Thiels views. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzdiWDw4teo )

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