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The disconnect between curriculum and job market has a banal explanation: educators teach what they know—and most have as little firsthand knowledge of the modern workplace as I do. Yet this merely amplifies the puzzle. If schools boost students’ income by teaching useful job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? How are educators supposed to foster our students’ ability to do the countless jobs we can’t do ourselves?
The puzzle is the weak tie between curriculum and labor market combined with the strong tie between educational success and professional success. The way our education system transforms students into paid workers seems like magic. Governments delegate vast power to a caste of Ivory Tower academics. The caste wields its power as expected: Every child has to study teachers’ pet subjects. Educators then rank students on their mastery of the material. Students rapidly forget most of what they learn because “they’ll never need to know it again.” Employers are free to discount or disregard the Ivory
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How then do my classes make my students more employable? I can’t teach what I don’t know, and I don’t know how to do the jobs most of my students are going to have. Few professors do.
The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you reveal by mastering them.
the sheer duration of education doesn’t refute signaling. Since easy-to-fake traits like conscientiousness and conformity are valuable, education has to take years. Signaling is a war of attrition. Giving up early is surrender. The longer you endure, the stronger you look. The victors—the people who get the best jobs—are the last students standing.
Newsweek magazine gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test.25 Thirty-eight percent scored too low to become citizens of their own country.
Teachers’ plea that “we’re mediocre at teaching what we measure, but great at teaching what we don’t measure” is comically convenient.
school inculcates many attitudes that, regardless of their moral worth, impede on-the-job success.
If you’re preparing kids for their adult roles, a year of work experience instills more suitable discipline and socialization than a year of school.
In percentage terms, the average study finds graduation year is worth 3.4 regular years. College graduation has a huge spike: senior year of college pays over twice as much as freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined.4 In percentage terms, the average study finds graduation year is worth 6.7 regular years.
Over 60% of the education premium turns out to be a sheepskin effect.
Does the labor market reward workers for education they do not use? Human capital says no; signaling says yes.
Signaling is the only theory that explains the totality of these otherwise baffling facts. In our society, education is a seal of approval. Employers know it. Workers know it. As seals proliferate, workers need extra seals to upstage the competition. You’ll never apply most of what you study, but so what?
