The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

by Bryan Caplan

The thought of education cuts horrifies most people because “we all benefit from education.” I maintain their horror rests on what logicians call a fallacy of composition—the belief that what is true for a part must also be true for the whole. The classic example: You want a better view at a concert. What can you do? Stand up. Individually, standing works. What happens, though, if everyone copies you? Can everyone see better by standing? No way.

If education boosts income by improving students’ skills, we shouldn’t be puzzled merely by the impractical subjects students have to study. We should be equally puzzled by the eminently practical subjects they don’t have to study. Why don’t educators familiarize students with compensation and job satisfaction in common occupations? Strategies for breaking into various industries? Sectors with rapidly changing employment? Why don’t schools make students spend a full year learning how to write a resume or affect a can-do attitude? Dire sins of omission.

Do students need to understand the market for marriage, the economics of the Mafia, or the self-interested voter hypothesis to be a competent manager, banker, or salesman? No. But because I decide these topics are worth teaching, employers decide students who fail my class aren’t worth interviewing. Abracadabra.

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.

There’s no cheap way to directly measure conformity. But perhaps people with crew cuts are, on average, more conformist than people with mohawks. If so, prudent employers treat hairstyle as a signal of conformity.

Once every worker has a crew cut, you can “top-up” your conformity signal with a gray flannel suit. The rat race stabilizes when impersonating a conformist is, on average, such a chore that rebels stop pretending to be something they’re not.

education also signals conformity—the worker’s grasp of and submission to social expectations.

In 2008–9, over 94,000 students earned their bachelor’s in psychology, but there are only 174,000 practicing psychologists in the country.10 In the same year, over 83,000 students earned their bachelor’s degree in communications. Total jobs for reporters, correspondents, and broadcast news analysts number 54,000.

“No one knows if this trash will come in handy” is a crazy argument for hoarding trash. “No one knows if this knowledge will come in handy” is a crazy argument for hoarding knowledge.

Educators can arguably blame the majority’s disbelief in the Big Bang and evolution on Christian fundamentalism. Yet ignorance of the ABCs of science is nondenominational. Only 7% of adult Americans who deny the Bible’s literal truth answered all twelve questions correctly.

Educational psychologists who specialize in “transfer of learning” have measured the hidden intellectual benefits of education for over a century.33 Their chief discovery: education is narrow. As a rule, students learn only the material you specifically teach them . . . if you’re lucky. In the words of educational psychologists Perkins and Salomon, “Besides just plain forgetting, people commonly fail to marshal what they know effectively in situations outside the classroom or in other classes in different disciplines.

Teachers’ plea that “we’re mediocre at teaching what we measure, but great at teaching what we don’t measure” is comically convenient. When someone insists their product has big, hard-to-see benefits, you should be dubious by default—especially when the easy-to-see benefits are small.

Yes, there’s always the “college molds character compared to sitting alone in your basement playing video games” fallback. The relevant alternative, though, is a full-time job—and compared to that, college is a joke. As long as you avoid rare, demanding paths like engineering and premed in college, you bask in the warmth of a four-year vacation. If that’s “socialization,” it’s dysfunctional socialization.

the market penalty for mismatch is greater for more vocational subjects. Mismatched engineers and computer scientists earn over 20% less; mismatched health professions majors earn almost 30% less. For less vocational majors, in contrast, the mismatch penalty is roughly zero. Mismatched English and foreign language majors earn about 1% less. Mismatched philosophy and religion majors earn 20% extra!

School certifies employability.

Malemployment is not mere “man bites dog” hype designed to terrify English majors’ parents. The amount of education you need to get a job really has risen more than the amount of education you need to do a job.

Casual readers often equate learning plateaus with perfect knowledge, but stagnation and omniscience are not the same.

Some prominent economists find that boosting national education slightly impoverishes countries rather than enriching them.

When we near the pure signaling pole, education becomes an incinerator that burns society’s money, time, and brains in a futile attempt to make everyone look special.

While most things don’t come with visible price tags, you can slap mental price tags on absolutely anything. A cynic isn’t someone who puts a price on the sacred; a cynic is someone who puts a low price on the sacred.

When you compare workers with equal incomes but unequal educations, education has no clear effect on job satisfaction.

Some researchers actually find job satisfaction goes down as education goes up.27 One plausible reason: education raises expectations.

On average, students are painfully bored. The High School Survey of Student Engagement, probably the single best study of how high school students feel about school, reports that 66% of high school students say they’re bored in class every day. Seventeen percent say they’re bored in every class every day. Only 2% claim they’re never bored in class.

No wonder a major Gates Foundation study ranked boredom the most important reason why kids drop out of high school.

Main result: ranking activities from most to least pleasant, work and education are both near the bottom of the list. Yet work has a slight edge. During work hours, people are a little less stressed and sad, equally bored, but feel slightly more pain.37 The biggest difference is happiness. Work happiness averages 3.83—versus 3.55 for education.

Their most amazing discovery is that students who submit lots of applications to high-quality schools enjoy exceptional career success whether or not they attend such schools.

American marriage is a diploma-based caste system.

Incidentally, the marriage market is probably the strongest reason to pay for expensive private schools. Going to Harvard may not get you a better job but almost certainly puts you in an exclusive dating pool for life.

one research team finds that over half of women’s financial payoff for college quality comes via marriage.108 There is nothing counterintuitive about the idea that schools improve your spouse more than they improve you. If you go to Harvard, you’ll be the same person, but you’ll meet the elite.

The professional degree and the Ph.D., in contrast, pay well for most disciplines. Unfortunately, the vast majority of students lack the ability to survive these programs. Most Ph.D. students have spent their entire lives at the top of the class, yet half wander off before they defend their dissertations.

Furthermore, education’s health benefits are—at least in part—status benefits in disguise.13 Correcting for status, anywhere from 20% to 60% of education’s apparent effect on self-reported health vanishes.

Setting aside victimless crimes, the most comprehensive tally of crime’s social cost comes out to $3,728 per American per year in 2011 dollars.52

Critics of population also often complain about “crowding.” But if crowding is so awful, why are urban rents so high? Because crowding has glorious side effects like opportunity, choice, and excitement. Even the birth of a clear-cut “drain on society” can be a net social benefit if, like most of us, the “drain” is glad to be alive.

Counting everything that counts, industrial policy for education has clearly gone too far. The United States—and probably the rest of the world—is overeducated.

The root problem with education is not too little access but too much attendance. The more loans inflate tuition, the less they inflate credentials.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. —Mark Twain

When I explain the centrality of signaling, audiences often think I’m endorsing the technophiles’ story. This utterly misunderstands me. Education is not a bubble, but stable waste. As long as traditional education receives hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year, the status quo will stand. Online education will slowly carve out a niche, but that is all.

Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable price. What they don’t offer are official college degrees, the kind that can get you a job. And that, it turns out, is mostly what college students are paying for.

The whole U.S. employs only 129,000 writers, 64,000 translators, and 3,800 historians.

Children with joy in their hearts don’t belong in gray workshops, toiling all day long, cogs in the machine. They’re kids, not robots! Well, unless the gray workshop is called a “school” and the cogs earn zero wages.

The traditional route is painless for educators: teach your students whatever your teachers taught you. The vocational route is painful for educators: to follow it, we must keep tabs on student aptitudes and the job market. So be it. To prepare youths for plausible futures, educators must feel the pain.

Americans spend 0.2% of their income on all reading materials, barely more than $100 per family per year.

By and large, literature teachers fail to “get through” to their captive audiences: they rarely spark love of reading, much less love of the genres they urge their students to admire.

In the data, the well-educated are only microscopically more liberal. In the General Social Survey, people place themselves on a seven-step scale, where 1 is “extremely liberal,” 4 is “moderate,” and 7 is “extremely conservative.” An extra year of education seems to make people .014 steps more liberal.27 Taken literally, over seventy years of education are required to shift ideology a single step.

Stereotypes say the well-educated are less religious, but this is a half-truth. The well-educated are less religious theologically. As education goes up, faith in God and the literal truth of the Bible recedes. Yet the well-educated are more religious sociologically. As education goes up, so do church membership and church attendance. These are well-established patterns, at least in the United States.

Even though social class fully explains education’s effects on marriage and divorce, social class explains none of education’s effect on fertility.64 Dropouts who climb into the upper class still breed like dropouts; Ph.D.s who stumble into the lower class still breed like Ph.D.s.

Most of the items on the academic tasting menu have the same stale flavor—unsurprising since teachers typically teach whatever they were taught. When schools decry “narrow-mindedness,” their real goal is to replace students’ narrowness with their own.

“broadening horizons” is a slogan educators use to squelch students’ sensible doubts. If educators really wanted to broaden students’ horizons, curricula would give students a tour of what the world has to offer—not a tour of what educators were forced to learn when they were students.