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

by Bryan Caplan

Learning doesn’t have to be useful. Learning doesn’t have to be inspirational. When learning is neither useful nor inspirational, though, how can we call it anything but wasteful?

When this book criticizes human capital stories, it does not reject the view that schools build some human capital. It rejects “human capital purism”—the view that (a) virtually all education teaches useful job skills and (b) these job skills are virtually the sole reason why education pays off in the labor market.

For a single individual, education pays. On this point, the standard “education as skill creation” and the “education as signaling” theories agree. The theories make different predictions, however, about what happens if average education levels decline. If education is all skill creation, a fall in average education saps our skills, impoverishing the world. If education is all signaling, however, a fall in average education leaves our skills—and the wealth of the world—unchanged. In fact, cutbacks enrich the world by conserving valuable time and resources.

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.

It is precisely because education is so affordable that the labor market expects us to possess so much. Without the subsidies, you would no longer need the education you can no longer afford.

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.

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

Now we’re up to three broad traits that education signals: intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity.

Education signals a package of socially desirable strengths. People at the top of their class usually have the trifecta: intelligent, conscientious, and conformist.

Higher education is the only product where the consumer tries to get as little out of it as possible.

After six years in the famous Milwaukee Project, experimental subjects’ IQs were 32 points higher than controls’. By age fourteen, this advantage had declined to 10 points.83 In the Perry Preschool program, experimental subjects gained 13 points of IQ, but all this vanished by age 8.84 Head Start raises preschoolers’ IQs by a few points, but gains disappear by the end of kindergarten.

American employers rely on educational credentials rather than IQ tests because IQ tests are effectively illegal.

I don’t hate education. Rather I love education too much to accept our Orwellian substitute. What’s Orwellian about the status quo? Most fundamentally, the idea of compulsory enlightenment. Educators routinely defend compulsion on the ground that few students want to explore ideas and culture. They’re right about the students’ tastes but forget a deeper truth: intrinsically valuable education requires eager students. Mandatory study of ideas and culture spoils the journey.