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

by Bryan Caplan

How stuck are we? Given the near-trillion dollars government annually heaps on the status quo, we’re nearly immobilized. Never-ending cosmetic changes create the illusion of fluidity. Schools adopt a new history textbook or add Mandarin to the course catalog. They toy with technology. Instead of playing on their phones in class while the professor lectures, college students can play on their phones in their dorm rooms while the professor streams the lectures over the Internet. Yet no matter how many cosmetic changes accumulate, the essence of school endures: students spend over a decade learning piles of dull content they won’t use after graduation. There is a way to sever this Gordian knot: slash government subsidies. This won’t make classes relevant but will lead students to spend fewer years sitting in classrooms. Since they’re not learning much of use, the overarching effect will not be “deskilling” but credential deflation. Though this unprecedented reversal sounds like social science fiction, the logic is clear: the less education applicants have, the less applicants need to convince employers they’re worth hiring.