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

by Bryan Caplan

BRYAN: You know my answer: signaling. Education pays primarily by certifying worker quality, not job training. GILLIAN: Maybe now, but that’s all going to change. BRYAN: Have any close relatives in high school? GILLIAN: Sure, my little brother is 17. BRYAN: Would you advise him to skip college in favor of online education? GILLIAN: Not yet. Give it five years. BRYAN: But in your view, isn’t online education already superior to traditional education? GILLIAN: Online education is a better way to learn, but employers still don’t take it seriously. BRYAN: Exactly. And employers don’t take it seriously because the “early adopters” flout social convention. GILLIAN: A transitional problem. Once online education dominates the market, students at traditional schools will be stigmatized as “nonconformists.” BRYAN: Alas, there’s a catch-22. Online education won’t escape the nonconformist stigma until it dominates the market, but it won’t dominate the market until it escapes the nonconformists stigma.

FREDERICK: [taken aback] Well, there are plenty of useless college classes, but isn’t the system reforming itself as we speak? Liberals arts are in steep decline. Modern college students seek out majors that teach job skills. STEM is the future. BRYAN: STEM majors earn moderately more than non-STEM majors, but it’s not because they’re acquiring great job skills. Most STEM majors end up in non-STEM jobs. Signaling is the obvious explanation: earning a STEM degree impresses employers regardless of what concrete skills the job requires.

FREDERICK: If “signaling is the obvious explanation,” why is your view so unpopular? BRYAN: Social Desirability Bias. Education sounds great to liberals and conservatives alike. Blinded by panideological love, people rush to embrace theories that praise education and reject theories that criticize education.

BRYAN: You should expect about a 3% return to starting college. Selfishly speaking, that’s no disaster, but you can do better. Quit school, get a job, and invest your savings in stocks and bonds. JAMES: There’s no guarantee stocks and bonds will pay off. BRYAN: [animated] There’s no guarantee college will pay off, either! Even if you finish, a college degree doesn’t ensure a college job. It’s only a hunting license. ALAN:

DARIA: When I finished college, a bachelor’s degree opened exciting career doors. Now my firm won’t interview a would-be secretary without one. BRYAN: Credential inflation at work. When average education levels rise, employers jack up educational requirements. FREDERICK: Isn’t that because the economy is so much more high-tech? BRYAN: Jobs are a little higher-tech than they used to be, but workers are much more educated than they used to be. When researchers disentangle the “technological change” and “credential inflation” stories, the breakdown is roughly 20% tech, 80% credentialism.

BRYAN: Here’s the real crisis: every year, over a million students who won’t graduate start college. Their failure is foreseeable; high school students with poor grades and low test scores rarely earn B.A.s. Instead of tempting marginal students with cheap credit, we should bluntly warn them that college is stacked against them. DARIA: What do we advise all these “marginal” high school students to do with their lives after graduation? BRYAN: We shouldn’t wait until senior year to advise them. Instead, we should steer academically uninclined kids toward vocational education when they’re 12 or so. Teenage workers may not discover their “calling,” but at least they’ll get used to gainful employment.

DARIA: Like it or not, government support for education is mighty popular. Bluntly rejecting it is no way to win over the public. BRYAN: You’re probably right. I have a whole book on this theme called The Myth of the Rational Voter. Popular policies aren’t good, and good policies aren’t popular. DARIA: You’re cynical about more than education. BRYAN: I prefer “realistic,” but have it your way. Voters favor—and governments adopt—policies that sound good, even if they work poorly. That’s what I call the “politics of Social Desirability Bias.” Cutting education spending sounds awful despite its merits, so it will remain unpopular and untried.

If the party line is so false, why is dissent so scarce? Social Desirability Bias. Calling school a rat race verges on nihilism. When students challenge the party line, teachers and parents get upset. When graduates challenge it, they seem immature. Even those who don’t care to preen don’t want to get stomped. Education’s like John Gotti, the legendary “Teflon Don”: guilty as sin, but everyone’s petrified to testify against it. The Case against Education

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.

Policies don’t triumph and endure because they work well. They triumph and endure because they sound good. “Every child deserves the best education in the world” sounds great to citizens the world over, ruinous social returns notwithstanding. Why fight political psychology? Instead of being a soloist crying for less education, I could join the megachorus crying for better education. Alas, my arguments hold me back. What I’ve shown is that otherworldly education is overrated. The commonsense response is to cut otherworldly education, and spend the savings on something worthwhile—with no presumption that “something” should be another form of education. Education is so integral to modern life we take it for granted. Of course youths have to leap through interminable academic hoops to secure their place in adult society. This is how civilized societies work. My thesis, in a single sentence: civilized societies revolve around education now, but there is a better—indeed more civilized—way. We can switch as soon as adults collectively admit we’re making childish mistakes. We have to admit academic success is a great way to get a good job, but a poor way to learn how to do a good job. If everyone got a college degree, the result would not be great jobs for all, but runaway credential inflation. Trying to spread success with education spreads education but not success. Back in the 1980s, a sign hung in my junior high school’s main office. It read: “Teenagers! If you’re tired of bei...