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

by Bryan Caplan

Anyone reading this book has almost certainly spent over a decade in school. You have vast firsthand knowledge of the education industry. The unfolding argument takes full advantage of your decade-plus of personal experience. Please test all claims about the true nature of education against your own abundant educational experience.

The Ivory Tower routinely ignores the real world. Strangely, though, the disinterest is not mutual. Employers care deeply about professors’ opinions. Not, of course, our opinions about epistemology or immigration. But employers throughout the economy defer to teachers’ opinions when they decide whom to interview, whom to hire, and how much to pay them.

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.

What are modern model workers like? They’re team players. They’re deferential to superiors, but not slavish. They’re congenial toward coworkers but put business first. They dress and groom conservatively. They say nothing remotely racist or sexist, and they stay a mile away from anything construable as sexual harassment. Perhaps most importantly, they know and do what’s expected, even when articulating social norms is difficult or embarrassing. Employers don’t have to tell a modern model worker what’s socially acceptable case by case.

Why do employers seek this package? Because the road to academic success and the road to job success are paved with the same materials. An intelligent worker learns quickly and deeply. A conscientious worker labors until the job’s done right. A conformist worker obeys superiors and cooperates with teammates.

Students struggle to win admission to elite schools. Once they arrive, however, they hunt for professors with low expectations. A professor who wants to fill a lecture hall hands out lots of As and little homework.43 On the popular Rate My Professors website, students grade their professors’ “easiness,” “helpfulness,” “clarity,” and “hotness,” not “marketable skills taught” or “real-world relevance.”

For workers, education’s social benefit equals the observed dropout-engineer gap, times the probability of successfully completing the education, times the fraction of the gap not due to preexisting ability differences, times the fraction of the gap not due to signaling.