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

by Bryan Caplan

Almost every politician vows to spend more on education. As an insider, I can’t help gasping, “Why? You want us to waste even more?”

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.

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

Signaling shouldn’t take years. Another top antisignaling talking point: education drags on for years, which “doesn’t make sense.”

Finally, almost no one pursues a career in history or social studies—except teachers of history and social studies.

Historians, unsurprisingly, have the bleakest prospects of all. There were over 34,000 newly minted history graduates—and only 3,500 working historians in the entire country.

My shortcut is easy to implement. Surveys of adults’ knowledge of reading, math, history, civics, science, and foreign languages are already on the shelf. The results are stark: Basic literacy and numeracy are virtually the only book learning most American adults possess.

While the average American spends years and years studying other subjects, they recall next to nothing about them. If schools teach us everything we know about history, civics, science, and foreign languages, their achievement is pitiful.

The ignorance revealed by the NAAL is numbing. Only modest majorities are Intermediate or Proficient on the prose and document tests. Under half are Intermediate or Proficient on the quantitative test. Reviewing specific questions underscores the severity of the ignorance. Barely half know that saving $.05 per gallon on 140 gallons of oil equals $7.00. Thirty-five percent of Americans can’t correctly enter a name and address on a Certified Mail form—with no points off for misspelling!20 Schools do far less to cure illiteracy and innumeracy than we’d like to think.

Newsweek magazine gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test.25 Thirty-eight percent scored too low to become citizens of their own country.

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.31 Given the ease of the questions, we shouldn’t conclude Americans’ knowledge of science is mediocre. We should conclude Americans’ knowledge of science is virtually nonexistent.

The results were shocking: Of the several hundred students tested, many of whom had taken more than six years of laboratory science in high school and college and advanced mathematics through calculus, almost none demonstrated even a semblance of acceptable methodological reasoning about everyday-life events described in ordinary newspaper and magazine articles.

Applying abstract math to concrete physics comes much more naturally than generalizing from concrete physics to abstract math. More impressively, studying statistics enhances statistical reasoning on real-life questions outside the classroom.

Reformers tend to see summer learning loss as an argument for year-round school. If summer makes students stupid, let’s abolish summer. The flaw in their thinking: everyone graduates eventually. Once you graduate, you’re no longer in school—and learning loss kicks in. To quote “Tiger Mother” Amy Chua, “Every day you don’t practice is a day that you’re getting worse.”88

If you’re preparing kids for their adult roles, a year of work experience instills more suitable discipline and socialization than a year of school.

Almost 30% of U.S. workers need a government license to legally do their jobs.63 The most obvious effect of licensing is to raise wages by restricting competition. While payoffs vary from job to job, the average license raises income by 10–15%.64

Thanks to the landmark 1971 Griggs vs. Duke Power case, later codified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act, anyone who hires by IQ risks pricey lawsuits. Why? Because IQ tests have a “disparate impact” on black and Hispanic applicants.

When a B.A. bartender asks, “Why oh why can’t I get a better job?” human capital bluntly answers, “Because despite your credentials, you didn’t learn how to do a better job.”

For the 2010–11 school year, education was 7.5% of the American economy, versus 4.7% for defense. Spending came to over $1.1 trillion on education, and a bit over $700 billion on defense. Schools overtook the military back in 1972 and sharply widened their lead after the Cold War.

Government spending on education is about 6% of the whole economy.

More technically, subsidies raise the correlation between educational attainment and employability.

Philosophically, I am staunchly libertarian. While not absolutely opposed to taxpayer support for education, I have a strong moral presumption against taxpayer support for anything. Why? Because I have a strong moral presumption in favor of leaving others alone—and consider taxation to be a prime example of failing to leave others alone. Even if a tax has full democratic support, the burden of proof properly rests with the majority that wants to tax, not the minority that demurs. This burden, too, is surmountable. When taxation is the only way to avert clear-cut disaster, tax away. But taxing people to fund programs with modest or debatable social benefits strikes me as deeply wrong.

When Britain first made education compulsory for 5-to-10-year-olds in 1880, over 95% of 15-year-olds were already literate. Mid-nineteenth-century American literacy was comparable, at least outside the South.

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.

Cost matters whenever you spend your own money. How could cost cease to matter when you spend taxpayer money?

Subsidized education’s real aim isn’t to make ideas and culture accessible to anyone who’s interested, but to make them mandatory for everyone who isn’t interested.

Even extreme left-wing dominance leaves little lasting impression. Contrary to the indoctrination story, education doesn’t progressively dye students ever brighter shades of red.

First, despite years of study, most adults are historically illiterate. Either they never learned basic history, or they swiftly forgot what they learned. If a world of historical ignorance is scary, you should be scared already, because that’s where we live.

The Internet enlightens the money-poor: out-of-pocket cost is near zero. The Internet enlightens the time-poor: commuting cost is normally zero, too. The Internet enlightens the intellectually isolated: search engines and ratings mark the most promising autodidactic paths.

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.

FREDERICK: So you were a rebel, not a reformer? BRYAN: Right, until my senior year of high school. Once I discovered libertarianism, education reform came naturally. Why on earth should government subsidize socially wasteful education?

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.

The heralded social dividends of education are largely illusory: rising education’s main fruit is not broad-based prosperity, but credential inflation. Crunching the numbers, social investment in education underperforms stuffing money under mattresses.

Stop throwing good money after bad. Cut education budgets. Shift the financial burden of education from taxpayers to students and their families.

Picture all the overqualified graduates you’ve encountered waiting tables and working in bookstores. You’ve seen a world of academic oddities with your own eyes. Signaling elegantly explains them all.

A blend of idealism and cynicism. Idealistically, I’m duty-bound to blow the whistle on my industry’s vast, ongoing abuse of the taxpayer. Voters need to know they’re not getting the human capital they’ve been promised—and who will tell them if I don’t? Cynically, I doubt the majority will heed my warnings.