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

by Bryan Caplan

When relevant experimental evidence is thin or nonexistent (as it usually is), I put my trust in Ordinary Least Squares with control variables.

This approach isn’t perfect, but it’s easy to understand, easy to compare, and hard to manipulate.

My deepest gratitude, though, goes to Nathaniel Bechhofer, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, and Alex Tabarrok for sharing my intellectual journey, day by day. Whatever they think about education as it really is, these dear friends exemplify education as it ought to be.

pusillanimous

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?

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.

However, you can buy the substance of my argument without embracing my crazy extremism.

Education is a strange industry, but familiarity masks the strangeness.

But employers throughout the economy defer to teachers’ opinions when they decide whom to interview, whom to hire, and how much to pay them. Students with straight As from top schools write their own tickets. A single F in a required course prevents graduation—closing the door to most well-paid jobs.

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.

Clear signals carry a strong stigma, fuzzy signals a weak stigma.

Statistical discrimination may be unfair and ugly, but it’s hardly weird or implausible.

Jenn and Karen scored higher on their SATs than three out of four students. After high school graduation, both took full-time jobs. However, they spent their evenings differently. Jenn spent twenty hours a week earning her college degree part time. Karen, in contrast, spent twenty hours a week creating the world’s biggest ball of yarn. Five years after high school graduation, Jenn has her degree, and Karen her record-breaking ball of yarn.

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

Higher education is the only product where the consumer tries to get as little out of it as possible. —Arnold Kling, “College Customers vs. Suppliers”

Question: How would your career have been different if you flunked all the classes you’ve forgotten?

If my Spanish teachers couldn’t achieve their official goal despite their expertise, you’d have to be awfully gullible to believe they covertly taught me “how to work.”

Invest years now and one day you might save hours at an airport. See, studying French pays!

Main finding: Most people who take high school algebra and geometry forget about half of what they learn within five years and forget almost everything within twenty-five years.

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.

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.

Eventually, though, young researchers grow sadder and wiser.

When someone insists their product has big, hard-to-see benefits, you should be dubious by default—especially

Remember

Studies that carefully measure students’ time show IQ rises more on school days than non–school days.74

This optimism, however, leads to absurdity: Can you transform average students into geniuses by handing them the answer key before their IQ test?

Preparation inflates measured intelligence without raising genuine intelligence.78

The typical worker spends the day doing boring work in a hierarchical organization. Perhaps education acclimates children to their future role.