How can education be so irrelevant yet so lucrative? There exists one clean explanation—call it the wheat/chaff theory—that doesn’t appeal to signaling. In this story, education is a mixture of high-paid wheat (literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, technical training) and unpaid chaff (history, Latin, gym, French poetry). Schooling is lucrative because official statistics take “real” classes and “real” majors and lump them together with “Mickey Mouse” classes and “Mickey Mouse” majors.
