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

by Bryan Caplan

Given the mass of the evidence, it would be easy to handpick a grossly biased basket. Readers must judge how well I’ve countered this ever-present temptation, but I offer one upfront disclosure: I consciously place extra weight on basic statistics over high-tech alternatives. When relevant experimental evidence is thin or nonexistent (as it usually is), I put my trust in Ordinary Least Squares with control variables. When the results seem questionable, I just seek richer data. This approach isn’t perfect, but it’s easy to understand, easy to compare, and hard to manipulate. High-tech statistics can improve on basic methods, but the cost is high: to fix the flaws you understand, you usually have to introduce new flaws you don’t understand.

I have been in school continuously for over forty years.1 First preschool, kindergarten, elementary, junior high, and high school. Then a four-year bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a four-year Ph.D. at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my first “real job”—as a professor of economics at George Mason University. Twenty years later, I’m still here. In the fall, I’ll be starting forty-first grade. The system has been good to me. Very good. I have a dream job for life. I’m expected to teach five hours of class, thirty weeks per year. Unlike many professors, I love teaching; but even if I hated it, 150 hours a year is a light burden. The rest of the time, I think, read, and write about whatever interests me. That’s called “research.” My salary doesn’t make me wealthy, but I wouldn’t trade places with Bill Gates. His billions can’t buy me anything I crave I don’t already have. And I bet that even in retirement, Gates lacks my peace of mind.

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. 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 process seems even more magical when you’re one of the wizards. I go to class and talk to students about my exotic interests: everything from the market for marriage, to the economics of the Mafia, to the self-interested voter hypothesis. At the end of the semester, I test their knowledge. As far as I can tell, the only marketable skill I teach is “how to be an economics professor.” Yet employers seemingly disagree. Anyone who’s not dumbstruck should be. Do students need to understand the market for marriage, the economics of the Mafia, or the self-interested voter hypothesis to be a competent manager, banker, or salesman? No. But because I decide these topics are worth teaching, employers decide students who fail my class aren’t worth interviewing. Abracadabra.

My Spanish teachers’ official goal was to teach me Spanish. It was their native language. They failed. Are we really supposed to believe my Spanish teachers successfully taught me something that wasn’t on their agenda? Something that’s actually useful on the job? 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.”

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.”44 If human capital purists are right, why do students struggle to get into the best schools, then struggle to avoid acquiring skills once they arrive?

The staunchest defenders of education reject the idea of sorting subjects and majors by “usefulness.” How do you know Latin, trigonometry, or Emily Dickinson won’t serve you on the job? A man told me his French once helped him understand an airport announcement in Paris. Without high school French, he would have missed his flight. Invest years now and one day you might save hours at an airport. See, studying French pays!

Yet such optimism overlooks a key point: knowing half a subject’s basic facts does not make you “halfway proficient.” If you know only half the letters in the alphabet, you are illiterate. Why? Because you lack knowledge of basic facts on which all reading depends. The same holds for the ABCs of history and civics. Not knowing the three branches of government isn’t like not knowing Hamlet; it’s like not knowing the letter “h.” If you don’t know that the Civil War came after the Declaration of Independence, you don’t understand American history. If you don’t know which parties control the House and the Senate, you don’t understand American politics.

High school graduates average two years of foreign language coursework. What do adults have to show for it? The General Social Survey allows rather precise estimates. It asks respondents, “Can you speak a language other than English?,” “How well do you speak that language?,” and “Is that a language you first learned as a child at home, in school, or is it one that you learned elsewhere?”32 The results could scarcely be worse. Schools make virtually no one fluent in a foreign language (see Figure 2.5). Only .7% claim to have learned a foreign language “very well” in school; another 1.7% claim to have learned a foreign language “well” in school. Since these are self-reports, true linguistic competence must be even worse. The hard truth: if you didn’t acquire fluency in the home, you almost certainly don’t have it.

Most Americans possess basic literacy and numeracy, but only 13% are proficient. For history, civics, science, and foreign language, few Americans grasp the ABCs. The claim that schools “teach these subjects” is an overstatement. Schools only “teach of these subjects.” After years of exposure, American adults know history, civics, science, and foreign languages exist. That’s about it.

As the researchers conclude, their results show “different undergraduate disciplines teach different kinds of reasoning to different degrees.”58 Yet their results also undermine the view that students gain general reasoning skills. Students primarily improve in the very tasks they study and practice. Even this isn’t guaranteed; humanities majors’ verbal reasoning barely budged.

you throw a coin straight up, how many forces act on it midair? The textbook answer is “one”: after it leaves your hand, the only force on the coin is gravity.63 The popular answer, however, is “two”: the force of the throw keeps sending it up, and the force of gravity keeps dragging it down. Popular with whom? Virtually everyone—physics students included.64 At the beginning of the semester, only 12% of college students in introductory mechanics get the coin problem right. At the end of the semester, 72% still get it wrong. After students learn how to handle complex homework and exam problems, few apply their lessons to simple real-world cases.

My exams are designed to measure comprehension, not memorization. They’re completely open book. Yet students’ performance reliably disappoints me. Half the answers repeat semirelevant passages from the notes and hope for mercy. In a good class, four exams out of forty demonstrate true economic understanding.

Hear the pedagogical odyssey of psychologist Douglas Detterman: When I began teaching, I thought it was important to make things as hard as possible for students so they would discover the principles for themselves. I thought the discovery of principles was a fundamental skill that students needed to learn and transfer to new situations. Now I view education, even graduate education, as the learning of information. I try to make it as easy for students as possible. Where before I was ambiguous about what a good paper was, I now provide examples of the best papers from past classes. Before, I expected students to infer the general conclusion from specific examples. Now I provide the general conclusion and support it with specific examples. In general, I subscribe to the principle that you should teach people exactly what you want them to learn in a situation as close as possible to the one in which the learning will be applied. I don’t count on transfer and I don’t try to promote it except by explicitly pointing out where taught skills may be applied.

Teachers’ plea that “we’re mediocre at teaching what we measure, but great at teaching what we don’t measure” is comically convenient. When someone insists their product has big, hard-to-see benefits, you should be dubious by default—especially when the easy-to-see benefits are small.

The strongest reason to believe in “learning how to learn” is also a commonsense claim: Since physical exercise builds physical muscles, we should expect mental exercise to build mental muscles. But on reflection, this is another reason to disbelieve in “learning how to learn.” You don’t exercise your legs to improve your bench press. You don’t even exercise your right leg to strengthen your left leg. Instead, you exercise the muscles you seek to build. Why would “mental muscles” be any less specific? Furthermore, when you stop going to the gym, your physical muscles soon atrophy.70 Why would “mental muscles” be any slower to wither? If exercise analogies prove anything, they prove our education system rests on educators’ conceit—the self-serving line that when we teach students whatever interests us, they durably acquire whatever skills they need to succeed in life.

Summer vacation, intermittent attendance, delayed school entry, and dropping out all measurably depress IQ.71 Some experimental early childhood programs have increased IQ by over 30 points—moving kids’ performance from roughly the 2nd percentile to the 50th percentile of their age group.72 Extra years of education usually seem to boost IQ.73 Studies that carefully measure students’ time show IQ rises more on school days than non–school days.74 Isn’t this conclusive evidence that education makes us smarter? Not really. While the facts are secure, the interpretation is shaky. The first major worry: people can sharply improve on virtually any test by practicing—and a little practice goes a long way. A major review pulled together fifty relevant studies of practice on cognitive tests. On average, “a candidate who scored at the 50th percentile on the first test could be expected to score at the 60th percentile on the second test and at the 71st percentile on the third test.”75 Explicit coaching—“teaching to the test”—works even better.76 A cockeyed optimist might rejoice that mankind is only a few hours of practice away from massive intelligence gains. This optimism, however, leads to absurdity: Can you transform average students into geniuses by handing them the answer key before their IQ test? Most researchers draw the sobering conclusion that test preparation yields only “hollow gains.”77 Preparation inflates measured intelligence without raising genuine intelligence.

Ceci also notes that schools teach students to offer the kinds of answers IQ tests favor. How are an apple and an orange alike? IQ tests award only partial credit for such factually correct answers as, “They’re both round,” “They’re both edible,” or “They both have seeds.” For full credit, you have to say, “They’re both fruits.”

Major finding: school days noticeably raise scores on synonym and technical comprehension subtests without raising scores on spatial and logic subtests. The authors infer that education raises “crystallized intelligence” but not “fluid intelligence.” A better interpretation, though, is that education improves some specific skills without increasing intelligence at all.

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.”

For the unskilled, progress is easy. Given commonsense conditions, it’s almost guaranteed. In the words of K. Anders Ericsson, the world’s leading expert on expertise, novices improve as long as they are, “1) given a task with a well-defined goal, 2) motivated to improve, 3) provided with feedback, and 4) provided with ample opportunities for repetition and gradual refinements of their performance.”91 Before long, though, the benefit of mere practice plateaus. To really get good at their jobs, people must advance to deliberate practice. They must exit their comfort zone—raise the bar, struggle to surmount it, repeat.

Educators boast that they teach their students how to think. Laymen tend to favor a colder, more credible story about what kids learn in school: discipline and socialization. Life isn’t a picnic—or a game of solitaire. Schools build discipline by making students show up on time, sit still, keep their mouths shut, follow orders, and stay awake. Schools build social skills by making students cooperate, manage conflict, work as a team, dress nicely, and speak properly. The typical worker spends the day doing boring work in a hierarchical organization. Perhaps education acclimates children to their future role.

Yet discipline-and-socialization stories overlook a vital question: If students weren’t in school, what would they be doing instead? Young adults who spent their teens sitting home alone playing video games might be feral. But what if young adults spent their teens working? Work teaches discipline. Work teaches social skills. Why would education be any better at readying us for the world of work than the world of work itself?

What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression.

Grade inflation completes the idyllic package by shielding students from negative feedback. The average GPA is now 3.2.102 Instead of making students conform and submit, college showers students with acceptance. This doesn’t merely fail to prepare students for their future roles; it actively unprepares them. College raises students’ expectations to unrealistic heights, leaving future employers the chore of dragging graduates back down to earth.

As long as you avoid rare, demanding paths like engineering and premed in college, you bask in the warmth of a four-year vacation. If that’s “socialization,” it’s dysfunctional socialization.

The modern economy is vast and diverse. Few of the students you meet will end up in your line of work—even if they share your major. As a result, they’ll probably never be in a position to help you. If you’re looking for a good job, you don’t want generic contacts. You want relevant contacts.105 Friends in your narrowly defined occupation are quite lucrative.106 So are older male relatives (father, uncle, grandfather) who know the boss or vouch for you.107 When researchers estimate the average benefit of “contacts” or “social networks,” though, some find a positive effect on employment and wages, some no effect, and others a negative effect.

Normally, however, lucrative networking begins after students graduate and find a niche in the sprawling modern economy.

The major premium, like the college premium, steeply falls after correcting for ability. Strong students tend to major in high-earning subjects. Natural science majors, for example, outshine social science and humanities majors on the math and verbal sections of the SAT.

On a naive reading, Figure 3.2 says the average education major would make 75% more money by switching to engineering. But the average education major’s SAT scores, high school GPA, and math preparation say otherwise. How much extra would the average education major who switched really earn? Estimates from ten separate papers range from +25% to +60%, with an average of +44%. These corrected figures are actually optimistic, because they take the education major’s ability to complete the engineering curriculum for granted. In practice, even eager engineering students frequently flee to easier majors.

I assure you that my profession makes near-zero effort to train our undergrads for the job market. We’re easy on our students, even at elite schools like Berkeley and Princeton. Frankly, most econ professors practice a variant of the old Soviet adage, “We pretend to teach, they pretend to learn.” During four years of study, our better students acquire only two marketable skills: elementary statistics, and ability to calculate a present discounted value.

How then do economists fill eight semesters of coursework? With watered-down versions of topics that fascinate the faculty: supply-and-demand problems, mathematical economics, economic growth, and a long list of fields that are far less “applied” than they sound—macroeconomics, industrial organization, labor economics, regulation, public choice, economic history. From the standpoint of job skills, an economics degree is almost entirely chaff (except for budding economics professors). Yet despite our failure to prepare econ majors for their careers, the job market treats our graduates like engineers.

the 1960s, Egypt notoriously guaranteed every college graduate a government job. By 1988, two-thirds of Egypt’s male college graduates and 80% of its female college graduates worked in the public sector.

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. To escape liability, employers must prove IQ testing is a “business necessity.”68 Since this legal hurdle is nigh insurmountable, employers turn to higher education to “launder” their workers’ IQ scores. As Jonathan Last succinctly states: In Griggs, the Court held that employers could not rely on IQ-type tests if minorities performed relatively poorly on them. . . . So what employers do is this: They launder their request for test scores through the college system, because colleges are allowed to use such considerations. The universities get rich, students and their parents go into hock, and everyone pretends that Acme Widgets is hiring Madison because they value her B.A. in sociology from Haverford, and not because her admission to Haverford proved that she is bright—a fact which a three-hour written test could have demonstrated just as well. If Griggs were rolled back, it would upend the college system at a stroke.

the modern world, your first quarter century of life is deeply weird.1 You spend your earliest years learning incredibly useful skills: How to walk. How to talk. How to get along with others. Everything’s going so well . . . until your parents decide you’re old enough to start school. School teaches you a few more incredibly useful skills: reading, writing, math. Most of the day, though, you just kill time. Parents, teachers, and other adults guarantee that formal education is vital preparation for adult life. Thirteen years later, your elders grant you the option to quit school but urge you to finish at least four more years. The link between what you have to study in school and what you’ll do on the job is an ongoing mystery. Yet when you finally graduate, the wisdom of your elders is undeniable. The better your transcript, the richer your opportunities in the labor market. When you have a weird experience, you doubt yourself. What’s really weird: the World, or you? The answer for education, as we’ve seen, is the World.

Picture the labor market as an arms race. Rising education automatically sparks credential inflation; as credentials proliferate, you must study harder and longer to convince employers to hire you. In an everyone-has-a-B.A. dystopia, an aspiring janitor might need a master’s in Janitorial Studies to land a job scrubbing toilets.

In our society, education is a seal of approval. Employers know it. Workers know it. As seals proliferate, workers need extra seals to upstage the competition. You’ll never apply most of what you study, but so what? Academic success opens doors. A dysfunctional game, but if you refuse to play, the labor market brands you a loser.

The Red Queen! You must run ever-faster to stay in the same place!

Take the study that provocatively claims employers see college graduates’ ability “nearly perfectly.” The same piece reports high school dropouts, high school graduates, and college dropouts enjoy virtually zero payoff for their ability when they first join the labor force. Full catch-up takes over ten years.46 In other words: to win your rightful place in the world, you must either enter the labor force and work for a decade-plus, or graduate from a four-year college. Somber news for “diamonds in the rough” whose skills surpass their credentials.

For starters, firms often give new workers valuable on-the-job training. As a result, signaling can indirectly boost your productivity. Step 1: Signal in school. Step 2: Land a good job. Step 3: Learn useful job skills on the job. Step 4: Persistently profit. If your signal modestly overstates your skill, your employer may soon wish they’d hired someone else. By the time they spot their mistake, however, your new marketable skills permanently justify higher pay.

According to the pure signaling model, education raises income by making you look more productive. A worker gets more education; their productivity stays the same, but their income goes up. A nation gets more education; its productivity and income stay the same. The personal and national effects diverge because signaling is a rat race. Only one worker can look like the Best Worker in the Country, and only 25% can look like the Best 25%. If signaling is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, education is a path to individual prosperity and national stagnation: education fails to make the pie bigger, so bigger slices for some means smaller slices for others.

Of course everything isn’t signaling. Students definitely learn useful job skills. School lasts over a decade. It would be amazing if students didn’t learn something useful before they left. My claim is that education is mostly signaling. Given all the evidence, a 20/80 human capital/signaling split seems reasonable. I’m happy to debate the exact figure. Until labor economists renounce human capital purism, though, I cannot take their approach seriously—and neither should anyone else.

The closer we get to human capital purism, the more education benefits mankind. As signaling’s share rises, education’s social benefits fade. When we near the pure signaling pole, education becomes an incinerator that burns society’s money, time, and brains in a futile attempt to make everyone look special.

Crunching numbers on the return to education is not like measuring Planck’s constant. All our calculations require guesswork, yielding averages or “expected values,” not precise predictions. But don’t be alarmed. Whenever possible, guesswork builds on canonical data and careful academic research. Such data and research are available for every major building block in the calculations. For minor building blocks, however, data and research are often thin. Rather than pleading agnosticism—as academics are wont to do—I use my best judgment. If my “best judgment” on a component of the calculation seems off, substitute your own. Waiting for omniscience is not an option. Educational decisions confront students, workers, voters, and policy makers here and now. Instead of imagining we can live without guesswork, let us strive to guess with care.

People who hear I’m a college professor often reminisce about their time in school, living the life of the mind. Few tell me, “I’m happy now because I went to college.” But many yearn for the good old days: “How wonderful to be a student again, savoring fascinating new ideas every day!” When I look at college students, though, I see little savoring. Excruciatingly bored students fill the classrooms. Well, “fill” isn’t quite right, because so many don’t bother to show up.

The High School Survey of Student Engagement, probably the single best study of how high school students feel about school, reports that 66% of high school students say they’re bored in class every day. Seventeen percent say they’re bored in every class every day. Only 2% claim they’re never bored in class. Why so bored? Eighty-two percent say the material isn’t interesting; 41% say the material isn’t relevant.31 Another research team gave beepers to middle school students to capture their feelings in real time. During schoolwork, students were bored 36% of the time, versus 17% for all other activities.32 No wonder a major Gates Foundation study ranked boredom the most important reason why kids drop out of high school.

One could protest that for every disgruntled student who cuts class, there’s an enthusiastic student sucking the marrow out of college. Wishful thinking. Remember: even though college students are generally free to unofficially attend any course, cutting classes is far more common than crashing classes. My teaching is highly rated, and I publicly announce all my courses are open to everyone on earth. Yet guests fill under 5% of my seats.

The strongest available evidence on the relative pleasantness of work and school comes from the Princeton Affect and Time Survey (PATS). Surveyors phoned a random sample of Americans and walked them through the previous day to find out (a) how respondents spent their hours, and (b) how each activity made them feel at the time—happy, stressed, sad, interested, pained? All PATS emotion scales run from 0 (not feeling the emotion at all) to 6 (feeling the emotion very strongly). Main result: ranking activities from most to least pleasant, work and education are both near the bottom of the list. Yet work has a slight edge. During work hours, people are a little less stressed and sad, equally bored, but feel slightly more pain.37 The biggest difference is happiness. Work happiness averages 3.83—versus 3.55 for education. Education barely beats elder care, the depths of woe.

One prominent study finds that, correcting for income and lifestyle, education might actually hurt life expectancy.42 A study at the other extreme finds a year of education boosts life expectancy by “as much as 1.7 years.”43 Another research team detects large sheepskin effects for mortality; while most years make little difference, high school graduation boosts life expectancy by a year or more, with even larger effects for college completion.

Suppose a bank charges 10% interest on one-year loans. This doesn’t mean the bank earns 10% interest on the average loan. Some borrowers default. They could spend the entire loan, then skip town or declare bankruptcy. Even rare defaults gut the lender’s rate of return. When one borrower in twenty reneges, the bank’s return falls by 55%—from 10% to 4.5%.

Unreflective researchers naturally overlook noncompletion because it falls far outside their personal experience. The researchers finished their degrees. So did almost everyone they personally know. How bad can attrition be? Dismal. Overall dropout or “noncompletion” rates are high at all levels of American education. About 25% of high school students fail to finish in four years. About 60% of full-time college students fail to finish in four years. Half of advanced degree students never finish at all.