Book review: The Case Against Education

The Case Against Education is a book written by libertarian economist Bryan Caplan and published in 2018 by Princeton University Press. Drawing on the economic concept of job market signaling and research in educational psychology, the book argues that much of higher education is very inefficient and has only a small effect in improving human capital, contrary to the conventional consensus in labor economics. Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to certify their intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity—attributes that are valued by employers. He ultimately estimates that approximately 80% of individuals' return to education is the result of signaling, with the remainder due to human capital accumulation, as wiki says. Or you can try Goodreads. As BC himself notes, almost no-one changes their mind as a result of reading the book, so entrenched are everyone's opinions; so I'm not going to make any attempt to convince you he is correct: read the book if you want the details.

His data is almost all from the USA, but that hardly matters, because the same is true world over. Every government happily burbles that nothing is more important than education, and no-one amongst the elite - or indeed, anyone else - will listen to arguments to the contrary. Which is itself a meta-argument: how can so many fools all be right?

Another meta-argument: why is it that education is the only "good" that its recipients try so hard to avoid?

Anecdote: one of the gains to education is a strong societal, and indeed personal, gain at the lower end of male ability, because staying in education, and the minor gains to employability, tend to reduce criminality amongst young men. But there's no similar gain for young women, because so few commit any crime.

There are two sorts of gains: personal, and societal. The personal is improvements in your employability, future earnings, and the care and comfort of your soul. The societal is how much extra you'll produce as a result of what you learn, together with harder to measure stuff like the good of your soul and reduction in crime. If the bulk of the personal gain came from what you actually learnt, then the two types of good would be close to indistinguishable; BC's main argument is that they aren't, because the bulk - his estimate is 80% - of the personal good comes from signalling: completing your education signals to employers that you are intelligent, industrious, and conformist. But signalling has no societal benefit: it merely alters the relative ordering of people, it doesn't make people any more useful.

He produces exhaustive evidence for the effect of signalling, but I suspect this is much like evolution: you don't really need evidence, once the concept has been explained, unless your religion prevents you from believing. An example is that the rewards for education - as measured by earnings, in this case - are not linear with years of schooling; instead, there is a marked jump around graduation, from either high school or college. This would make no sense if the gains came from what you learnt; but makes perfect sense if what matters is the piece of paper saying you hae passed the course.

For what it is worth, BC happily accepts that reading, writing and arithmetic are valuable skills that we all need, and so doesn't trouble himself with junior school. Probably if you pushed him he would quibble that too, but never mind we need not go there. He also accepts that some of what is learnt in some courses - for example, engineering - is useful.

His remedy is austerity: the government should stop, or at least begin to reduce, subsidising useless signalling. He is perfectly well aware that this isn't going to happen.

I think that his arguments-from-future-earnings are unassailable, which means the easiest way round them is to argue for nurture-of-the-soul. This has the great advantage of being very hard to measure, so it is easy to apply wishful thinking, and people promptly do so. I - and I assume you, dear reader - are amongst the cognitive elite; and so our experience of education is rather different to that of the masses, at least I should jolly well hope so. I enjoyed school, and I enjoyed university. And I rather suspect that applies to quite a lot of elite policy and opinion formers out there; this may account for some of the bias. But nurturing the soul, and instilling a love of education, knowledge, and culture for its own sake, is not something that the bulk factory education system is going to do, except by happy chance.

If we were to accept his case, how much does it matter? The waste is then lots of money, but that translates into lots of time: all those people teaching stuff pointlessly, and all the students who could be doing something more productive. So, yes, it matters: the facile govt idea that at least it keeps people off the unemployment rolls for three years is silly.