George Leef’s latest Martin Center column focuses on a new book from a university professor who challenges conventional wisdom about education.
In his long-awaited book, George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan argues that “the education system is a waste of time and money.” He is emphatically not against people learning skills and knowledge but argues that our current system of education does a poor job of that, and at inordinate cost.
Caplan puts his case starkly:
“Most critics of our education system…miss what I see as its supreme defect: there’s way too much education. Typical students burn thousands of hours studying material that neither raises their productivity nor enriches their lives. And of course, students can’t waste time without experts to show them how.” …
… Among economists who study the effects of education, there is a great divide between those who believe that education augments your skills and thereby enables you to do a better job (the “human capital” crowd) and those who think that education mostly reveals your pre-existing abilities and thereby enables you to get a better job (the signaling crowd). Caplan is firmly in the latter camp. He argues that the education premium people enjoy for having crossed various educational thresholds is about 80 percent due to signaling and only 20 percent due to human capital improvement.
