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

“For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,To stir men’s blood. I only speak right on;I tell you that which you yourselves do know.’’ —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (285)Well. . .I think Caplan ‘will stir men’s blood’ with this work. Why?‘I say what you already know’! What! How insulting!Caplan’s conclusion is that ‘higher education’ serves as ‘signal’ for employers, and does not serve the educated. Why?“From the standpoint of most teachers, right up to and including the level of teachers of college undergraduates, the ideal student is well behaved, unaggressive, docile, patient, meticulous, and empathetic in the sense of intuiting the response to the teacher that is most likely to please the teacher.’’ (14) —Richard Posner‘Signal’ for perfect corporate ball-bearing, round and round with no squeaking! Why so valuable to business?“The road to academic success is paved with the trinity of intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity. The stronger your academic record, the greater employers’ confidence you have the whole package. Why do employers seek this package? Because the road to academic success and the road to job success are paved with the same materials. An intelligent worker learns quickly and deeply. A conscientious worker labors until the job’s done right. A conformist worker obeys superiors and cooperates with teammates. If you lack the right stuff to succeed in school, you probably lack the right stuff to succeed in the labor market.’’ (18)Right! Well . . .What about just the wonderful goal of - just ‘teaching how to think’?“Transfer researchers usually begin their careers as idealists. Before studying educational psychology, they take their power to “teach students how to think” for granted.’’Who wouldn’t?“When they discover the professional consensus against transfer, they think they can overturn it. Eventually, though, young researchers grow sadder and wiser. The scientific evidence wears them down—and their firsthand experience as educators finishes the job. 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.’’How did he adjust to the real classroom, with actual students?“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.’’ (58)Who can deny it?CHAPTER 1 -The Magic of EducationCHAPTER 2 -The Puzzle Is Real: The Ubiquity of Useless EducationCHAPTER 3 -The Puzzle Is Real: The Handsome Rewards of Useless EducationCHAPTER 4 -The Signs of Signaling: In Case You’re Still Not ConvincedCHAPTER 5 -Who Cares If It’s Signaling? The Selfish Return to EducationCHAPTER 6 -We Care If It’s Signaling: The Social Return to EducationCHAPTER 7 -The White Elephant in the Room: We Need Lots Less EducationCHAPTER 8 - We Need More Vocational EducationCHAPTER 9 -Nourishing Mother: Is Education Good for the Soul?CHAPTER 10 -Five Chats on Education and EnlightenmentOne fantastic, fascinating, marvelous feature . . .“Though I can heed everyone, I cannot please everyone. Rather than try to placate any one faction, this chapter brings them all together for a battle royale.’’‘’The following dialogues are inspired by three decades of arguments about education. I’m the only real character. The rest are archetypes, composites—though hopefully not caricatures—of my favorite critics. The Cast -Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University. Highest credential: Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.James Cooper, freshman at the University of Kansas; major: undeclared. Highest credential: diploma from Topeka High School.Frederick Dodd, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, blogger for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Highest credential: M.A. in journalism from New York University.Alan Lang, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Highest credential: Ph.D. in economics from MIT.Gillian Morgan, freelance tech journalist. Highest credential: B.S. in computer science from UCLA.Cynthia Ragan, English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School, New Jersey. Highest credential: B.A. in English from the College of New Jersey.Derek Romano, recent high school dropout. Highest credential: none.Gretchen Simpson, student loan activist. Highest credential: M.A. in sociology from the University of Florida.Daria Stein, entrepreneur and parent of a high school junior. Highest credential: B.S. in engineering from the University of Texas.’’ (262)This part is so. . .so. . .cool. I hope other writers copy this technique. What a gift. This chapter alone worth the price of the book!Why Caplan’s conclusion so difficult, so painful to the ear?“If research and common sense are both on my side, who’s the defendant? The party line—what we’re supposed to believe about education. You’ve been enmeshed in the irrational exuberance since preschool.“School prepares us for our future.”“School is fun.”“Nothing is more important than education.”“We’ve all heard it, and we’ve all repeated it. If the party line is so false, why is dissent so scarce?Social Desirability Bias. Calling school a rat race verges on nihilism. When students challenge the party line, teachers and parents get upset. When graduates challenge it, they seem immature. Even those who don’t care to preen don’t want to get stomped.”“Education’s like John Gotti, the legendary “Teflon Don”: guilty as sin, but everyone’s petrified to testify against it. The Case against Education aims to reassure the witnesses. Standing up to Social Desirability Bias is inherently scary, but you’re not alone. Most people who reflect on their time in school privately agree with you. Research in economics, psychology, sociology, and education itself has your back. Testifying against education is safer than it looks.’’ (286)Wow!Another painful observation . . .“College graduates often proudly name-drop their alma mater, but few realize the phrase contains a worldview. In Latin, “alma mater” means “nourishing mother.” A rich metaphor.’’“A nourishing mother doesn’t merely teach you practical skills or help you land a well-paid job. She nurtures your whole person, teaches you right from wrong, and shows you the magic of life. As William Bowen, former president of Princeton, and Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, attest: Education is a special, deeply political, almost sacred civic activity. It is not merely a technical enterprise—providing facts to the untutored. Inescapably, it is a moral and aesthetic enterprise—expressing to impressionable minds a set of convictions about how most nobly to live in the world.’’ (238)‘Special, deeply political, sacred activity’! This is really a secular religion, as many scholars (J L Talmon, Isaiah Berlin, Herbert Butterfield, Carlton Hayes, etc.) concluded decades ago; faith, trust, ‘worldview’, secular priesthood, holy days, sacrifice, and transferring the will of God to ‘will of the people’, all this replaces the ‘old’ Judeo/Christian system with the ‘new’ Political/scientism one.Caplan writing for the general reader, although careful and scholarly. Includes enough charts, graphs, etc., to appeal to academics (I skipped most).Easy to absorb and clear to the ear. Sounds closer to a friendly talk than a academic essay.About six hundred excellent notes (linked).More than eighty pages of references (one thousand?) most with links. Tremendous scholarship!Fifteen page extensive index (linked). Great!(See also - “Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes’’ by Jacques Ellul; “The Measure Of Man’’ by Joseph Wood Krutch. Both present fascinating insights into modern education.)

This is an important book, one which all educators, parents, students, taxpayers and policy makers should read and absorb. The title is a bit overwrought but the subject is of vast importance and the points of the book are argued rigorously. Bryan Caplan is a Berkeley/Princeton-trained economist who teaches at George Mason. He is a libertarian by political inclination but he says that his views on education were formed long before his views on politics were. As an economist he sometimes says things that appear to be crass; at the same time, as an economist, he says things that are supported by the data even though we might not want to hear them.The essential argument concerns job skills and the fact that American education (including higher education) does not prepare students for jobs in the real world. Their coursework is still based on 19thc (and earlier) models in which individuals were trained to be clergymen, medical doctors or lawyers. That coursework is now largely dated, irrelevant, boring and out of touch with both student interests and the jobs that they might (realistically) seek. Everyone studies history but there are very few jobs for historians and the vast majority of students forget whatever history they might have learned in school. Thus, their time and tuition dollars are wasted; they suffer through tedious material and, now, in their adulthood, don’t know any history anyway.So why go to college, when college does not, in most cases, prepare you for useful work? (Note that a great number of STEM-trained students do not end up working in STEM-related fields.) The answer lies in the nature of the labor market. Employers seek three characteristics in potential employees: intelligence, conscientiousness and the ability to conform. They want bright people who have demonstrated their ability to apply themselves, keep on task, do what is expected of them, take orders from superiors and operate successfully in an environment which might be dull, soporific and tedious. Being able to secure a high school diploma and/or being able to secure a college degree are central to that process. Formal education, which is completed, signals the student/ applicant’s abilities in this regard. What you learned is of far less importance than what you have demonstrated that you are able to do (in a setting that may well bear no relationship to the job for which you are applying). Professor Caplan estimates the amount of ‘return’ based on signaling at approximately 80%.Given the public investment in education and the vacuity of the process itself we should focus instead on those basics which will pay off in the world of work—reading, writing and mathematics—and channel our now-wasted resources elsewhere. The points are made in approximately 300 pp. of closely-reasoned text, with bar graphs galore and number-crunching aplenty.While the author argues that he is not the philistine he may appear to be at first sight, he does argue that most students are philistines and that they have very little interest in the traditional elements of the liberal arts core curriculum. He sees the value in these areas of study but the students and the marketplace do not. Take, for example, the study of foreign languages. The simple fact is that there are very few jobs in the world for translators (vs. plumbers, mechanics and electricians, e.g.). Most students do not enjoy the study of foreign languages and almost never gain actual fluency in those languages. It is certainly true that an individual might study Italian in order to be able to read Dante, but how many such individuals are there in this world and to what degree should we bend our curriculum in order to somehow lure or persuade or encourage an individual or two to have such a goal?The numbers are all on his side as is the experience of all faculties young and old. He says that when we teach we teach in the hopes of reaching three or four students in a class, knowing that the others are not interested in the material and will make no future use of the material. I believe that most higher ed teachers will agree with this and that they will also say that the problem has gotten worse and worse as more and more come to college out of the necessity created by credential creep.In some ways I believe that he understates the problem. When he talks about required high school courses he talks about Latin and Greek, e.g. The liberal arts core which bores college students is now largely non-existent in ‘top’ colleges and universities. The introductory courses are largely taught by contingent faculty and graduate assistants, since tenure track faculty are neither interested in teaching them nor—in a day of hyper specialization--actually capable of teaching them. It is also the case that the courses taken outside of students’ majors are nearly always introductory courses, so that students stare at PowerPoint slides (or, preferably, have the teacher’s lecture notes emailed to them so that they need not attend class), memorize bullet points (or ‘study sheets’) for the exam and then promptly forget the material forever.While he cites the Arum/Roksa study, ACADEMICALLY ADRIFT, and notes that students now spend a minimum of time studying and a maximum of time socializing he does not emphasize two facts: lax standards are the order of the day among the professoriate, lax standards which are pressed on them by corporatist administrators who seek to maximize tuition whatever the academic cost. These administrators are now largely bureaucrats rather than academic leaders and they are best served by a growth in ‘direct reports’ and ‘programs’ for which they can take credit when seeking their next job. Such non-line administrators as assistant vice provosts have increased by 91% in recent decades; non-teaching academic staff have increased by 240%. These individuals want to swell the ranks of tuition-payers at any cost. With regard to the faculty: two anecdotes. When I took my first serious course in the second half of the 18thc (an over/under course for undergrads as well as master’s students), the teacher had the registration staff hand out notes at the registration table, informing us that we should have read Boswell’s LIFE OF JOHNSON (1400 pp. more or less) by the first class. This represented perhaps 20% of the total course readings; now no one would dream of doing that unless the book was the only text in an entire course. Second anecdote: just before his recent death M.H. Abrams (the first editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature) discussed the book with its current editor, Stephen Greenblatt. Abrams commented that a book that was once a standard text in freshman and sophomore survey courses is now used by advanced doctoral students to prepare for their comprehensive exams.So how are serious, curious, dedicated students supposed to encounter material that was once the province of educated elites? “Most humans intrigued by abstract ideas and high culture are working adults. Instead of lamenting youthful apathy, passionate educators should redirect their energy to humans who are ready for enlightenment” (p. 261).I wish he had pursued that argument in greater detail. For 17 years I had the opportunity to teach in the Liberal Studies Program at Georgetown. The program was designed for working adults who wanted to ‘read Plato’. It was expressly stated that there would be no vocational dimension to the program and that prospective students (who should be out of school for at least 3 years) should not expect to use it to secure employment or promotion. This was the largest liberal studies program in the country, with approximately 400 students (drawing from an area population of 4,000,000). It was the most memorable and gratifying teaching experience of my life. The students would routinely read the ‘recommended’ materials as well as the ‘required’ ones and saw their classes as the most interesting and engaging part of their week.I will spare the reader other comments but urge you to obtain this book and give it your most serious attention.

This book provides some important and persuasive arguments against the common sense view that education is a powerful force for good. I'm convinced by the point that most of the point of getting a degree amounts to what Caplan calls 'signalling' but still think him wrong on the ability of education to raise intelligence. While his counter arguments are well researched and lucidly structured, he discounts the role of knowledge on changing cognitive architecture, especially for the most disadvantaged. In short, Caplan's case against education is far too compelling for anyone to be complacent about. A must read.

I've given this four stars because the concepts really are interesting to somebody like myself who's worked in education for a long time. However I'm not a social scientist, and therefore much of the book was something of a drudge to wade through due to the meticulous research detail included. For me, I would have been happy to read a condensed version comprising mainly chapter summaries! For any academic purists or those with a social science background, I think you'll love this.

This book his highly repetitive. A whole book on this topic is just way too much, I gave up a third of the way through. The main concepts and arguments could easily be distilled into a long read in a newspaper

Well written , making good arguments . Will be very helpful for my research

In this book the author considers two driving forces for the value of schooling: human capital and signalling. Human capital assumes that school teaches you valuable skills, while signalling proposes that the value of your schooling lies on what your diploma/credentials signal to the job market. In particular, the author proposes that a degree signals intelligence, consciousness, and conformity (and that it is hard to evaluate those three combined features which is the reason why the labor market relies on degrees).The author proposes a 20/80 break down between human capital and signalling (i.e. 20% your education value comes from human capital while 80% comes from signalling). As he mentions in the book, he comes to this figures by a combination of data analysis and guesstimation.The book's argument echoes the general sentiment that what matters about going to school is to get a diploma. Based on that argument, the author proposes that we should defund education, and instead spend those resources in something else.The author strengthen his argument by making a sincere effort to address possible criticisms of his analysis. That being said, there are a couple of criticisms that are not fully addressed in the book.1. Throughout most of the book, human capital is measure by the skills learned in school and directly applied in the labor market. The author argues that humans in general are terrible at transfer learning and that therefore we can almost ignore any knowledge that is not "directly" transferable to the job market. Although I agree that humans are in general terrible at transfer learning, I would like to see a comparison between how fast a person can learn some skills with and without schooling (although I am not sure if there are any research in this area).2. The author only mention in passing the social value of education derived from the fact that keeping the young in a school allow their parents to go to work. This part of the equation seems not insignificant to me. Without founded K12 education, many parents would be unable to go to work for long periods (this situation might be even worse for single parents)... Although most people like their kids, they don't like their kids 24/7. A sad part of reality is that a fairly large of the population don't like their kids that much, and without schools those kids would grow in even more hostile environments. The author also proposes to relax labor laws to allow kids to work. Here once again, i believe that the author underestimate the possibility of kid exploitation. If we decided on such policy, on the bright side, we might get a modern literary equivalent of Oliver Twist.in general, I enjoyed the book, and I recommend it to everyone interested in the value of schooling. My main complain is that the book should be titled "the case against schooling". We all know that schooling is a complete waste of time of resources, and yet education opens people minds. Or, as attributed to Mark Twain, "Never let schooling interfere with your education."