The Case Against Education - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

Introduction

Learning doesn't have to be useful. It doesn't have to be inspirational. When learning is neither useful nor inspirational, though, how can we call it anything but wasteful?

Signaling: Why the market pays you to kill time

Even if what a student learns in school is utterly useless, employers will happily pay extra if their scholastic achievement provides information about their productivity. If you claimed you were skilled but just chose not to graduate, employers wouldn't believe you.

The doesn't reject the human capital theory of education, only human capital purism: all education teaches useful job skills, and these skills are the sole reason why education pays off in the labor market. Certifying the quality of labor is valuable, but could be done in much less time.

Education: Private profit, social waste

For a single individual, education pays off-- just not for society. One person can see better by standing up at a concert, but if everyone does that it no longer works. If we curtail education, the world would benefit from conversing time and resources. By making education less affordable, the market won't be able to expect everyone to have so much of it.

The Magic of Education

Education definitely pays- ~10% for every additional year.

Otherwordly Education

Numeracy and literacy are required for almost any real work. Almost everything else they learn is highly impractical, and mostly suited for preparing for the next level of education. Meanwhile, these things aren't taught at all:

• Compensation and job satisfaction in common occupations
• Strategies for breaking into industries
• Sectors with rapidly changing employment
• Writing resumes
• Positive mental attitude

Why is the link between curriculum and job skills weak, but the link between academic success and professional success so strong?

Making Magic Pay

Academic success is a strong signal of worker productivity.

Basics of Signaling

Requirements:

• Different types of people (intelligence, consientiousness, conformity, etc.)
• Which person is which type has to be nonobvious
• Types must visibly differ on average

A signal doesn't have to be perfect, only better than nothing. Employers don't know how to figure out who has what they want, so they rely on signals. Employees learn to send the most desirable signals. For this to work in the market though, it must be easier for people who naturally possess the correct traits to send signals than fakers.

Statistical discrimination: Using true-on-average stereotypes is cheaper and quicker.

What Does Education Signal?

Education signals that someone is intelligent, consientiousness, and conformist. Education is a societal expectation, and turning away from it signals that you don't follow expectations. It signals that you're the model modern worker:

• Team players
• Deferential to superiors, but not slavish
• Congenial toward coworkers, but put business first
• Dress and groom conservatively
• Say nothing remotely racist or sexist, and stay far away from sexual harassment
• They know and do what's expected of them, even articulating it out loud is embarassing

Employers these traits, and those traits make you successful in school too. More school means an even tighter alignment with those traits.

Locked-In Syndrome

Education signals a package of intelligence, consientiousness, and conformity. If you have a strong signal of one, not going to college implies you must be deficient in the others. Alternative signals end up actively signaling non-conformity.

Since employers think there's a link between education and good workers, conforming people get a lot of education to signal that they're good workers, which makes it seem even more true. This is locked in a loop.

Signaling "Simply Doesn't Make Sense"

Addressing common criticisms:

• Signaling doesn't mean 100% signaling- useful things are taught, they're just combined with a lot of things that aren't useful.
• Education doesn't only signal intelligence- it also signals conformity and consientiousness.
• Signaling needs to be costly and grueling- if it can be easily aped, it doesn't work well as a signal
• The market takes a long time to figure out whether the education signal was accurate, and the signal is needed to get your foot in the door in the first place. Also, many employers are happy to live with subpar performance from a team member they have affection for.

Riddle Me This

Higher education is the only product where the consumer tries to get as little out of it as possible.

You can go to any college class right now and get the education for free, if that were truly valuable. No one does this, because without the signal, the education alone isn't worth it.

Failing a class and forgetting the material would have identical career consequences if not for signaling.

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 work hard to get into elite colleges, and then try to get the easiest A's they can once they get there. Schools have fame, but professors only have local fame- getting an A in a hard professor's class doesn't signal anything meaningful.

If human capital theory were true, schools wouldn't worry about cheaters since the students would only be cheating themselves. Detecting and punishing cheaters protects the value of the school's signal. Even habitual cheaters don't want a worthless diploma.

Students love it when teachers cancel class. Even though they're free to skip anytime they want, they don't want their relative performance to suffer, even if their absolute performance does.

Lead Into Gold

Do professors really transform waiters into economic consulants, or merely evaluate whether waiters have the right stuff to be economic consultants?

Both sculptors and appraisers have the power to raise the market value of a piece of stone. The sculptor raises the market value of a piece of stone by shaping it. The appraiser raises the market value of a piece of stone by judging it. Teachers need to ask ourselves, "How much of what we do is sculpting, and how much is appraising?"

The Puzzle is Real: The Ubiquity of Useless Education

What do students learn?

The Content of the Curriculum

Over 4/5 of high school students study Geometry, which has few applications outside of school. Meanwhile, only 7.7% of high school students study statistics, which underpins many foolish real-world choices.

You "might need" any number of things you learn in school. Like hoarding though, this doesn't justify the investment.

Measured Learning

Students can learn enough to get a good grade once, and then forget everything they were taught without a market penalty. Almost all studies that measure learning completely ignore retention. Humans poorly retain knowledge they don't use.

Most people who take high school algebra forget half of what they learn within 5 years, and everything they learn within 25. Only people who continue on to calculus retain most of their algebra and geometry.

Schools can't be responsible for more than 100% of what someone knows about something. So, even granting schools a 100% benefit of the doubt, retention of history, civics, science, and foreign language are pitiful. Literacy and numeracy is the only thing most adults hold onto.

Half of US adults know that $0.05 per gallon on 140 gallons of oil is $7.00.

After 9 years of school, most dropouts are still functionally illiterate and innumerate. High school graduates are barely any better. Less than a third of college grads could pass an entrance exam back into their own school. 38% of Americans failed a test to become citizens of their own countries. Adults can't recall almost anything about science.

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 language exist. That's about it.

The Relevance of Relevance

In the best of circumstances, knowledge transfer is weak. Students are generally only capable of learning the things they are explicitly taught. Making surface features dissimilar, time delays, adding irrelevant lessons, and having different people teach subjects negatively affects transfer.

Critical thinking skills move up as students go through school. Shockingly though, they don't improve over the course of education. Students in their 1st and 4th years at the same program perform nearly identically. They just came in much higher.

Students transfered abstract math to concrete physics better than the opposite (Bassok & Holyoak, 1989). Statistics seems to transfer fairly well, but only on easy questions, given to students at an elite university, during peak retention in the final week of class, and less than half of the students actually improved.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins, MIT, and other well-regarded universities have documented that students who receive honor grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested. (Howard Gardner, 1991)

If what you learn in school lacks obvious real-world applications, you'll probably never apply it and definitely not retain it.

Making You Smarter

Test prep makes you better at measured intelligence without improving your genuine intelligence. School improves things like IQ scores in part because teachers often directly teach the kinds of questions that show up on IQ tests. Even training students to sit still and pay attention improve test scores, but aren't actually indicators of intelligence. Education ends up raising "crystallized intelligence," but not "fluid intelligence."

Making someone's IQ higher is easy, but keeping it there is very difficult due to fade out or summer learning loss. Year-round school only fixes this while the students are in school; once they graduate it kicks in all the same.

How People Get Good at Their Jobs

K. Anders Ericcson:

Novices improve as long as they are:

• Given a task with a well-defined goal
• Motivated
• Provided with feedback
• Provided with ample opportunities for repetition and gradual refinements of their performance

Then, people must do deliberate practice:

• Raise the bar
• Struggle to surmount it
• Repeat

Discipline and Socialization

The school ethic and the work ethic don't perfectly overlap. Both of them involve follow orders and cooperate with others, only school rewards abstract understanding over practical results and passing exams over winning in the market. Students could also develop a work ethic by working. The socialization provided by school is extremely leisurely, especially when accompanied by grade inflation.

Who You Know

You may find some great connections in engineering or education, but most of your lucrative networking happens after you graduate anyway.

The False Promises of Education

Most of what schools teach has no value in the market, students fail to learn most of what they are taught, and adults forget most of what they learn.

The Puzzle is Real: The Handsome Rewards of Useless Education

Graduating high school pays a 23% premium, a bachelor's pays 73% over high school, and a master's 122% over high school. If education is mostly signal, why is this so?

Credit Where Credit Is Due: The Specter of Ability Bias

The labor market pays for the combined effect of education + preexisting ability. This means to get to the real education premium, you need to find workers with equal ability, but unequal education. You aren't a professional athlete but for the kind of practice they put in; you also need to account for their preexisting ability.

Ability bias is a third competeting story with human capital theory and signaling theory, that discredits what education adds to someone's preexisting ability. It says people determine skill, and thus don't need education as a certification of it.

Correcting For Ability Bias: What You See Is More Than What You Get

Students are different in many ways before they set foot in a classroom.

• Holding education constant, 1 IQ point raises earnings 1%
• Holding IQ constant, the education premium shrinks, but never vanishes.
• Correcting for cogntive bias and non-cognitive bias, the education premium shrinks by about half at each level, but still exists.

Labor Economists vs. Ability Bias

Labor economists write-off ability bias because no one can measure all of the abilities that cause career and academic success. That actually means the problem is worse than it appears, not negligle.

Wheat vs. Chaff?

This is the theory that curriculum is full of invaluable preparation (numeracy, technical training) and filler (history, Latin). In practice, wheat pays more than chaff, but chaff still pays. Also, correcting for ability bias, math and foreign language pays pretty well, but natural science doesn't. Economics pays as well as engineering, despite making no attempt at training people for jobs.

Yet the fact remains: Students can major in underwater basketweaving, enjoy a four-year party, and reasonably expect to out-earn peers who said "I'm not going to college because it's a waste of time" by 25%.

To capture the benefit of a "wheat" major, you need to do work that directly uses it. There's a substantial market punishment for not working directly in your vocational field. "Chaff" majors, in contrast, are interchangable, and some even enjoy premiums for working outside their field.

Is Credentialism a Creature of the State?

Almost all government employees have graduated high school, which is up from 66% in 1960. Governments tend to overpay their least educated employees, and underpay their most educated workers. On the whole, the private sector values education more highly than the public sector.

Almost 30% of US workers need a government license to legally do their jobs, and many of those licenses require education. You could say that the private sector is valuing education because the government is making them, but if occupational licensing were deregulated, the education premium would still be almost identical.

"IQ laundering": Employers fear high-IQ/low education applicants because they're signaling their lack of consientiousness and conformity. They also value intelligence, but it's effectively illegal to use IQ tests to screen applicants because of disparate impact to minorities. If they hire someone who went to a school, they can get the same benefit, though. The Griggs case also said that employers can't screen based on educational credentials (for the same reason) without a demonstrated business need, but this is not enforced in practice. Also, 10%-30% of large employers admit to using cognitive ability screening tests of some kind, and the total legal burden for this is very small. If employers really cared about just IQ, they would administer the tests and pay out a lawsuit here and there as a cost of doing business and save a bunch of money. Also, if IQ laundering were true, you'd just need to hand over college admissions letters, not diplomas.

Underrating the Benefits of Education

• Even though college isn't paying off as well as it used to, it still pays off better than not going to college
• Errors in measurement are probably underestimating the payoff of college. The real college premium is probably 10% higher than it appears.

The Real Rewards of Education

Going to school to certify skill is as lucrative as going to school to enhance skill.

If archaeology BAs are better workers than high school grads, employers needn't waste time wondering, "What useful skills do archaeology programs really teach?" Instead, they'll skip to the bottom line: "When I pay 25% extra for an achaeologist, I get my money's worth. End of story."

The Signs of Signaling: In Case You're Still Not Convinced

What is the social system behind this phenomenon?

The Sheepskin Effect

If you do all the work but don't graduate, does it matter? Human capital theory says no, signaling theory says yes. Labor economists usually treat "years of education" as equal, but usually only the graduation years actually improve earning. Ability bias would suggest that's because people who are capable of graduating usually graduate, but that advantage disappears when controlled for. The diplomas matter way more than the years of education

Malemployment and Credential Inflation

Workers are getting educated faster than the need for their education, by a lot. The labor market is an arms race, and every worker is trying to outdo each other. Signaling theory is again confirmed because bartenders with degrees still outearn bartenders who dropped out of high school by 70%-90% more. It could be ability bias, but controlling for that shrinks but never eliminates the education premium. The amount of education you need to get a job has truly risen more than the amount of education you need to do a job.

The Speed of Employer Learning

Signaling is a type of statistical discrimination: Using stereotypes that are true-on-average to save time and money. After a while, the employer gets to know you though. If the signal overstated your skill, your employer will pay extra because they fear losing you. If your signal understated your skill, your employer may hope to lose you.

It takes a while though: The sheepskin effect takes about 2 decades to go away completely. Everyone from college dropouts on down gets no ability premium for a decade.

Employers can figure out an employees intelligence relatively quickly, but takes much longer to figure out their consientiousness or conformity. The often never really do- they learn what they can conveniently learn, and then stop looking for more. Also, employers worry about seeming unfair or hurting morale, so they stick to formal pay scales. These max out good workers, and "min out" bad workers. They get stingy with raises and promotions, and eventually dehire the poor performers, and then the cycle starts all over again.

The Education Premium: Personal vs. National

An individual can beat the game, but the nation can't. Signaling is zero-sum.

1. Estimate the effect of a year of personal education on personal income - ~10% in America and the global average, ~7.4% in most rich countries
2. Estimate the effect of a year of national education on national income - 1%-3% in most countries.
3. Human capital's share of the credit is national effect / personal effect, everything else is signaling.

As countries get richer, they spend more on education.

Issue	What pure human capital says	What pure signaling says	Advantage?
Learning-Earning connection	Only job-relevant learning pays	Irrelevant learning pays too, as long as it's correlated with productivity	Signaling
Collegiate Exclusion	Colleges prevent unofficial attendance so students actually pay tuition	Colleges ignore unofficial attendance because the market doesn't reward it anyway	Signaling
Failing vs. Forgetting	Employers reward workers only for coursework they still know	Employers reward workers for coursework they used to know	Signaling
Easy A's, canceled classes, and cheating	Students care about only marketable skills, not graduation requirements or grades	Students care only about graduation requirements and grades, not marketable skills.	Signaling
Sheepskin effect	Graduation years won't be especially lucrative	Graduation years may be especially lucrative	Signaling
Malemployment	Degrees required to get a job depend solely on skills required to do a job	Degrees required to get a job rise when those degrees become more common	Signaling
Employer learning	Employers instantly discover and reward true worker productivity	Employers never discover or reward true worker productivity	Signaling
Personal vs. National returns	Education equally enriches individuals and the nation	Education enriches individuals, but not nations	Signaling

What About Test Scores?

Education doesn't generally improve test scores in the long run. High "value-added" teachers can inspire their students go to college at higher rates and make more money. Correlations between high test scores and national prosperity can be explained by high intelligence.

Labor Economists vs. Signaling

Labor economists take anything that looks like it supports human capital theory at face value, but try to perform stats gymnastics to discredit anything that points to signaling. It also may well be that academics fall in love with the current education model and rush to defend it.

Who Cares If It's Signaling? The Selfish Return to Education

Selfishly, it's irrelevant if education pays off because of human capital or signaling; just follow the money. Socially, it matters a lot. If it's human capital, education benefits mankind. If it's signaling, it's a incinerator for time, money, and brains in a futile attempt to make everyone look special.

The Selfish Return to Education: A Primer

When you weigh the value of education, you don't just need to know the returns, you also need to know the timing. Economists put a price tag on the amount you would spend for a benefit and the amount that you would spend to avoid something, and generate a rate of return.

A cynic isn't someone who puts a price on the sacred; a cynic is someone who puts a low price on the sacred.

• Education premium- The amount education raises your wage
• Tuition- What you pay for the education
• Foregone earnings- The extra income you would have earned if you had not gone to school

Return rates:

Inflation-adjusted Rate of Return	Quality
10%	Excellent
7%	Very good (average for stocks)
5%	Pretty good
3%	So-so
2%	Poor
<1%	Awful

The Selfish Return to Education: Counting Everything that Counts

You have to avoid double-counting- higher income and the things the higher income buys aren't two different benefits, they're two perspectives on the same benefit.

The Selfish Return to Education: The Case of the Good Student

A good student:

• Man or woman
• Full-time student or worker
• 73rd percentile cognitively
• Single and childless
• All local schools

Compensation: Correcting for ability bias, about half of the education premium is genuine, and because of the sheepskin effect graduation years are way more valuable Employment: Unemployment falls with more years of education. With a BA, it hits the average of 3.4%. Taxes and transfers: Apply the tax rate and add in $300 a week as the average unemployment benefit Job satisfaction: Increased education has little/no effect on job satisfaction Happiness: Education actually reduces happiness (when correcting for double-counting), perhaps because of inflated expectations "Agony and Ecstasy of Learning": 59-66% of high school and college students are bored every day. 2% are never bored. People who talk about feasts of the mind are either outliers or liars. As long as work is worse though, it's still a premium. It's not though- work happiness is generally higher than education happiness. Health: Education improves health and longevity to the value of $100 a year. Tuition: $3,662 a year, for public school list price - scholarships. Foregone earnings: Equal to the amount they would have made without education. Students sometimes have part-time jobs, but the pay is low and many of them are internships, so this offsets only about 10% of the loss. Experience: The job experience premium is worth about 2.5%. Completion probability: A good student has 92.3% chance at finishing high school in 4 years, 43.5% to finish a bachelor's degree in 4 years.

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.

Total: The returns are pretty good for every year (except the first year of a master's program). The return on a high school diploma is 16%, the return on a BA is 21%, and the return on a master's 8%. Failing to account for the full benefits and costs gives the astronomical numbers (29%, 41%, 22%) that are generally advertised.

The Selfish Return to Education: The Case of the Everyone Else

Doing the equation for three other profiles:

• Excellent (typical master's student)
• Fair (typical high school only grad)
• Poor (typical high school dropout)

Everyone gets good returns on high school. Owing to their large failure rate, fair and poor students get pretty bad returns out of college. Degree returns for electrical engineering and business are 5%-11% for good and excellent students, but only 1%-5% for poor and fair students. Fine arts returns -2%-2%. All of them technically raised compensation, but these are the returns adjusted for all other factors.

College pedigree has good returns, as long as the money is the same. You will probably see the best returns going to the best school that will accept you. That said, there is a substantial difference in return paying list price vs. getting scholarships. Excellent students from poor families should apply to the most selective schools, then go with the lowest bidder.

• High school is a good deal for everyone
• College is a good deal for excellent and good students
• Excellent students are well served by master's degrees

Consider also that college raises your chances of meeting and marrying someone who will also make more money.

Practical Guidance for Prudent Students

• Go to high school unless you're a terrible student- you'll see 5% returns
• College is a good deal for excellent and good students as long as:
  • You pick a "real" major
  • Go to a respected public school
  • Work full-time after you graduate
• Don't get a master's degree unless the stars align- right major, right circumstances, and you're an excellent student

Doubts

• Some models are simplified
• Associates degrees aren't valued by markets very much, and have very low completion rates
• PhDs have high returns, but even higher wash out rates (for people that have been at the top of their class their entire academic careers, no less)
• Professional degrees have high returns and high completion rates, but brutal admissions standards

The Spreadsheet of You

You can edit any of these values.

We Care If It's Signaling: The Social Return to Education

Once employers know enough to rank job candidates, further signaling is pure redistribution.

The Social Return to Education: A Primer

The Social Return to Education: Recounting Everything that Counts

• Some benefits are purely social (like reduction in violence), so we can't just tweak the selfish numbers.

Selfish returns focus on compensation, but social returns have to focus on producitivity. In human capital terms, productivity == compensation. Signaling allows for them to be true on average, but not for every individual. Strong credentials means you earn more than someone of your ability, weak credentials mean you earn less than someone of your ability.

To measure society's gain, you need to know why education raises pay. If education raises someone's productivity, then the worker's gain is society's gain. If education reveals someone's productivity, then society gains a lot less.

What share of education is signaling? Subtracting only the sheepskin effect from the annual return of education is 38%/59%/74% for HS/BA/MS. If we also attribute some of the annual benefit to signaling, we get 80% across the board.

The social cost of education is what you fail to produce while you're in school, and the benefit is what you produce afterward. If 80% of the value of education is signaling, then in a $5000 raise, $1000 is benefit to society and $4000 is just wealth transfer. 80% of your drop in unemployment rate is zero-sum (your employment is someone else's unemployment). That you need less welfare is just zero-sum transfers. The life satisfaction that comes from increased education is almost entirely based on status, which is zero-sum. Education has health benefits, but those are also just status benefits. The average social financial cost of a year of K-12 education is ~$11k, college is ~$8279 after discounts.

The Social Return to Education: Purely Social Benefits

There are no demonstrable improvements in living standards or economic growth from education. Even if you discount the data, you still have to contend with the other-worldliness of the curriculum.

Crime goes down with education, but it's not causal. Sheepskin effects still hold, which means that it's easier to find legal work with a diploma.

There is strong evidence that success (educational and otherwise) is strongly genetic. Upbringing has no effect on grades.

Crunching Society's Numbers: Cautious Signaling

With "the Good Student":

• The social return for a "good student" for high school is 3.4%, BA is 2%, master's is -4%.
• The social return for "poor student" for high school is 6.1%. Mildly curbing their criminality more than pays for itself.
• Master's students are an abysmal return across the board

There is little value in the combined benefits, so the return is low.

Crunching Society's Numbers: Reasonable Signaling

If you grant that signaling is 80% of education, the social returns are 0.2% for weak students for high school, and negative for everyone else at every level. Students are still improving at school, but they die well before society recoups their investment.

Crunching Society's Numbers: You Call That Reasonable?

At different estimates of signaling, high school can be a good deal for most, college for some, master's are a bad deal for society overall. High school's only clear social dividend is curbing poor student's high propensity for crime.

Searching For Social Returns

If you try to find any social returns for education:

• The most qualified students studying the most lucrative majors remain burdens to society overall
• Even STEM majors rarely apply their skills directly in their job
• Women show the least societal benefit because they commit virtually no crime to begin with and are less likely to use their education on the job

Doubts

• Outstanding research could walk signaling down to 60% or up to 90%
• Social returns hinge on workforce participation, but there is not enough research on how ability bias affects that
• The full social cost of crime is difficult to calculate

The Educational Drake Equation

For workers, education's social benefit equals the observed dropout-engineer gap, times the probability of successfully completing the education, times the fraction of the gap not due to preexisting ability differences, times the fraction of the gap not due to signaling.

Other schools of thought usually assign 100% certainty to these terms: Everyone who goes to school finishes, none of the gap is due to ability bias, none of the gap is signaling, and everyone works.

The White Elephant in the Room: We Need Lots Less Education

Every country in the world subsidizes education, and it enjoys extreme bipartisan support.

Bad arguments:

• "Nothing is more important than education!" - Food is, and we rely on markets for that
• "We need to invest in people!" - We rely on markets for all kinds of investments
• "Even the poorest students deserve a good education" - We can use means-tested vouchers and other solutions that don't involve the government running schools or subsidizing education for kids who aren't poor

No one can determine when education spending would be too much.

The Best Pro-Education Arguments: What's Wrong with Them

In a free market, evaluating the value for proeducation policies would be straight-forward. Estimate the social return, and see if it exceeds the selfish return. If it doesn't, doing nothing is better than doing something. The entire world is overeducated.

Irrationality

The market fails to convince people to selfishly invest in education. The subsidies make it too hard to ignore.

• Equate selfish and social returns

Credit Constraints

The market fails to provide enough opportunities for people to selfishly invest in themselves. Kids don't have any collateral to put up, so even a sound return could be a bad investment. Students leave school too early, shortchanging themselves and us.

• Equate selfish and social returns

Externalities

Claim that people won't invest selfishly in something that primarily provides a social return. We need them to benefit society, so we need to entice them to stay in school.

Schoolcraft as Soulcraft?

How Big Is Your Elephant?

• School spending ($1.1T) far outstrips defense spending ($700B)
• Like a rich uncle, government helps us waste
• Measuring the amount of government spending on education is difficult, because it's easy to double and triple count
• 12% of student loans are subsidized with tax dollars

Cutting Education: Why, Where, How

• Discovering wasteful spending does not magically reveal constructive alternatives. We can cut without redirecting.

Cut the fat from curriculum

• For littles, replace low-value topics with more playground or library time
• Stop requiring useless coursework
• Stop subsidizing useless coursework
• Start with obvious waste, then consider and evaluate everything else

Cutting subsidies for education

• Shift the costs from taxpayers to students and families
• Raise tuition for public schools
• Cut subsidies
• Turn grants into loans
• Charge borrowers market rates
• Impose some tuition for high school

Attendance needs to fall dramatically. We could cut college attendance ~20% by raising the real annual cost $5k-$10k.

Rich societies can afford to waste trillions, but we have so many other opportunities- curing cancer, driverless cars, and ending world hunger.

The Hidden Wonder of High Tuition and Student Debt

• If too many people already go to college, reducing the cost exacerbates the problem
• Tuition rarely varies by field, but just increasing costs across the board lowers the return of useless majors first
• "Bennett Hypothesis": Expanding access with loans enriches colleges as they restrict access with tuition

Raising Completion Rates?

They still primarily reflect past academic success. They don't make poor students perform like fair students. The only realistic way to raise completion rate is to slash academic standards, which defeats the purpose.

Signaling and Social Justice

If schools were primarily about teaching skills, raising tuition costs would increase inequality. Since it's mostly signaling, it just turns into credential inflation. They're only valuable because they're costly- if they were cheap, they lose their value as signals. Society is as unequal as before, but everything is more expensive.

If most people can't afford to go to college, college loses power as a signal. It becomes ineffective to ignore applicants who can't afford college. If everyone can afford college, it becomes a good signal again. When most Americans didn't finish high school, high school dropouts faced very little stigma in the market.

What I Really Think

Government should stay out of education entirely. Voucher systems may increase quality, but the problem is quantity- there's too much education. State-sponsored religion has a poor track record- the solution isn't to minimize the connection, but to eliminate it. The data is scarce on the returns for K-8 education, but when Britain made education compulsory in in 1880, 95% of 15 year olds were already literate.

Why Not Tax Education?

Education still has some skill creation, and it violates the libertarian principles of leaving people alone.

The False Savior of Online Education

Online education is great at building skills, but poor at sending signals. Technophiles shouldn't predict an online testing revolution until they can explain why there wasn't an offline testing revolution. The online schools aren't signaling consientiousness and conformity.

The Politics of Social Disirability Bias

People are responsive with their own resources- groups of people are frequently foolish with their collective resources. Once an idea becomes politically popular, it tends to stay politically popular even if it's demonstrably false.

People believe false things in the first place because they don't like expressing or believing ugly truths. We gratitate toward things that "sound good." This is called social desirability bias. Leaders have a strong incentive to be crowd pleasers, so they reinforce this.

It's not a lie if you believe it, and if you avoid calm deliberation, you can believe almost anything.

1 > 0: We Need More Vocational Education

You could treat the signaling revelation as a prescription- how can we turn schools from time sinks to skill factories?

Until uncoached adults score better on reading, writing, and matah tests, we should presume basic skills remain static.

Why Vocational Education Rules

Vocational education revolves around teaching specific job skills and learning-by-doing, not learning-by-listening. Vocational students, when compared with similar students who didn't go to vocational schools, their selfish returns are great. The signal vocational ed sends is weak (~k40%), but not bad. Social returns are ~7%. Why? Status is zero-sum, skill is not.

What's Wrong With Child Labor?

Civilized adults recoil at the name [child labor]. Children with joy in their hearts don't belong in gray workshops, toiling all day long, cogs in the machine. They're kids, not robots! Well, unless the gray workshop is called a "school" and the cogs earn zero wages.

Child labor has a dark side, but so does education (eg. corporal punishment). Early job experience boosts post-graduation earnings by 5%-20% for at least a decade. It also lowers crime by not sticking work-oriented students in school.

Doing any job teaches you how to have a job better than any school. Unpaid internships are a good way to learn and have benefits to the business, but only if the law isn't enforced. It rarely is for college grads, but always is for low-wage jobs. Working enthusiastically has higher returns than studying apathethically.

Misvocational Education, or 1 > 0

Liberal arts education teaches people how to do 0 jobs. Vocational education teaches people how to do 1 job. In 12 years, it's reasonable to prepare students for at least 1 job.

Traditional liberal arts isn't a broad education; it's a hyper-narrow technical one in rare professions. STEM is general training for quants and scientists, not general training for workers. Liberal arts education is easy for educators; teach your students what your teachers taught you. Vocational education requires staying on top of the market. It's easy to imagine that all students start as academics and then switch to vocational if it doesn't work out. Most students who wash out of academics are too embittered to switch though.

Youth Reimagined

I always thought there was something ill-fated about the promise of three million "shovel ready jobs" made to a society that no longer encourages people to pick up a shovel.

As society evolves, teaching students different occupations makes sense. Teaching them no occupations doesn't.o

Work is vocational education in its purest form.

Instead of fearing a dystopian future, we should gawk at our dystopian present.

Nourishing Mother: Is Education Good For The Soul?

Education can be good for the soul, but existing education isn't.

Meritorious Education

To qualify as a merit good, education must meet 3 criteria:

• Worthy content
• Skillful pedagogy
• Eager students

None of which are met. There are pockets of greatness surrounded by insipid busywork. Most teachers are boring, and most sudents are worse. While the education may provide some good, that doesn't automatically justify unlimited expense.

Modern education's staunchest fans don't nourish their souls by watching YouTube videos of average teachers.

Since anyone can access any information from experts for free on the internet, the case for government subsidized enrichment collapses. This is doubly so because the fact that so few people avail themselves of free high culture on the internet is evidence that most people just don't want it.

The Soulful Fallback

Education could shape society in two ways:

• Leadership: Teachers ideas are planted in students' heads. This changes society.
• Peer Effects: Students influence each other's choices. This reshuffles society. College students are less religious than the rest of society, so a new college student might become less religious to fit in. The rest of society is (by definition) more religious than college students, so non-college students feel pressure to become more religious.

Peer effects likely outweigh leadership. Even in areas where it leadership seems obvious, the effects on existing attitudes and behaviors is mild. Like signaling, boosting an individuals education can change their worldview, boosting a society's education rarely changes theirs.

High Culture Falls on Deaf Ears

Educators push high culture, but rarely pop culture.

Education can't be responsible for more than 100% of society's pop culture consumption. Most American families spend 5 times as much on alcohol as they do on reading. Literature teachers have failed to convince their captive audience. If you like high culture, you may have had a teacher that opened your eyes to it- that's an abnormal experience, though, and there's no reason to believe you would have never found it otherwise.

The Paper Tiger of Political Correctness

While there are certainly lots of ingredients to suggest that liberal professors are brain-washing students, the measured impact on political alignment is fairly small. Overall, it makes students very slightly more socially liberal and economically conservative. Issue by issue though, professors are as likely to repel students as attract them.

Knowledge of history should make people more consientious about contemporary issues. The problem is that people don't actually learn history, and even if they did their ability to transfer the patterns is very weak.

If a world of historical ignorance is scary, you should be scared already, but that's where we live. Second, humans' ability to transfer knowledge from one domain to another--such as from history to policy--is poor. When Bush Invaded Iraq, was he ignoring the lesson of the Vietnam War or heeding the lesson of the Korean War? So even if citizens knew the details of history, it is far from clear they'd fruitfully apply their knowledge.

Getting Out the Vote

Education makes people more likely to vote, but it makes non-educated people less likely to vote. It redistributes democracy, rather than growing it.

The Modern Lifestyle

• Increasing education makes people less theologically religiously, but raises things like church attendance. Students also understand their own religions poorly enough that they aren't even able to recognize when an idea might be challenging. The only kind of education that has demonstrably undercut religion is the education in former communist countries, which was harshly athiestic.
• Little effect on marriage and divorce after statistical corrections
• Education does lower fertility rates across the board

Broadening Horizons

Kids are close-minded, and schools can help broaden their horizons. They don't though- they replace the narrow-mindedness of students with the narrow-mindedness of the teachers. If educators really wanted to broaden horizons, they'd show what the world has to offer instead of just repeating what they were taught. The subjects being offered are still taught in the same stale way. True broadening might involve Japanese graphic novels, films from the 1980s, reading random wikipedia articles, etc. Expose boys to nursing, expose strong math students to insurance. Tell upper middle-class kids what plumbers and electricians do and earn.

To live the adage "Do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life," students must learn what lovable jobs are available.

The Merit of Play

School isn't the only thing that enriches the soul. There's little reason to favor a dominant role for education over a dominant role for play. As K-12 packed on the hours, it came at the expense of things like recess or open library time. In contrast, one of the biggest benefits of college is how much open time you have to discover new passions.

The Cynical Idealist

Eager students, passionate educators, and wise deciders are hopelessly outnumbered. Meritorious education survives, but it does not thrive. Motivating conscripts is difficult, and conscripts are what teachers have in the classroom.

I don't hate education. Rather I love education too much to accept our Orwellian substitute.

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.

Five Chats on Education and Enlightenment

Chat #1: Education, What It's Good For

Chat #2: College and Catch-22s

Chat #3: How Educational Investments Measure Up

Chat #4: Why Do You Hate Education?

Chat #4: Education vs. Enlightenment

If schools don't teach poetry, outliers will go extinct.

No we won't. Remember: plenty of ideas and culture receive no taxpayer support. Public schools don't teach religion, yet religion endures. Few schools public or private push rock-and-roll, but rock-and-roll thrives. When I was growing up, I explored my many interests at the library. Today's kids enjoy the divine bounty of the internet.

Conclusion

• Education is overrated from a social point of view. Students forget most of what they learn after the final exam.
• Educated is better from a selfish point of view, but it's still overrated. Most people shouldn't go to college, and most college students shouldn't go to college. This is true because of ability bias and completion probability.
• Education is grossly overrated from a humanist point of view. Despite heroic effects, adult consumption of high culture is low.
• Ergo, cut education budgets and shift the financial burden from taxpayers to families.

If You See Something, Say Something

Count the times your peers asked "Will this be on the test"-- but never "Will this be on the job?"

The facts are obvious, but the truth is unlikely to be embraced because of Social Desirability Bias.

The Punch Line

Students spending fewer years in the classroom won't be "deskilling", it will be credential deflation.

Even bad students are more sinned against than sinning. If adults had voted for educational austerity, adulthood would start years earlier. "Move out and pay your own way" would then be a viable option instead of a cruel taunt.