Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Higher Education
2018-05-10 · Guest: Bryan Caplan (Professor of Economics at George Mason University) · 51:55
The Case Against Education and Signaling
Bob Zadek interviews economist Bryan Caplan about his provocative book, The Case Against Education. Caplan argues that the primary value of higher education is “signaling”—proving to employers that a student is intelligent, hardworking, and conformist—rather than actually teaching useful job skills. They discuss the wastefulness of government subsidies, the success of vocational models in countries like Switzerland, and why “learning how to learn” is largely a myth.
Topics: Higher Education, Signaling Model, Human Capital, Government Subsidies, Vocational Training, Economics of Education, Public Choice
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek – Host
- Bryan Caplan – Professor of Economics at George Mason University
- Michael – Caller
- Evan – Caller
Introduction to the Case Against Education [00:18]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. The show always of ideas, never of attitude. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning.
This morning’s guest is Bryan Caplan. Bryan Caplan is an economist, teaches economics at George Mason University. He is a blogger at EconLog, a must-read every morning, and he is the author of three books, the last of which is the subject of this morning’s discussion. Bryan has written The Myth of the Rational Voter, which The New York Times has labeled the best political book of that year. He also has written Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and the subject of this morning’s show, The Case Against Education.
Education—is anybody against education? I grew up in a household where about my first thoughts, and the thought impressed upon me constantly throughout my growing up, were my parents urging me to “get a good education.” That was the phrase. All of my friends were instructed: get a good education. It was a core belief; it was then and frankly, it still is now. The Founders cherished public education. Jefferson felt strongly about public education, as did Madison. Public education, education in general, was the only way our country could survive.
Bryan, you’re taking on my parents, Jefferson, and Madison in the subject of your book, The Case Against Education. Tell us what the thesis of your book is, and good morning.
Bryan Caplan: Good morning. Yeah, so a lot of what I say is very compatible with what your parents and friends told you. Where I agree is with the idea that if you go and do well in school, that you’re likely to get a better job and make more money. What I question is that you’re actually learning a lot of useful job skills in school. So I say most of what you study in school, you’re never going to need to know after the final exam, which then raises the puzzle: well, why do employers pay you so much for studying stuff that they don’t actually require you to know?
And my answer is that when you study subjects that you don’t use, you still impress employers. It’s a way of getting certification, or what we say is a way of signaling. It’s a way of persuading employers that you’re good. And the key point here is that if one person shows off and looks good, that one person can get a better job and make more money. But if everyone shows off, this just raises the bar. Employers then say, “Well, if everyone’s got high school, now you need college. Everyone’s got college? Fine, you need a master’s degree if you want me to look twice at you.”
Signaling vs. Human Capital [03:18]
Bob Zadek: So is the thesis of your book—of course, you’re an economist, that’s what you study, that’s what you teach, or one of the things you study and certainly is what you teach—is the thesis of your book as simple as education is too expensive, it is overpriced, we are buying something that is useless? And would the thesis—education of course is expensive, most people use that phrase although there’s nothing to measure it against—but is it that the government, that is all of us, are spending too much on education and it is not a sufficient public good to justify government money? Would you feel the same way if there were no government subsidies and the students or their parents were paying the money out of their own pocket? Is it a waste of money per se, or only a waste of money if government spends it?
Bryan Caplan: Well, what I say is that there’s always a good reason to be suspicious about what’s going on, especially when you see people studying subjects they never need to actually use on the job but it still pays. But yeah, I mean, I’d say that the large, large part of the problem is that government is pouring money on this, largely just because they see, “Well, one person gets more school then they do better, so if everyone did school, everyone would do better.” And that’s precisely what I’m calling into question.
Right? So I say, if you want to understand what is the real social effect of education, you’ve got to actually crack open the black box or look in the classroom and say, “Well, what are they studying? What are they actually learning? Is this actually useful stuff?” And if you find that they’re learning useful things, then you can say, “Well, this is enriching the individual and enriching society.” On the other hand, if they’re just studying, say, poetry, or a foreign language that they’re never going to actually speak, or history—if they’re studying these subjects where they’re not going to actually know them and it’s paying for the individual, it’s probably what you’re doing is you’re just creating this rat race, or you’re encouraging this rat race where everyone needs more degrees just so they can say, “Hey, look at me, I’ve done more than other people.” So again, like, selfishly speaking, this works. But it’s not a way for society to get rich.
Bob Zadek: And it is, as you point out, the objective case that job seekers who have a college degree—even a college degree in a subject where a lot of what they learned is from a job performance standpoint useless—you mentioned poetry, I don’t mean to pick a fight with poets or professional poets if there is such a thing, but I’ll just pick poetry because you did—a student has a poetry degree, but he or she has a degree and they get a better job. Doesn’t the student, even with a poetry degree, realize some value and maybe sufficient value with the degree to justify the student, putting aside government for a minute, doesn’t the student get a fair amount of value from that otherwise, from the standpoint of the student herself, worthless degree because she does get a better job?
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, exactly. That’s really my whole point, is that what’s going on is a system where people advance their own interests by showing off. And individually, that works quite well for a lot of people. But socially, it doesn’t make sense to encourage showing off, because the more showing off we’ve got, the more impressive you have to be to get employers to take a second look at you.
So yeah, in terms of the individual student, the main criticism I have is just that a lot of people don’t finish, and if you have a good reason to think you won’t finish, then especially college isn’t likely to be a good deal for you. But again, most of my focus again is looking at it from the taxpayer’s point of view. Is this really the kind of thing that makes sense to encourage? And that’s where I say no.
The Diploma Mill and Jumping Through Hoops [07:22]
Bob Zadek: I guess the problem is something akin to what we have in healthcare today, and I’ll correlate healthcare to education in a moment. But in education, like in healthcare, we have the one paying the bill—the patient in the case of healthcare and the student in the case of education—is the one who is the spender of the money is spending somebody else’s money. In healthcare, the patient has little idea of what things actually cost, and students who are either getting student loans or subsidies, they don’t care that much how much something costs, at least not immediately. So is the problem of the cost of education in part the disconnect, both in healthcare which we’re not talking about this morning and education which we are? Is the problem the disconnect, that if the student were spending her own money, whether it’s a direct more connection with the repaying of the loan or no subsidy, would that in and of itself drive down the cost of education and make students and their parents be more intelligent purchasers of the product?
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, well, I mean, definitely if you’re paying your own money, then you’re going to be more careful with what you do and more careful with your decisions. In terms of, is that the sole problem? Again, I don’t think that’s the sole problem. I think that it’s a big contributing problem. Again, I think it’s very important to take a look at what are students actually studying and see, “Hmm, is this something that’s really going to be useful or is this looking more like something where you’re basically just showing off?”
So in terms of, is the cost really high because of the subsidies? Well, you need to think about, so is it—are you focused on the price including the subsidies or not? Right? So again, the whole reason why government subsidies encourage schooling is because after you subtract out the subsidy, it makes it cheaper. So again, I would say that a big difference between my book and most others: most people are trying to figure out a way to make college cheaper so more people go, and I’m rather trying to figure out a way to stop the madness, to switch from a society where people feel like they’ve got to go to college to get a good job back to one where you can get a good job right out of high school, which really used to be the case. And I say there’s no good reason why we couldn’t have that again.
Bob Zadek: It sounds like your observations are—well, there’s this phrase in society of “diploma mills.” We all have heard the phrase. It’s simply mail-order or online where you are able to spend some amount of money, go through some pointless ritual, at the end of the day you get the sheepskin, and you have bought a sheepskin which puts that seal of approval on your forehead. It sounds like you fear that all universities, or most—of course you can’t say all and never get away with it—but most universities are in effect diploma mills. They’re selling the diploma or the degree and not the content. Is that too broad a statement?
Bryan Caplan: Well, probably. At least the classic idea of a diploma mill is a place where they don’t really require much of any work; you just give them 20 bucks and they give you the degree. So I don’t think that’s what’s going on at most universities. Most universities actually, a shocking number of people start, pay the money, and then don’t finish. If it were a real diploma mill, they’d all be finishing.
So it’s true that I say most schools aren’t teaching a lot of useful job skills, but it’s not like they just hand you a piece of paper in exchange for money. Rather, they make you jump through a bunch of hoops. And the hoops are sufficiently numerous and challenging that a lot of students don’t finish. And at lower-ranked schools, actually most students would not wind up finishing even if they’re going full-time. But again, sort of the thrust of it, which is that you’re getting a degree but you haven’t learned to actually do anything, is the same. But again, I would say in a way my story’s a lot more pessimistic because it’s saying that people spend years doing a lot of boring work that they don’t like doing, and then the only thing they get out of it really is the seal of approval rather than job skills. Whereas at least with the diploma mill, you don’t get much out of it but you don’t put much into it either.
The Signaling Effect: Intelligence, Work Ethic, Conformity [12:22]
Bob Zadek: In your book, you talk about the signaling effect of having a college degree. A very, very interesting concept, one that I hadn’t heard about before I learned of it from you. Tell us about the signaling effect, what that’s all about and how it works in the context of education.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, sure. So think about it like this: there’s two totally different ways that you can raise the value of a diamond. One is to get the expert gem-smith to go and cut it perfectly, making it a great diamond. Another one, though, is to give it to a guy with that little eyepiece and he looks at it and says, “Oh, it’s flawless, wonderful,” and he puts a sticker on it saying a triple-A diamond. Both of these things raise the value of a diamond.
Right? So similarly for education. People usually think about education as pouring useful skills into you, and then you’re improved and then of course employers like you better. And that is one story, and it’s a genuine part of the story. So literacy and numeracy are genuinely taught in school and employers do need them. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on, a lot of other teaching of material that you aren’t ever going to use after the final exam. And that’s signaling. That’s where you are getting certified or stamped.
Right? And in the book, I explore: so what exactly is it they are certifying or stamping? What is it that you signal when you get that degree? And the obvious thing is you’re just showing that you’re smart. Smart people find it easier to excel in school. Right? Also, you’re showing you’re hardworking, because even the smartest person who’s really lazy isn’t going to be able to finish a degree. Right? And then the last thing I say that you are signaling with a degree is sheer conformity—just saying, “Look, I am a person that when you tell him to go and jump, doesn’t go and argue with you, just says ‘how high?’”
Right? And notice, employers need all three of these traits. Right? So even if you’re really smart and hardworking, if you just aren’t a team player, it’s a problem. So these are all ways that people in our society want to show off, and school is the main way that we actually convince employers that we’ve got this trifecta of desirable traits.
Specific Certifications vs. Liberal Arts [16:35]
Bob Zadek: I was trying to sort out, in learning the thesis of your book, I was trying to sort out where the dual concepts of a degree fit in with a certification. I’m an accountant, I’m a CPA. I don’t have a license anymore, but I had a CPA’s license, which means I went through CPA-centric stuff. I studied topics in college, and I had practical experience, and I took an exam. And without that CPA certificate, I would not have been employable by an accounting firm. Now, the accounting firm didn’t care one bit whether I took a course in astronomy, which I did because it was easy, or took a course in genetics because it was easy. They only cared about my certificate and about my specific training. So do you—is a subtext of your book that society is squandering a trillion dollars a year, as you point out, in education, or a lot of that, and you seem to favor or would you support or would it make more sense to move more towards specific certifications in specific fields of study? Asking the question another way: do you feel that society would be better off if there was less liberal arts education, less money spent on liberal arts education, and more money spent on specific job skills that is the purpose of education is to get you a job?
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, yes, definitely. So I mean, from the point of view of taxpayers, it’s a lot better to pay for someone to learn something useful than to go and study something they’re never going to need to know again. I think that’s pretty obvious. So yeah, I mean, a society where things were more like the CPA, I think that would be a big improvement. There are special subfields that work that way, so it’s the same thing for actuaries, for example.
Again, what I say, though, the problem though is that in a world where almost everyone needs to get a college degree in order to get a good job, then how do you go and break the mold? How do you go and move to a better system? And again, I say the problem is that anytime someone comes with a new system, the first people in line to do that are people who are trying to take the easy way out, people that don’t like the system that we have. And again, unfortunately, that looks bad to employers.
So even if—a lot of people read my book and they say, “Well, if this were really true, then someone would just come up with a better, cheaper way.” And I say, “Well, look, you try to come up with a better, cheaper way of showing that you’re conformist.” So say, “This is a great new weird way of showing how conformist you are.” So there’s a catch-22: the first people in line to do that aren’t going to be conformists, they’re going to be non-conformists. So yeah, I say that with all of the hundreds of billions of dollars of government money on the side of the status quo, it tends to lock us into this very dysfunctional system that we’ve got.
The Liberal Arts and “Soft” Sciences [19:47]
Bob Zadek: I think what you’re saying—I’m struggling to channel an economics professor—I think what you’re saying is that society has a built-in bias which forces government, forces society, forces all of us to pay for soft, non-job-specific courses, soft sciences perhaps, or liberal arts as it often is called. The liberal arts portion of an education, when society gets no benefit, the individual may or may not get a benefit—that’s very personal to the individual. So is—if everybody signed on to the Caplan approach or bought into what you are proposing, would it result in simply much less government money and perhaps individual money being spent on liberal arts? That liberal arts is simply, if you want to learn to play golf, spend your own money, we’re not going to subsidize it. Is learning to play golf the same as learning poetry? Is that what would be a byproduct if people followed your teaching and your urgings?
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, I think so. Although it’s worth pointing out that the actual share of college graduates who get a degree in liberal arts is no longer all that high. I mean, so again, like majors that people don’t think about very much but are actually very common now: so there’s like the communications major. You wouldn’t usually think of communications as liberal arts, but in terms of the labor market, it’s probably as useless as history or poetry or almost anything else. I mean, nominally it’s sort of preparing people for a career in the media, but there’s so many people who get communications degrees and so few jobs in the media that almost inevitably the large majority of communications majors don’t wind up working in anything related to what they studied.
And the same probably goes for the undergraduate business degree, which sounds kind of vocational, but people know it’s a—not really, it’s just sort of something that we give to people that find economics too hard. So yeah, so there are a lot of these majors where whether they’re liberal arts or whether they’re something else, they’re just not really preparing people for any job they’re ever likely to have. Psychology’s another one; it’s a very popular major and yet it’s almost impossible to get a job as a psychologist with just a bachelor’s degree. You’ve got to go and get another degree if you want to even counsel people.
Bob Zadek: So is—in your view, is or should the role of higher education be purely preparation for a specific job, profession, vocation and the like? And if anybody wants to get anything else out of higher education, they’re on their own, but taxpayer money should not be used for it? You don’t—you wouldn’t complain if somebody chose to spend their own money to learn poetry. You wouldn’t be opposed to that, it’s their own money. They might as well spend it to play golf.
Bryan Caplan: Right, exactly. If you actually want to spend your money on it and you of course you actually like it, then great. I mean, I think that what a lot of what goes on is that people sort of pretend that they’re really interested in these subjects when actually the real reason they’re there is precisely to look better to employers. So I mean, like, if you actually just wanted to learn about poetry, like you can go to YouTube, there’s the internet, there’s tons of stuff, right? And you can interact with other people.
I mean, to me, like one of the most telling things about higher education is that it’s actually completely free already. And when I say that, what I mean is that if all that you want to do is unofficially attend classes, you can just move to next to whatever school you want to go to and start going, and no one will ever bat an eye, no one will complain. So like, I was—got my PhD at Princeton. If you just show up in Princeton classes and start attending, no one’s going to stop you. There’s no effort to see whether you’ve really paid your money or whether you were accepted. And yet, even though anyone can get unofficial education at any college in the country for free, virtually no one in the country tries to do this. It’s extremely rare to get a non-student who just wants to take a class for personal enrichment. And I think this is very revealing. It just says, what are people’s priorities? It’s like, basically without the official certification, the grades, the diplomas, which you’re doing in order to make yourself impressive to employers, I mean, there’d be almost no demand for this stuff. As a professor, it kind of makes me sad to think that people aren’t really curious about this, but I think the honest thing to say is, yeah, doesn’t look like they are very interested.
Bob Zadek: It sounds like you’re making all of higher education sound like they are all, as I said earlier, diploma mills. We’re going to go to break in a second, Bryan. When we come back, I’m kind of curious: when you go into the faculty lounge, do you find yourself eating all of your meals by yourself? How do your colleagues take this? Hold that answer until we come back from break. This is Bob Zadek speaking with Bryan Caplan. We’re talking about Bryan’s book, The Case Against Education. We’ll be back in 60 really short seconds.
[Break]
The Faculty Lounge and “Learning How to Learn” [18:30]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. We are always the show of ideas, never the show of attitude. This morning we’re speaking with Bryan Caplan. Bryan is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He most recently has written The Case Against Education, a book where Bryan believes that most of the money that society spends on education—not limited to college education, but also grade school and intermediate school and high school education—most of the money is wasted from a societal standpoint. Society gets little or no benefit from that money, and it seems to be just baked into our system. And Bryan would hope that the one trillion with a “T” dollars of educational expenditures which the government spends, or which society spends, would be greatly reduced.
Now Bryan, is the problem in part that a degree is kind of bundled services? That in the courses that one takes in college, some of the courses may be quite valuable—I’ll go back to my reference to I was an accounting major, they were quite valuable, I couldn’t have entered the profession I was in for a while without those courses—and then I took genetics and astronomy and psychology and stuff I really didn’t care about very much at all but had to take some non-business courses. I was required to do so, so I would become, quote, “well-rounded,” and I took those courses, hated them, cut class, didn’t learn a thing, but somebody paid for them. So is it a bundling problem, that some of education is of course valuable because it creates—it makes people more productive in society, it gets them a job? Is that part of the issue, the bundling of a college education?
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, sure. So I mean, if you go and scrutinize what you’re studying, you’re almost sure to be able to find some things that are genuinely useful. But here’s the striking thing: if when people go and try to figure out, right, why does education pay? When they go and break it down and say, “Alright, here are the things that seem really useful, here are the things that don’t seem very useful,” generally what they find is the useless stuff pays very well in the labor market too.
So I spend a lot of work on, like, American high school curriculum. So like one big result: foreign languages seem to pay in the labor market. Right? Now, why? Hardly any American jobs actually use them. But again, like the obvious story is that you need these foreign languages even to get into college. So if you don’t go and do that, then it holds you back through the rest of your career. So you know, this is something that’s actually literally true: if I hadn’t taken Spanish when I was in high school, I simply could not have gone to the University of California, Berkeley because it was an absolute requirement. So I really wouldn’t be talking to you here today if I hadn’t gone and studied a foreign language that I’ve never actually used professionally, not even close. I mean, the teaching was so poor, how could I?
Bob Zadek: So it is—but it’s compulsory bundling. It’s society has—it’s you’ve described so much societal irrational behavior. You couldn’t have gotten into Berkeley without studying Spanish. Well, somebody in Berkeley made this utterly irrational decision, perhaps driven by some nod to the fact that in California there are lots of Hispanics and somehow there is a relationship between studying Spanish in high school and succeeding at Berkeley. But you describe in that one little story you’ve told so much irrational behavior all along the way, and there you are, you had to go through this empty ritual of studying Spanish in order to end up becoming an economics professor at GMU.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, so I mean, I think that these requirements go back a very long time. So I mean, basically, you know, like in the 19th century, there’s an idea of the very well-rounded Renaissance man that would be turned out by top schools. And as the university system expanded, they basically copied the same model. So I think—so you know, like when people come up with a curriculum, they say, “Well, someone should have, I don’t know, like three, four years of math, three, four years of English, three years of foreign language, you know, three years of history and civics.” And you know, and so like so much of it is just backwards-looking where people just keep repeating whatever the requirements of the past were.
I mean, so much of what professors teach is they just teach whatever they were taught by their professors in turn. You may have heard, you know, like in earlier centuries, you know, the whole idea of universities was to prepare people for law, medicine, and the ministry. And if you look at the way that modern universities work, they’re not really so different from these 19th-century colleges. We’ve expanded the list of things that you’re getting prepared for, but still sort of the dead hand of the past is pretty easy to see, the fingerprints all over the system that we’ve got.
Caller Michael: Clinical Psychology and Apprenticeship [22:22]
Bob Zadek: I’d like to take a caller, and Bryan, after we finish talking with Michael, I’m curious about whether other countries, other societies have managed to evolve into a better Caplan-esque system than the one we have in the United States. But first we’ll take a caller. Michael, welcome to the show this morning.
Caller (Michael): Thank you, Bob. Bryan, I wanted to thank you for a great book. I haven’t read it yet, but from what I’ve heard so far in this interview, it seems to make a lot of sense. The question I have is—you’re welcome—when I was a high school student, I didn’t have a clue as to what I wanted to do, so I did what seemed like the road of least resistance and I just kept on going and on with my education. Finally got a PhD and I’m a clinical psychologist, which I really couldn’t be and thrive without a PhD. So how would a high school student determine at that point whether it’s better for them to go out and get a good job, as you say many of them could do, or just go on through years of education to get the kind of job that they would really love?
Bryan Caplan: Right. So I mean, if I was giving advice to an individual, what I always need to ask is, “Well, how well are you doing in high school?” Right? So there are people who do very poorly in high school who then blossom in college, but that’s very rare. Right? So you know, just when I—whenever I’m giving actual educational counseling, I just say, “Well, look, you know, so the best predictor of the future is the past. So you know, if you’ve been doing really well in high school, then it’s probably going to work out for you if you keep going on to college. On the other hand, if you’ve been struggling in high school or you just don’t like school, then that’s where I would recommend looking for something else to do because your odds of college working out for you are very low.” In terms of how people would actually learn different careers or how they would get exposed to different possibilities, is that what you’re thinking of?
Caller (Michael): Uh, no. I’m thinking of—there’s some careers where you couldn’t get exposed to that, like being a clinical psychologist. Hard to get exposed to that as a high school student. But I didn’t do well in school at all, and I didn’t like school. So another quality to get a PhD is just stick-to-itiveness. If you’re persistent and you’re willing to sit and read books and take exams, then that could be a good predictor of being successful in school.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, of course. Normally if you have those, then you’re doing well in high school. My guess is that if you have a PhD, you were doing very well in high school, just not as well as some of your friends. Right? See, yeah, so like PhDs tend to say, “I was terrible,” when really what they mean is they were getting B-pluses. So I don’t know about you, but that’s common.
But again, you know, like in terms of, you know, like what could an alternate system be like? You know, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t have an apprenticeship system where people are learning to actually be clinical psychologists, you know, starting in high school. Like, why couldn’t you be an apprentice in the office of someone who’s already doing it and learn it by doing? Uh, so I mean, my best guess—tell me if I’m wrong—is that actually a lot of what you know, you learned by doing. Is that true?
Caller (Michael): Oh, every—just about everything I learned out of school, not in school. And by the way, I learned more about history from my book club than from my history classes.
Bob Zadek: Michael, thanks for the call this morning.
The Founders and the Educated Electorate [25:08]
Bob Zadek: Bryan, a couple of follow-up questions. First, were the Founders, of course, were committed to an educated population. Democracy was a big experiment, and they believed that without an educated electorate—it’s interesting how we go back to The Myth of the Rational Voter—but they felt that a wise and educated electorate was essential for the success of democracy. Is your position at variance with that strongly held belief of our Founders?
Bryan Caplan: Well, I guess I would just step back and say, what do you think about the democracy that we’ve got? Do you think it’s okay? If you think it’s okay, then I’d say that they’re just wrong, because the electorate is not well-informed at all. Like, whenever you give the public any test of civics or history, even very easy questions, public performance is terrible.
Now, you might say kind of like me that, yeah, well, the public hardly knows anything and that’s why things don’t work very well. Right? So I mean, you know, that’s what I would tend to say: yeah, well, like if for democracy to give good results, the public would need to know a whole lot about not just history and civics, but economics and science. And then what’s wrong with the world? Well, the public doesn’t know this stuff. The public’s knowledge is negligible.
Now, like, how can I be so critical of the teaching of these subjects if I think it’s so important? The answer is, people study these subjects for years right now, and yet they know next to nothing. So it looks like it’s just really hard to actually teach these subjects or we’re just really bad at doing it. So I mean, I have thought about other things you could do. I think something that would be a much better use of taxpayer money would be if you just said, “Every year there’s a test of your knowledge, and if you get a good score, you get some money.” Right? And this is a way to encourage people first of all to learn the material however they think best and whatever way works best, but also it’s a great reason for people to try to remember whatever they’ve learned, because you can keep retaking the test every year.
One of the basic problems with all education is that people forget most of what they learn after the test is done. And yet, if you want people to be good voters, it doesn’t do for them to learn civics in high school and then forget it afterwards. What good is that? Right? So a system where you encourage people to maintain their knowledge—and again, I think the simplest thing is just if every year there’s a national test where you can go and get some money if you get a good score—that seems like a much more effective way of getting the result. Right? And you know, by the way, even if the test were politically biased, I’d say just being able to get a good score on a biased test says something. It says you can understand things well enough to give people the answers they’re looking for, which is itself a pretty good kind of knowledge when you think about it.
Rewarding Knowledge Directly [27:27]
Bob Zadek: You just really tickled my imagination, Bryan, because now I envision—there is of course a phrase in economics or psychological phrase called “human capital.” People spending money to make themselves better people because it pays off in the long run. And rather than spending money on education so the money goes out and the humans get very little benefit, if the government instead of spending money on education spent money on rewarding people who have become educated, now an individual would pick—they might pick courses not for the money but simply because they’re curious, poetry or learning golf or something like that. Or they might choose to be smarter because they get rewarded. So the government still would be spending money, but would be spending money on very tangible or at least more measurable results. You are rewarding people who become better contributors to society and better citizens. There’d be a huge political component what they have to be smart at and what defines what they know or not—there’s a huge political component obviously—but the concept as you just mentioned it, light bulbs went off and I found myself getting intrigued.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, that’s right. And again, like I said, one of the key flaws with education is that people quickly forget whatever material they aren’t using. And actually in my book, I put a lot of effort into tracking down studies of what American adults actually know. Because usually what we do when we want to measure knowledge and learning is we look at the final exam or like an exit exam for school or something like that, and that’s a very crummy measure just because we know that people forget a lot of stuff. So I looked at whatever I could find on what adults actually know. And again, in terms of understanding the world, you’d figure that employers would reward you for what you actually know now, not for what you used to know. Unless of course what you’re trying to do is just impress them. Right? So if I say I used to know engineering but now I don’t, someone who wants an engineer says, “Yeah, well, that doesn’t really help me very much.” But on the other hand, if you say, “Look, hey, I got an A-plus in European history,” they’re like, “Hmm, well, if you could get that good grade then, I don’t really care if you know any history, but I bet that you could learn something else that I do want you to know.” So yeah, I mean, so like educational performance, even when you study stuff that you’re not going to use, is a great way of convincing your employer that you’re good at learning stuff. And like I said, I think that’s so much of what’s going on is that people are getting rewarded not for actual knowledge but just for persuasion, for saying, “Hey, look, if I could learn this other stuff, I could probably learn how to be a good secretary for you, so give me a chance.”
Caller Evan: Overpopulation [29:25]
Bob Zadek: I suspect that the overwhelming majority of our listeners this morning and on the podcast are nodding quietly in agreement that so much of what they were compelled to learn they have forgotten, maybe the moment after the final exam. So the waste of money, the collective societal waste of money—you mention a trillion dollars in a year for education—but add that up over a whole number of years, a lot of years, the money we have wasted in force-feeding useless knowledge with no benefit to the individual or to society other than the sheepskin, the seal of approval, is astonishing. And you know, you have to scratch your head and say, “Oh my god, how did we get here?”
Bryan, are there countries, societies that do it better that you can hold out as a lodestar, as something aspirational that we can at least look to to think about as a better way to do education?
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, so my favorite one is Switzerland, actually. So I mean, in Switzerland, you’d only have about 10% of people finishing college right now, but they’ve got a fantastic system of vocational training for young people. And if you go there, it is just one of the most skilled countries in the world. People know how to do their job; if anything, people just seem overqualified for what they’re doing. But it’s basically one where it’s very practical and they just try to prepare people for their future lives and make them into independent and capable adults.
Right? And what you notice when you’re in Switzerland is almost no underclass there. There isn’t really the same big chunk of the population where they just don’t work and where they’re dependent upon the government. So again, there’s always a little bit of that, but it’s just a very different system where, especially for kids that just don’t like school, in Switzerland they say, “Yeah, well, okay, you don’t like school? Well, a lot of people don’t. Let’s go and teach you how to be a woodworker or a steelworker or even teach you to be a train conductor.” Right? You know, there’s so many different options that you can consider. So yeah, it seems like a much more socially valuable system than the one we’ve got here where people just spend so much time studying stuff they’re not going to need to know.
Bob Zadek: We have one more caller we have time for. Evan, welcome to the show this morning. What’s on your mind?
Caller (Evan): Yeah, primarily good show. Your latest shows have been really, really good. But this one, there was something said about having a selfish reason for having more kids, and that one I am really opposed to. We have in the world today OPS—Overpopulation Syndrome. And I can remember from high school chemistry where you had the thing called Brownian kinetic theory, where you compress a bunch of gas and the molecules are striking each other faster and faster exponentially. And I think that’s what we have in the world today. And so, you know, having the population as it is, having a static I think would be really, really beneficial.
Bob Zadek: It’s a little, as they say, off-message in our topic this morning on education. So Bryan, in as they say in 10 words or less, can you just respond to Evan even though it’s off-message this morning?
Bryan Caplan: Sure. So there are definitely a bunch of bad things about population that are heavily discussed, things like causing congestion and so on. But there’s also a ton of really great things about population that people hardly ever talk about. Most obviously, higher populations are more creative. You have a lot more innovation that comes out of larger populations. And so just think about deleting half the names from your music collection, or half the directors of the movies that you like, or half the inventions. Right? So if you think about this, then you realize that there’s an enormous benefit of higher population, especially because one idea can actually be enjoyed by everyone on earth. So in my other book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, I spend a chapter going over all these neglected great things about higher population which, when you really add them up, I say are for the foreseeable future far outweigh the bads.
Closing and Future Projects [31:08]
Bob Zadek: Thank you very much for the call, Evan, even though it was off-message. Now, Bryan, in the closing seconds that we have in the show this morning, would you have written the book if government was not spending a dime on education and all of the expenditures were simply students buying education as if they were buying a car or a vacation? It was simply something they bought because there was a benefit or they would enjoy it. Is the issue who’s paying or is it more basic than that?
Bryan Caplan: Right. So intellectually, I think the topic is interesting whether or not government is paying, but I wouldn’t have written the book if government were not pouring all this money on it because then it wouldn’t be a very important topic. So when I write a book, I like to get a topic where it’s intellectually interesting but also important. And if government weren’t going and spending all this money, then I don’t think it would be a big deal. So I probably would not have written the book then.
Bob Zadek: So your problem is the government is in effect spending money furthering a system which benefits only the sellers, not much benefit to the customers—the students—and far less benefit to society. And one would think that if government is going to be spending money, there ought to be what is called a public good, a societal benefit. And just as society didn’t benefit the fact that I learned or didn’t learn the trampoline, society doesn’t benefit very much from students learning the liberal arts part of an education. And it sounds like the system would be far improved, far more economically sound if higher education were initially directly related to creating productive members of society, either more intelligent voters as Bryan has said in his book—probably impossible in the myth of the rational voter—or at least those who can be productive in producing and increasing their own and societal wealth.
So that of course is a difficult—we are very locked into this system and it is very difficult to overcome. Bryan’s book is quite provocative and perhaps will move us down the road. Bryan, what’s your next book and how can people follow your writings and your thought? I know you blog on EconLog.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, sure. So you can get all of my books on Amazon. The Case Against Education is only 20 bucks. I’ve got almost everything I’ve written up on my website, bcaplan.com, or on that blog, which is econlog.org. And then my next book: so my next book’s actually going to be a non-fiction graphic novel on immigration. It’s called All Roads Lead to Open Borders, and it’s in collaboration with my favorite web cartoonist in the world, Zach Weinersmith of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. So that should be out next year.
Bob Zadek: And tell us about EconLog. We have about 30 seconds.
Bryan Caplan: EconLog is a blog on economics and liberty, and together with my co-bloggers David Henderson and Scott Sumner, we write about all the interesting stuff.
Bob Zadek: Bryan, thanks a lot for giving us a valuable hour of your Sunday morning. We sure appreciate it. To all my friends out there, thanks so much for listening. We’ll be back again next Sunday with ideas, not attitude. Thank you so much for listening. Have a nice Sunday.
Bryan Caplan: My pleasure, Bob.