This professor’s ‘Case Against Education’ powerful but extremist
“The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money” by Bryan Caplan; Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press (416
pages, $29.95)
American colleges and universities have been taking it on the chin lately. The income gap between high school and college graduates has been shrinking, and college costs and student debt have spiraled. Academic freedom on college campuses is said to have diminished, as overly sensitive students, used to being coddled, try to keep out ideas that challenge their own. Many believe that curricular rigor has decreased as grade point averages have risen, and that underworked and overpaid professors teach easy, hyper-specialized courses to bored, often hungover students more interested in campus water slides, climbing walls and happy hours than in anything that goes on in the classroom. Four (or more) years of such stuff, alas, in order to prepare oneself for a position as a copier at Kinko’s, a barista at Starbucks, or a “sales associate” at a UPS store.
Adding fuel to the fire, a high-profile 2011 study seemed to confirm much of this critique, finding that “36 percent of college students made no discernible progress in the ability to think and analyze critically after four years in school.” Any wonder, then, that many Americans question the value of a college or university education, with recent polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center finding that large majorities of Republicans have doubts about the value of higher education (Gallup) and believe that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the U.S. (Pew).
Unfortunately for those of us involved (implicated?) in higher education, things just became more worrisome still with the release of Bryan Caplan’s book, “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money” (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 416 pages). Indeed, in comparison to Caplan’s takedown, the critical comments above seem like hymns of praise. For in his study, Caplan, a well-regarded and prolific economist at George Mason University, mounts an elegant, powerful, and well-documented argument against higher education, which is aat once simple to summarize and difficult easily to discount.
In so doing, he adopts the economist’s preferred method, parsimony, trying to explain a great deal with as few assumptions as possible. More specifically, he focuses on the economic concept called signaling—the credible conveyance of relevant information from one party to another—which in his view is by far the most important function higher education performs. While most experts on higher education argue that the key role of colleges and universities is to develop human capital in the form of discrete knowledge, critical skills, etc., Caplan makes the case that colleges and universities don’t so much develop human capital as certify it. This certification process, he claims, wastes vast amounts of students’ time and money, most of which would be far better spent on vocational training.
According to Caplan, evidence that a student gained admission into college and later graduated offers credible information—or, in other words, “signals”—to interested parties (i.e., potential employers) that that person has certain qualities or attributes that are associated with success in the workplace: intelligence, conscientiousness and the ability to conform. Such qualities and attributes, Caplan writes, were present before a student possessing them entered college or university, and it’s a good thing, too, for the author contends that while on campus students are taught little of value, master even less, and soon forget the modicum they did learn.