School Is Expensive. Is It Worth It? For your kids, yes—at least assuming they graduate. But the author of ‘The Case Against Education’ says the benefits to society are vastly overstated. James Taranto
https://www.wsj.com/articles/school-is-expensive-is-it-worth-it-1523658384?cx_testId=0&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s
If America listened to Bryan Caplan, he’d probably have to find another job. And he loves his job.
Mr. Caplan, 47, is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a public institution in the Washington suburbs. He enjoys exploring against-the-grain ideas, as evidenced by the titles of his books: “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids” and the one I’ve come to discuss, “The Case Against Education.”
The new volume’s subtitle is “Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money.” But if you’re hoping for permission to raid your kids’ college fund, forget it. Mr. Caplan doesn’t mean schooling is a waste of your money—or his, for that matter. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a doctorate from Princeton. He’s home-schooling his twin sons, gifted 15-year-olds who study quietly in his office when I drop by. Before he took them out of public school, he looked into college admission practices and found that home-schooled applicants these days face what he calls “only mild discrimination.”
Thus Mr. Caplan’s case against education begins by acknowledging the case in favor of getting one. “It is individually very fruitful, and individually lucrative,” he says. Full-time workers with a bachelor’s degree, on average, “are making 73% more than high-school graduates.” Workers who finished high school but not college earn 30% more than high-school dropouts. Part of the difference is mere correlation: Mr. Caplan says if you adjust for pre-existing advantages like intelligence and family background, one-fifth to two-fifths of the education premium goes away. Even so, it really does pay to finish school.
The prevailing view among labor economists—Mr. Caplan disdains them as “human-capital purists”—is that education works “by pouring useful skills into you, which you then go and use on the job.” That’s true to a point, he allows. School teaches basic “literacy and numeracy,” essential in almost any workplace. Specialized skills carry their own premium, so that a degree in engineering is worth more than one in philosophy or fine arts. But that 73% college premium is an average, which includes workers who studied soft or esoteric subjects.
Break it down, Mr. Caplan says, and “there is no known college major where the average earnings are not noticeably higher than just an average high-school graduate.” Yet there aren’t many jobs in which you can apply your knowledge of philosophy or fine arts—or many other subjects from high school or college. He goes through a list: “history, social studies, art, music, higher mathematics for most people, Latin, a foreign language.” That is the sense in which education is a waste of time. CONTINUE AT SITE
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