Academia has been very, very good to George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan, as he admits. Yet he also wants you to know that the service he has a cushy life selling to you isn't all it's cracked up to be:
Many educators sooth their consciences by insisting that "I teach my students how to think, not what to think." But this platitude goes against a hundred years of educational psychology. Education is very narrow; students learn the material you specifically teach them… if you're lucky. Other educators claim they're teaching good work habits. But especially at the college level, this doesn't pass the laugh test. How many jobs tolerate a 50% attendance rate—or let you skate by with twelve hours of work a week? School probably builds character relative to playing videogames. But it's hard to see how school could build character relative to a full-time job in the Real World. At this point, you may be thinking: If professors don't teach a lot of job skills, don't teach their students how to think, and don't instill constructive work habits, why do employers so heavily reward educational success? The best answer comes straight out of the ivory tower itself. It's called the signaling model of education– the subject of my book in progress, The Case Against Education. According to the signaling model, employers reward educational success because of what it shows ("signals") about the student. Good students tend to be smart, hard-working, and conformist—three crucial traits for almost any job. When a student excels in school, then, employers correctly infer that he's likely to be a good worker. What precisely did he study? What did he learn how to do? Mere details. As long as you were a good student, employers surmise that you'll quickly learn what you need to know on the job.
The signaling model means that more people getting more education has a tendency to create the demand for more people to get more education (which is great for people in the business of selling education) because:
In the signaling story, what matters is how much education you have compared to competing workers. When education levels rise, employers respond with higher standards; when education levels fall, employers respond with lower standards. We're on a treadmill. If voters took this idea seriously, my close friends and I could easily lose our jobs. As a professor, it is in my interest for the public to continue to believe in the magic of education: To imagine that the ivory tower transforms student lead into worker gold.
Caplan writes on occasion for Reason.
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