Full review and highlights at https://books.max-nova.com/case-against-education

There are two theories for why education is beneficial for individuals. The "human capital" model says that you go to school and learn valuable skills. The "signaling" model says that school is just a stamp of approval that certifies you as someone likely to be a good worker. In "The Case Against Education", GMU prof Bryan Caplan makes the case that our education system is ~80% signaling. A contrarian with strong libertarian views (see his previous book, "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" for a real journey down the rabbit hole), Caplan argues for slashing government support for our generally ineffective educational system. He brutally confronts the failure of our educational system to accomplish its stated goals of basic literacy and numeracy, to say nothing of historical awareness, foreign language fluency, or critical thinking. Constructing his own careful meta-analysis of an ocean of education studies and filling in the significant gaps with educated guesses, he recoils in horror at the low societal ROI of our trillion-dollar annual investment in education (for comparison, Caplan notes, we spend only $700 billion on the dreaded "military industrial complex" annually). This is a dense book brimming with references, stats, careful argumentation, and devastating zingers. It will challenge many readers who have greatly benefited from the educational system, but who don't have a quantitative response to one of Caplan's key questions:

“At what point would education spending be excessive?” “We’ve done enough for education” is as heretical as “We’ve done enough for paralyzed veterans.”

Caplan convinced me that much of high school and further education is about signaling rather than human capital development. This certainly matched with my experience at Yale (I learned almost nothing in class), and Caplan points out a devastating consequence of the signaling theory: additional investment in a signaling-driven system is pointless because signaling is all about status - and the average status can't rise. So we're just setting money on fire and wasting everyone's time by setting a societal standard that everyone should go to college.

But what really shook me was Caplan's explanation for the failure of Massively Open Online Courses:

Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable price. What they don’t offer are official college degrees, the kind that can get you a job.

I'm generally on board with Caplan's idea that "the Internet proves low consumption of ideas and culture stems from apathy, not poverty or inconvenience" - if people aren't motivated to learn stuff online for free, why are we trying to force-feed the same stuff (at enormous expense of time and money) in schools?

Caplan's suggested policy changes are extreme. He wants to cut all government funding for education. If that's not possible, at least stop subsidizing college (including student loans). This part of the book challenged me because I have been a huge beneficiary of the educational system and have had the unusual good luck of having 8 truly life-changing teachers over the course of my educational career. But it's tough to argue with Caplan's logic and his stats appear to be legit. Maybe, as Caplan says, we should "give heresy a chance."

If you're looking for a bite-sized summary of the book, Julia Galef of the "Rationally Speaking" podcast just interviewed Caplan on her show.

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