The Case Against ‘The Case Against Education’

Libertarian economist Bryan Caplan didn’t strive for subtlety when he titled his new book The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. As I wrote in a Remarks column in the print edition of Bloomberg Businessweek, the George Mason University professor makes a strong case that most of what people learn in high school and college is unnecessary and quickly forgotten. He says that only about a fifth of the value of an education is the increase in human capital. The rest is “signaling”—the degree itself puts you in line ahead of non-graduates, even if you learned nothing useful, because it tells potential employers that you’re reasonably smart, reasonably determined to complete what you started, and reasonably good at fitting in. Signaling is a zero-sum game: possibly useful for the individual who gets ahead, but wasteful for society.

I recommend the book. Still, I can’t fully buy Caplan’s conclusion that the solution is to cut back drastically on taxpayer support for college, and even high school. Caplan disagrees with my disagreement. On the blog he shares with some other economists, EconLog, he called my article “fun and fair” but indicated that I had fallen victim to “social desirability bias” by arguing that society should bend over backward not to deprive lower-income strivers of the human capital that college does build. (He also made a fair point about my throwaway line concerning Sanskrit and cement mixing, and I agree with him, so set that aside.)