Based Vampire
Sleep late, and read trashy books!
- Mar 23, 2023
- 5,799
Basically, we just learn a lot of useless stuff that we won't use throughout most of our lives. The whole purpose of education is to get a damn degree which is used as a way to signal your 'positive' traits (being smart, hardworking - doing boring shit for no reason that is, and compliant) to a potential employer. It's not about getting the right skills. At least (or especially) when it comes to liberal arts.
I suggest you guys watch the whole thing or at least the first 30-40 minutes, interesting stuff. Or read the wikipedia excerpts I provided below
The foundation of the drive to increase educational attainment across the board is the human capital model of education, which began with the research of Gary Becker. The model suggests that increasing educational attainment causes increased prosperity by endowing students with increased skills. As a consequence, subsidies to education are seen as a positive investment that increases economic growth and creates spillover effects by improving civic engagement, happiness, health, etc.
The main alternative to the human capital model of education is the signaling model of education. The idea of job market signaling through educational attainment goes back to the work of Michael Spence. The model Spence developed suggested that, even if a student did not gain any skills through an educational program, the program can still be useful so long as the signal from completing the program is correlated with traits that predict job performance.
Throughout the book, Caplan details a series of observations that suggest a significant role for signaling in the return to education:
- Intelligence and conscientiousness are known predictors of educational and occupational success, and are relatively stable throughout a person's life;
- Many students forget material over the summer and after the end of a class;
- Adults tend to forget much of the information they learned in school;
- Students look to take courses that offer easy As, instead of more difficult courses;
- Transfer of learning to other disciplines appears to be low or nonexistent;
- The sheepskin effect seems to be fairly large (people possessing a completed academic degree earn a greater income than people who have an equivalent amount of studying without possessing an academic degree);
- International estimates of the effect of an additional year of education on national income are much lower than those estimating the impact of an additional year of education on personal income;
For many students, Caplan argues that most of the negative social return to pursuing further education comes from the incursion of student debt and lost employment opportunities for students who are unlikely to complete college. He suggests that these students would be better served by vocational education (basically any education that gives you actual job skills).
Caplan advocates two major policy responses to the problem of signaling in education. The first recommendation is that government needs to sharply cut education funding, since public education spending in the United States across all levels tops $1 trillion annually. he second recommendation is to encourage greater vocational education, because students who are unlikely to succeed in college should develop practical skills to function in the labor market. Caplan argues for an increased emphasis on vocational education that is similar in nature to the systems in Germany and Switzerland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepskin_effect
I suggest you guys watch the whole thing or at least the first 30-40 minutes, interesting stuff. Or read the wikipedia excerpts I provided below
The foundation of the drive to increase educational attainment across the board is the human capital model of education, which began with the research of Gary Becker. The model suggests that increasing educational attainment causes increased prosperity by endowing students with increased skills. As a consequence, subsidies to education are seen as a positive investment that increases economic growth and creates spillover effects by improving civic engagement, happiness, health, etc.
The main alternative to the human capital model of education is the signaling model of education. The idea of job market signaling through educational attainment goes back to the work of Michael Spence. The model Spence developed suggested that, even if a student did not gain any skills through an educational program, the program can still be useful so long as the signal from completing the program is correlated with traits that predict job performance.
Throughout the book, Caplan details a series of observations that suggest a significant role for signaling in the return to education:
- Intelligence and conscientiousness are known predictors of educational and occupational success, and are relatively stable throughout a person's life;
- Many students forget material over the summer and after the end of a class;
- Adults tend to forget much of the information they learned in school;
- Students look to take courses that offer easy As, instead of more difficult courses;
- Transfer of learning to other disciplines appears to be low or nonexistent;
- The sheepskin effect seems to be fairly large (people possessing a completed academic degree earn a greater income than people who have an equivalent amount of studying without possessing an academic degree);
- International estimates of the effect of an additional year of education on national income are much lower than those estimating the impact of an additional year of education on personal income;
For many students, Caplan argues that most of the negative social return to pursuing further education comes from the incursion of student debt and lost employment opportunities for students who are unlikely to complete college. He suggests that these students would be better served by vocational education (basically any education that gives you actual job skills).
Caplan advocates two major policy responses to the problem of signaling in education. The first recommendation is that government needs to sharply cut education funding, since public education spending in the United States across all levels tops $1 trillion annually. he second recommendation is to encourage greater vocational education, because students who are unlikely to succeed in college should develop practical skills to function in the labor market. Caplan argues for an increased emphasis on vocational education that is similar in nature to the systems in Germany and Switzerland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepskin_effect
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