School is all about signaling, not skill-building
I get where the author is coming from, and agree that higher ed isn&#x27;t particularly efficient and has some serious problems. And yes, it is a &#x27;game&#x27; to an extent. I&#x27;ve worked with 100+ colleges &amp; universities and found their approach to educating large numbers of students to be sorely in need of revision. However, I also found this article simplistic and very much the product of an economist with a particular agenda rather than someone with more of a background in learning whose take on it is reasoned and informed.<p>First, and this is important, he seems to value only knowledge&#x2F;information currently known. Part of learning is forgetting, and knowing that you&#x27;ve forgotten something. His argument doesn&#x27;t take this into account at all, and essentially places equal value in someone who never knew something vs someone who once learned something but forgot it. These are not equivalent at all, but its a very economist way of reducing the world and accidentally losing fidelity in the process.<p>A great deal of higher ed is about exposure to the breadth of ideas that make up our current understanding of the world. You get a chance to explore fields of study and use frameworks, processes, etc from them. All these shape your perception and approach to life, help you discover what motivates you, and provide on-ramps for re-learning later on. Contrast this with someone who&#x27;s never been exposed to things, and they simply wouldn&#x27;t know what they didn&#x27;t know. In the age of Google and being able to find a solution to anything, you still need to know what question to ask, and that requires an exposure to different fields and approaches and to know what you once knew or were exposed to, but have since forgotten. It builds intellectual humility, versus the self-assuredness of ignorance.<p>Next, the turn of phrase in the intro that students &quot;have to soak up precious knowledge like a sponge&quot; is basically the theory that the mind is an empty vessel to be filled, which is a common misunderstanding of how humans learn. We learn through interaction with our environment, and the things we learn are as much perspective, approach &amp; process, etc as it is about fact-based knowledge. Not sure if author is using this term interchangeably with learning, but based on other reading it seems like he may not have strongest grasp of this distinction.<p>These learning science nuances are just one thing the author has a blind spot for. I also don&#x27;t see him mentioning anything about the role of education beyond simply a job market feeder. This isn&#x27;t and hasn&#x27;t ever been the sole metric higher education has ever held itself to - only trade schools focus on this metric. It&#x27;s incredibly reductive to view education in this way, not least of which because you lose a necessary precondition for successful democracy (an informed citizenry).<p>Here&#x27;s another telling quote, clearly showing his argument has a pretty narrow focus:<p>&gt; Researchers consistently find that most of education’s payoff comes from graduation, from crossing the academic finish line. The last year of high school is worth more than the first three; the last year of college is worth more than double the first three. This is hard to explain if employers are paying for acquired skills; do schools really wait until senior year to impart useful training?<p>According to Amazon reviews of this guy&#x27;s book, he likes to set up a lot of straw men, and this is an example of one. Of course employers are <i>not</i> necessarily paying for acquired skills, but they&#x27;re also not just paying for signaling (his focus) - they could be paying for acquired experience, perspective, demonstration of sticking things through, self-knowledge, etc.<p>Again I think it&#x27;s important to look at the words he&#x27;s using to get a sense for whether he understands the nuances of what he&#x27;s talking about. &quot;Skill&quot; is a particular thing that most of higher ed intentionally doesn&#x27;t focus on because they&#x27;re not trade schools. Either he doesn&#x27;t quite get that, or he&#x27;s choosing to reinterpret education&#x27;s purpose for the sake of his straw man. If we reduce everything to a market-oriented &quot;skill&quot;, knowledge, theory, perspective, etc have no value. A good economist doesn&#x27;t leave value on the table like that, unless they&#x27;re trying to fit it into their particular argument.<p>His anecdote about a guerrilla student auditing a degree&#x27;s worth of classes and not having them valued isn&#x27;t a particularly smart take even from an economics perspective. That&#x27;s a one-off libertarian fantasy argument of sticking it to the system. At scale this idea collapses, because a) schools would crack down on free-riders, and b) once this good  is more available in the market, the market would respond by pricing it better. But with an n=1, the market can&#x27;t price it, because they don&#x27;t know what it means. Did this student actually show up to these classes, or just say they did? Did they get to know their classmates and learn from them? Did they understand anything they were being taught? As an entrepreneur who&#x27;s had to hire quite a bit, I&#x27;d see a prospective employee&#x27;s claim of having attended Princeton for four years but not getting a degree as needing <i>serious</i> verification.<p>I think an economist&#x27;s perspective is important to add to the discussion on how to make higher ed better, and signaling is an area that higher ed needs to get better at (see microcredentialing as one solution for instance). However, while the author makes some good points about grade &#x2F; degree inflation and alludes to a few other things that really matter like rising costs, I also don&#x27;t think he&#x27;s got the macro perspective really well sorted, at least from the blind spots above - either he&#x27;s willfully ignoring them for sake of argument, or genuinely doesn&#x27;t know them because he wasn&#x27;t exposed enough to those fields. Teaching a couple years at Princeton doesn&#x27;t make one an expert on the system as a whole, much as just getting an education doesn&#x27;t mean you know the first thing about how education works. Elite colleges work very differently from other forms of post-secondary education, and lessons learned &amp; opinions formed there are not necessarily broadly applicable. Elite colleges are so much more about signaling that its easy to over-index on that and form a theory that sounds nice but isn&#x27;t very accurate.<p>Any call for blowing up a system needs to be put in a larger context that any large organization &#x2F; institution is going to be inherently pretty inefficient, but this doesn&#x27;t mean the absence of it is a good alternative. Thing is he has a particular POV on this, if you read more of his bio [1]. He works in a very libertarian-focused economics dept at GWU and is funded by folks that are taking a particular agenda toward education and have taken a (highly unusual) active role in faculty selection [2]. This background alone shouldn&#x27;t be disqualifying (lots of agendas exist in ed, good to have diversity of perspectives), but can be a lens through with you read this and whether he&#x27;s being intellectually honest in all his arguments.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bryan_Caplan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bryan_Caplan</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;05&#x2F;us&#x2F;koch-donors-george-mason.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;05&#x2F;us&#x2F;koch-donors-george-mas...</a>