School is all about signaling, not skill-building
&quot;You study arcane subjects year after year, knowing you’ll never use most of what you learned after graduation&quot;<p>Well, that wasn&#x27;t true for me, and I&#x27;m pretty sure for those in engineering or science, it isn&#x27;t, but even the history, philosophy, and economics courses I took I recall and use. Even Steve Jobs, who merely audited a class on calligraphy, took a great value from it.<p>The fundamental flaw of Capland argument, who seems to be pushing this theme for years, is to view education purely in terms of economic benefit. It could simultaneously be true that the vast majority of your salary comes from signalling, but it could also be true that you gained great value from your education.  Not everyone who gets an advanced education tries to maximize salary.<p>Capland&#x27;s analysis, for example, would completely ignore the value of someone who chose to become a teacher or open source contributor.<p>Also, by induction, you could apply his argument to high school. Do we have evidence during the industrial revolution where blue collar factory work started to require more than an 8th grade education, that it made any difference besides signalling on salary?<p>Or, if you look at developing economies, where people often experience significant increases in wages as they move up the industrial ladder, sometimes without even full literacy, but merely from on the job experience.  Should we assume education isn&#x27;t worthwhile if you can&#x27;t show a correlation between education and wages other than signalling?<p>One of the frustrating things about these kinds of economic analyses is that they narrowing look at only a sliver of what it is to be a human being, or the potential positive market externalities by having educated population. If we just measure the overall social improvements from the education of women, not in terms of individual wage performance, but in terms of overall health of society itself, it can&#x27;t be reduced to a micro-analysis.<p>As a side note, I&#x27;ve seen Bryan&#x27;s work forwarded within libertarian and right wing forums, in large part, to justify arguments to defund and dismantle support for college, both from a cultural aspect (Colleges seen as liberal&#x2F;left institutions) but also from a notion that they don&#x27;t want the government funding it. The fact that he&#x27;s funded by the Cato Institute raises my suspicion that there&#x27;s a political angle involved.<p>Even if you could argue college is not producing economic gains, but merely a signal, one has to look at a future where structural unemployment from automation may make a lot of work unneccessary, period. Do we eliminate education when work is no longer a necessity? Or could it be, that it might be better if people have a lifelong opportunity for intellectual enlightenment, it might be cheaper than funding prisons to house them, or falling back to religious institutions to give humans something to do that has meaning besides straight up consumption.