Economics, it has been said, is the dismal science, and Bryan Caplan is pessimistic indeed. A professor of economics at George Mason University, Mr. Caplan argues that education — his own profession, and a bedrock benefit of the welfare state — is largely useless, at least for what we think it provides: learning.
Most of us assume that school and college make us smarter or more prepared for work. But the main benefit of a degree, Mr. Caplan argues in The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton University Press, 2018), is the signal it sends to employers: that a college graduate has the tenacity and the submissiveness to get through years of pointless busywork. That signal — and not higher levels of skill, which education may actually not confer — is what leads people into lucrative careers after graduation. Meanwhile students who drop out of college, no matter how smart or industrious, are punished for bucking the system.
True to his libertarian values, Mr. Caplan believes that more of the cost of education should be shifted away from government and onto individuals. But he’s pessimistic on that point, too: With the United States spending hundreds of billions of dollars on education, and the payoff of a diploma, we’re probably locked into the status quo, he says.
Mr. Caplan talked about the irrelevancies of education with The Chronicle.
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In The Case Against Education, you deride subjects like art, history, and foreign languages as “useless.” Does education have to be useful in one’s job every day to be valuable?
No, but it needs to be either useful or enjoyable. And for most students, these subjects are neither, unfortunately. There is an enormous gap between the education that people receive and what they actually use in most of the jobs they have. I mean, there may be some small amount that they’re able to glean from it. But most of the stuff, right after the final exam, they’ll never need to know again. And if these are required classes that the student was not interested in, and they just took those classes to get the diploma, then that seems wasteful from almost any point of view.
You write: “As far as I can tell, the only marketable skill I teach is ‘how to be an economics professor.’ " But isn’t that a failure of your imagination to make your subject relevant, not a failure of education itself?
In order to make my subject relevant, I would actually have to learn a lot about the occupations the students are doing and just teach, really, a completely different subject. Economics is not designed to be occupational training for bankers or salesmen. In terms of raising the job performance, I can’t honestly say that I’m raising the job performance of students who are doing a bunch of jobs that are really quite unfamiliar to me.
Some of the most useful skills that I do try to give to students are, for example, “walk out of movies if you’re not enjoying yourselves.” That’s what economics tells us to do. But even there, I’m not optimistic that students actually change their lives based on what they’re taught. Most people think of education as writing some answers on a test, then getting on with your life and going back to what you were doing before.
Most kids are philistines — they are that way deep in their souls. In the book, I quote Steven Pinker, the psychologist at Harvard, who regularly wins awards for his teaching. Yet he looks at his classroom a couple of weeks into the semester and sees that half the students aren’t there. How can it be that these are the best students in the world, with the best teacher, at arguably the best school in the world, and half the students don’t think it’s worth their while? And they’re getting a grade, so they actually have an extra reason to be there, and yet they’re not. The only thing you can say is that even the best teacher in the world is boring to these kids, compared to what else they could be doing. It’s sad and hard to face, but that’s the truth.
Isn’t there value in forcing people to march through topics they might not be interested in? They might discover some interest in it.
Once in a very long time, it happens. But there’s a greater number of students who suffer through it and don’t get any value from it. People who don’t like school rarely write essays about how terrible it was. Instead they just suffer in silence or complain to their friends, and then they go and get a practical job and we never hear their voices again. The whole conversation about education is really driven by people who did enjoy school and who work with students. Part of what I wanted to do is give a voice to the voiceless and say, “They may not talk about it, but they are suffering.” It’s not a real mystery if you actually go to a classroom and look at the faces. Students are generally not happy. They’re bored.
But if you talk with employers today, many laud the liberal arts and say they want well-rounded, broadly thinking people.
In this book I talk a lot about social-desirability bias. People say things, and often believe things, that sound good, but if you look closely at their behavior, you’ll see that either they are being dishonest or they don’t believe it all the way down. When employers say they want people who are well-rounded, you can see who they actually reward when they hire. I don’t see any signs of rewarding the well-rounded people. They’re rewarding people who do the job well and make the employers money. Employers want to sound like nice, open-minded people. They don’t want to say, “I don’t care if you’re a troglodyte as long as you bring in money.” Ultimately, that is what they’re thinking. Liberal-arts degrees are great from the employers’ point of view because it’s a way of selecting good workers. Once they’re on the job, who cares if they really like high culture or anything else?
You advocate cutting government spending on education and sending fewer people to college. Instead of diminishing education, why not reform it?
In the book, I have an analogy: You have a friend who is using a toenail-fungus cream that doesn’t work, and you tell him to stop using it. He says, “I’m going to keep doing this until you find a cure that works.” Well, it’s really hard to find that cure. So why don’t we look around for something that works, and maybe we’ll find it and maybe we won’t, but at least we won’t be wasting all this money in the meantime? That’s really the way I see education reform. We have a lot of stuff we’re doing right now that we know is wasted money. Step one is to stop wasting money. Then, in step two, we can have an open-ended conversation about better things to do with the money. It might actually be something that has nothing to do with education.
It seems like we have a system that is so dysfunctional that when we find things that work, they don’t get adopted. On my blog, I talk about a literature review of which pedagogical techniques are effective and which ones are not, evaluated by the gold standard of research. What’s striking is how the methods that work are used so rarely, while lots of methods that have proven to be ineffective are popular. For example, highlighting is totally ineffective, yet it’s used all over the world. That’s the problem: It’s a dysfunctional system where people don’t seem to be interested in improving it.
Let’s say you’re charged with fixing American education. Paint a picture of what your solution would look like.
To start, a much bigger role for vocational education. For the kids who are not interested in academic subjects intrinsically, an age as young as 13 or 14 is a good time to start actually preparing them for a job. This doesn’t mean you’re destined to become a plumber. A good thing to do is to expose them to a large number of occupations and see what actually interests them and what they have a talent for, getting them into workplaces to try things. Of course, at that age, continue to train them in reading, writing, and math, but cut the other stuff down to a minimum.
In terms of enriching people’s lives, I’d been more inclined to have money not focused specifically on the young. I could actually see spending money at modest levels much later in life if you just want to give people a chance for enrichment.
In higher education, focus money on majors where there are actual practical job opportunities, greatly cutting spending or not having government support for majors that are primarily for personal enrichment or hobbies. I don’t see why some hobbies get government support and others don’t. Why is it that comic books don’t get government support but poetry does? In terms of artistic merits, I think there’s a lot more going on today in comics than in poetry. But poetry is high status.
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
