Bryan Caplan writes in “What’s College Good For?” (The Atlantic, January/February 2018), an excerpt from his new book, that even though the financial payoff for earning a degree in higher education is greater than ever, the actual expenditure of time and money to earn that degree is “wasteful.”
How could that be? Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University, says that students who “excel on exams frequently fail to apply their knowledge to the real world.” The reason people are rewarded for going to college, he says, is not because of the “useless subjects” students master, but because of the existing traits students display by mastering them.
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