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.”
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Kimberly M. Vanderlaan
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.
I agree with Caplan that content takes students only a short distance in the marathon of lifelong learning, and that college students are “supposed to learn how to think in real life.” The solution resides in the traditional liberal-arts model, and extensive research bears this out. Reading literature helps students become more empathetic. Learning a foreign language has been tied to students’ improvement in science and math classes. Writing helps the brain train itself in logic and problem-solving. And the list goes on.
I wonder, too, why Caplan needs to mention his alma maters (Princeton and Berkeley), unless he seeks to perpetuate the same “runaway credential inflation” (and I would add prestige inflation) to which he himself so strenuously objects.
Kimberly M. Vanderlaan is an associate professor of English at California University of Pennsylvania.