As for the value of college for non-doctors, what about the study of GI bill recipients that were randomly chosen that found that college did have significant causal benefits (it was not just correlation that colleges were just choosing better qualified people)?
I’m not an expert in this area and haven’t seen that study, but I believe Eliezer generally defers to Bryan Caplan’s analysis on this topic. Caplan’s view, discussed in The Case Against Education (which is scheduled to come out in two months), is that something like 80% of the time students spend in school is signaling, and something like 80% of the financial reward students enjoy from school is due to signaling. So the claim isn’t that school does nothing to build human capital, just that a very large chunk of schooling is destroying value.
I haven’t read Caplan’s book, but I can imagine >50% of the math learned in a math course being not used in a technical career outside of research, and furthermore that the heuristics picked up in those courses are not generalisable (e.g. geometry heuristics not applying to differential equations).
As for the value of college for non-doctors, what about the study of GI bill recipients that were randomly chosen that found that college did have significant causal benefits (it was not just correlation that colleges were just choosing better qualified people)?
I’m not an expert in this area and haven’t seen that study, but I believe Eliezer generally defers to Bryan Caplan’s analysis on this topic. Caplan’s view, discussed in The Case Against Education (which is scheduled to come out in two months), is that something like 80% of the time students spend in school is signaling, and something like 80% of the financial reward students enjoy from school is due to signaling. So the claim isn’t that school does nothing to build human capital, just that a very large chunk of schooling is destroying value.
Wow—is there a paper to this effect? I would be surprised if it is that high for the technical fields.
I haven’t read Caplan’s book, but I can imagine >50% of the math learned in a math course being not used in a technical career outside of research, and furthermore that the heuristics picked up in those courses are not generalisable (e.g. geometry heuristics not applying to differential equations).