Book Review: 'The Case Against Education'

In which I almost succeed at not ranting

Before getting into it I have to say: My experience in school was miserable. I hated it. My impression of the value of school is colored by that experience. On the other hand many if not most people hated school but it’s socially unacceptable to publicly say that school, especially college, was anything but transformative. So here’s to speaking up for the unheard masses.

The central thesis of ‘The Case Against Education’ by Bryan Caplan is that the vast bulk of benefit which students get from their schooling is the diploma, not the education. While his estimate of the value of the diploma at 80% sounds gut-wrenching, it’s hard to avoid getting somewhere close to that if you do even vaguely realistic estimates. Most classes cover material which students will never use even if they were to remember it. The claims that the real purpose is to enrich students lives and make them better citizens are not backed up by those things happening or even being seriously attempted.

All those arguments and counter-arguments are gone over painstakingly in the book, but they wind up roughly where anyone observing what actually goes on in schools would expect. Students retain almost nothing from school. What’s more interesting is the impacts on student’s politics and morals, which is almost nothing. It barely moves the needle. The one thing it does have an effect on is that it makes people have a lot fewer children, especially women. Caplan doesn’t go deep into why this may be, but if I may speculate based on what other areas of research have shown my guess is that it’s caused by (1) not having children while in school and (2) raising women’s standards for men high enough that many of them never settle.

This raises the question of how things got here and what could be done to fix it. The possibility which Caplan oddly does not consider is that it’s a broad conspiracy propped up by the rich and well-educated to make a path for their disappointing children to have solid careers. One in three students at Harvard got in through a path other than earning it from high school achievement. The parents of those kids repay Harvard with money or prestige. It’s remarkable and bizarre that employers don’t look on Harvard graduates with skepticism due to this fact, but they don’t.

What the book does go into is the question of why employers, especially private sector employers, continue to highly value degrees. The answer is an obvious but infuriating one: School, especially college, is something with all the trappings of a job: Boring, unimportant, authoritarian, and demanding. People who do well at it are likely to succeed at any job. (There’s a bunch of discussion of personality types and whatnot which are just poor proxies for succeeding at a sucky job and don’t add much to the discussion.) The only things which school is missing are productive output and pay. What alternative criteria there are for employers which happen to be exciting, meaningful, egalitarian, or fun to find high achieving employees who couldn’t cope with school due to it missing those things is unclear.

The obvious fix for this is to do the exact same thing but with an actual employer. If you get a job at a participating qualified employer and manage to stay working there for a prespecified number of years you get a certificate of sucking it up. The obvious objections are that this would be a big subsidy to large employers, especially those with known toxic work environments whose certificates would be especially valued, and that people who failed the program would have wasted years of their life. Those objections are true, but apply just as much to what happens in universities. In any case, programs like this are rare in the real world, even internationally, and unlikely to become common any time soon.

One source of improvement going on now which Caplan oddly doesn’t go into is the devaluing of the most useless majors. This tends to naturally feed on itself by a somewhat circular logic: Employers devalue the most ridiculous majors, which causes only people who are lacking judgement to pursue them as degrees, which causes employers to further devalue those majors. Such logic is often not a good thing. It’s what got us into overeducation in the first place. But at least in this case it’s causing students to make choices of major which cause them to get more education out of their schooling.

What ‘The Case Against Education’ does go into in great detail is the case for vocational education, which is overwhelming. All but the very best students would be better off getting a vocational degree, both for their own monetary self-interest and the amount of productive work they’re doing for society. The sneering attitude generally given towards vocational degrees (and even engineering degrees!) is obnoxious and unwarranted and should be changed. If vocational degrees were given even a fraction of the prestige which is given to four year degrees the world would be a better place.

What remains is the question of how to improve the education itself. Caplan barely touches on this but I will speculate. Rather than go into vitriolic rants about the problems in subjects which are not my field, I’ll talk about the ones which are, specifically mathematics and computer science.

Many if not most students feel that math classes are torture, a boring subject which they will never use and can barely pass. This assessment is, I’m sad to say, fairly accurate. The reforms which actual mathematicians favor are twofold. First, what’s considered basic literacy in mathematics should be expanded to include probability and expected value, both important concepts apply to people’s everyday lives. Second, everything beyond that shouldn’t be taught as something important which students need to be force-fed, but something beautiful which it’s enriching to learn, like art or literature. There are of course a tiny fraction of students who are likely to go into math-heavy fields, and there should be advanced classes available for them, but those should also be taught by people who love the subject, with an emphasis on its beauty. Nobody should ever be subject to the misery of trigonometry classes as they’re taught today. And people with PhDs in mathematics should be viewed as qualified to teach the subject.

Computer Science’s main problem is right there in its name: It’s Computer Science, not Programming. By an accident of history it’s socially acceptable to get something approximating a vocational programming degree by getting one in computer science. Either an alternative degree program focusing on software engineering should be set up, or the focus of computer science should be put on practical software development. Thankfully a lot of that is already happening.

Then there things which are so basic that they don’t even fit in a field. Can we drop cursive and teach everybody touch typing? Bring back cooking, cleaning, and shop classes? Yes it was a problem that those classes were gendered in the past, but a better solution to that would be to teach them to everybody instead of teach them to nobody.