1. Lots of workers — especially less-educated workers — are paid less than they’re worth. If signaling is important, there are bound to be numerous “diamonds in the rough” — good workers who are underpaid because they lack the right credentials to convince employers of their quality.
2. Lots of workers — especially more-educated workers — are paid more than they’re worth. Again, if signaling is important, there are bound to be lots of bad workers who are overpaid because they obtained misleadingly strong credentials.
3. A lot of education is meaningless hoop-jumping. Campus radicals have long accused the education system of imposing an irrelevant, backward-looking, elitist curriculum on hapless kids. I say they’re right.
4. The education market is inefficient. In signaling models, education has negative externalities. My story therefore implies a serious market failure, where self-interest leads students to pursue more education than socially optimal.
5. Locked-in Syndrome. Due to conformity signaling, the market for education isn’t just inefficient; it’s durably inefficient. The education market doesn’t just fail; it durably fails.
6. The government’s “ban” on IQ testing is grossly exaggerated, and does next to nothing to explain employers’ reliance on credentials. While the Griggs case nominally imposes near-insurmountable hurdles on IQ employment testing (as well as virtually every hiring method), it is cursorily enforced. Lots of U.S. employers admit they use IQ testing, and the expected legal costs of doing so are tiny.
7. Credential inflation is rampant. Technological change explains only a small fraction of the evolution of the modern labor market. The popular perception that workers need far more education to get the same jobs their parents and grandparents had is deeply true.
8. Working your way up takes ages. While there’s good evidence that worker ability raises pay, the process takes many years. If you’re smart but uncredentialed, even a decade of work experience isn’t enough to fully catch up.
9. In many ways, the labor market used to be better for people from poor and working-class families. Sure, average living standards are much higher today than in 1950. But in 1950, there was far less stigma against high school dropouts, and very little stigma against workers who didn’t go to college. Moderns who look at college graduates from poor families and see “social justice” are neglecting the troubles of the massively larger number of kids from poor families who never get college degrees.
10. Forcing middle-class aspirations on everyone causes misery and failure for poor and working-class kids. Lots of kids loathe school. They’re bored out of their minds, and humiliated by teachers’ endless negative feedback. Such kids disproportionately come from poor and working-class families. But since the middle- and upper-classes control the curriculum, they’ve stubbornly moved to a “college-for-all” approach to school — and turned vocational education into an afterthought. The result: Most poor and working-class kids endure thousands of sad hours, then leave school unprepared for either jobs or college.
Although I can see some points that might still be of interest to today’s left, Caplan seems to be addressing mainly a left that existed 60 years ago.
Most leftists are people who did well in the traditional academic world, and who are frustrated that their proficiency and adaptation to that world has not and does not translate into real life. So, they try to make the outer world over into an academic-like reality that they think they will thrive in.
Leftism always has been, and always will be the refuge of the uncertain and fearful who are afraid to take part in reality. They build cloud-castles spun out of fantasy, and try to impose that fantasy on reality. Results are always ugly, because there is no worse an extremist than the frustrated idealist who discovers that their ideas don’t work, and that the “wreckers” won’t cooperate in their fantasies.
You want an example of how these things work, look at how little girls play; very often, the dominant alpha will be making the rules, and when the other little girls won’t play by them, or wander off, she’ll throw a temper-tantrum like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Most left-wingers have more in common with these playground bullies than they do anything else.
That leftists would appreciate an argument brings to mind the quote that you can’t reason a person out of a position that he didn’t reason himself into in the first place.
The corollary to all of that is that the Left generally doesn’t reason things out in the first place–Note how often they frame the issues as “beliefs”, rather than as objective observations about how humans interact and work.
There’s something akin to religion going on with a lot of these people, avowed atheists though they may claim to be. The response you get when you point to all the many and sundry failures of socialism throughout history is usually akin to that which you get when questioning the existence of God to a devout Christian or Muslim… Which, I think, says a great deal about the human need for some sort of irrationality in their lives, whether it’s a faith in God(s) or the altruistic nature of their fellow man.
Me? I go on established track records, which show me clearly that the rest of the human race consists mostly of right bastards…
I got married late, and put my kids through almost exactly the same schools in the same town that I grew up in, just about 40 years later.
I live in a university town; our schools today are rated 10/10 in our state. These schools are in large measure a disgrace, primarily due to “teachers” who can’t be fired, and the pernicious influence of extreme Leftist feminism that almost ruined my son’s life and yes, cultural Marxism. I couldn’t believe my eyes. We made liberal use of tutoring and our kids were bright self-starters, so we made it through.
In the 20 years during which my two children grew up and went through the public school system, I went from being an absolute supporter of public education staffed by university-trained teachers in unions, to refusing to vote for millages in the hopes that the entire worthless system would collapse. All parties are to blame, the whole thing needs to be scrapped.