“Higher education is the only product,” Arnold Kling says, “where the consumer tries to get as little out of it as possible.”
In The Case Against Education, Bryan Caplan runs with this idea:
Fact: anyone can study at Princeton for free. While tuition is over $45,000 a year, anyone can show up and start attending classes. No one will stop you. No one will challenge you. No one will make you feel unwelcome. Gorge yourself at Princeton’s all-you-can-eat buffet of the mind. Colleges do not card. I have seen this with my own eyes at schools around the country.
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After four years of “guerrilla education,” there’s only one thing you’ll lack: a diploma. Since you’re not in the system, your performance will be invisible to employers. Not too enticing, is it?
Imagine this stark dilemma: you can have either a Princeton education without a diploma, or a Princeton diploma without an education. Which gets you further on the job market? For a human capital purist, the answer is obvious: four years of training are vastly preferable to a page of paper. But try saying that with a straight face.
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The fact that almost no one grabs a free elite education shows human capital purism is false.
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How would your career have been different if you flunked all the classes you’ve forgotten?
If employers rewarded well-educated workers for skills alone, failing a class and forgetting a class would have identical career consequences. They plainly don’t.
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Failing to learn course material sends a lousy signal: you were lacking in intelligence, conscientiousness, and/ or conformity—and probably still are. Forgetting course material on the other hand, merely signals you lack the superpower of photographic memory.
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Students struggle to win admission to elite schools. Once they arrive, however, they hunt for professors with low expectations.
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Anyone who likes money and dislikes studying has an obvious two-part strategy: choose the best school that admits you so you get a good job after graduation, and choose the easiest professors on campus so you have a good time before graduation.
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Teachers have a foolproof way to make their students cheer: cancel class. If human capital purists are right, such jubilation is bizarre. Since you go to school to acquire job skills, a teacher who cancels class rips you off. You learn less, you’re less employable, yet your school doesn’t refund a dime of tuition.
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By analogy, both sculptors and appraisers have the power to raise the market value of a piece of stone. The sculptor raises the market value of a piece of stone by shaping it. The appraiser raises the market value of a piece of stone by judging it. Teachers need to ask ourselves, “How much of what we do is sculpting, and how much is appraising?” And if we won’t ask ourselves, our alumni need to ask for us.
Colleges do card now. The last five campuses I’ve been to all had many buildings with secure entry that require tapping student or staff identity cards on some RFID sensor panel to disengage the automatic lock on the doors. Even state schools that explicitly provide free “audit” access to classes for certain groups like the elderly still require more than the professor’s mere permission and one must apply for to get one of those IDs and, as I understand it, there is some vetting or background check that goes along with that.
Fellow classmate from Ivy during 1960s contacted me to say he was shocked, shocked to discover on visiting the campus EVERYTHING was locked down, security was obvious, and cameras watched over all. As to the schooling, he told me that the number of lectures given to students had decreased substantially per course since our time there.
Wow, times have changed! The recent Brown University shooting footage revealed that security cameras are common now, but the idea of locking a college down is really foreign to me.
If you want a career in education, engineering, medicine, law, business, or the sciences, an accredited degree is mandatory.
The days when you could just sit in the back of the room and listen ended long ago, even for state schools. At most schools, private and public, key cards of some sort are needed to get into most buildings, and surveillance cameras are everywhere.
Free men do not live subject to video surveillance or electronically locked buildings.