Arctotherium summarizes Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Education and notes that the chief implication of the signaling model of education is that investing in education is individually rational, but collectively destructive:
Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Whenever there is a signal for desirable traits, prospective signalers can focus on either (1) improving those traits or (2) optimizing for the signal itself, making it a worse signal of the underlying traits (i.e., “Goodharting”). Educational attainment has been a target for a very long time, so it’s not surprising that it has been aggressively gamed.
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If you’ve ever spent time tutoring, attended a college admissions prep course, gone to a selective institution like Stuyvesant High School, or done STEM at a selective college, you might have noticed a glaring omission in all of the articles linked in the introduction. Not one of them mentions Asian immigration—except in the context of Asians being harmed by affirmative action at elite colleges.
Stereotypes suggest that Asian immigrants put much more effort into Goodharting education (and other zero-sum status signals) than other groups in the United States. Don’t take my word for it: Yale Law professor Amy Chua wrote an entire book about how she and other Chinese immigrants aggressively (some might say abusively) parented their daughters to maximise status.
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This grind culture is found in first- and second-generation immigrants, and I would expect it to dissipate by the third generation. (Sample sizes are too small to check, but Jews had a similar reputation in mid-20th century America and don’t any more). Pro-immigration conservatives often use this focus on education status-signaling as evidence of immigrant moral superiority, but it is in fact destructive and wasteful.
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Korean private tutoring schools or “hagwons” are infamous. About 78% of Koreans between first and twelfth grade attended a hagwon in 2022, as did 83% of five-year-olds in 2017, and about 95% of Koreans do at some point in their student lives. The average hagwon student attends for 7.2 hours a week, in addition to regular studies and homework, and as a consequence the average South Korean student works 13 hours a day. South Korea spends three times the OECD average on private schooling as a percentage of GDP, the highest in the world. These thousands of hours of studying are all to get high scores on the CSAT, the standardized test that determines most college admissions in South Korea. Government regulations and crackdowns to try to stop South Korean parents from spending so much time and money on wasteful zero-sum signaling have thus far failed.
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About 73% of junior high schoolers in Taiwan attend some form of cram school, for an average of 6.24 hours per week. About 70% of Singaporean students do the same. China is much poorer than South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, and therefore has far fewer resources to spend on costly signaling. Yet the Chinese education industry grew at 11.3% per year between 2019 and 2023. This provoked a massive government crackdown in 2023–24 that banned people from offering classes in English, Chinese, or mathematics for profit. As with South Korea, demand is so high that the ban led to an explosion in underground quasi-legal tutoring. Note that China also relies primarily on standardized tests for college admissions.
China and India are both infamous for cheating—to the point that there have been riots by students in both countries when students were prevented from cheating by investigators. (China now threatens students with jail time for cheating.) International Asian SAT takers are also notorious for cheating, with common methods including impersonation14, purchasing tests from insiders at College Board, buying questions and answers from test takers in other time zones, and smuggling in vocabulary lists. The persistence of traits would suggest that this doesn’t stop when they enter the US, and indeed anecdotes from teachers suggest that recent Asian immigrants are dramatically overrepresented in cheating rings.
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The SAT score gaps between every major race in the United States have been roughly constant since the late 1970s (Native Americans have small samples), with all trending up and down together in line with test changes, external factors such as the COVID lockdown, the rise of the test prep industry, and other things that might affect scores—with one glaring exception. Asian-Americans have gone from testing approximately equal to whites to breaking away from the pack like Secretariat at Belmont, to the point that they are now about 100 points ahead on average.
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A remarkable 25% of Asians in Michigan (which forces all high schoolers to take the SAT and hence is more representative than other states) scored between 1400 and 1600 versus 4% of white students.