Isegoria

People who hear he’s a college professor, Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), often reminisce about their time in school, living the life of the mind:

Few tell me, “I’m happy now because I went to college.” But many yearn for the good old days: “How wonderful to be a student again, savoring fascinating new ideas every day!” When I look at college students, though, I see little savoring. Excruciatingly bored students fill the classrooms. Well, “fill” isn’t quite right, because so many don’t bother to show up.

Objecting, “Some students love school, some hate it. The end,” is a cop-out. On average, students are painfully bored. The High School Survey of Student Engagement, probably the single best study of how high school students feel about school, reports that 66% of high school students say they’re bored in class every day. Seventeen percent say they’re bored in every class every day. Only 2% claim they’re never bored in class. Why so bored? Eighty-two percent say the material isn’t interesting; 41% say the material isn’t relevant. Another research team gave beepers to middle school students to capture their feelings in real time. During schoolwork, students were bored 36% of the time, versus 17% for all other activities.

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Research on college boredom is thin but confirms the continuity of pain. A study of British college students found 59% were bored in half or more of their lectures. Only 2% claimed to find none of their lectures boring. Since classroom attendance is usually optional in college, we can also reason from students’ behavior rather than merely inquiring about their feelings. Look at attendance. Students loathe class so much that 25–40% don’t show up.

One could protest that for every disgruntled student who cuts class, there’s an enthusiastic student sucking the marrow out of college. Wishful thinking. Remember: even though college students are generally free to unofficially attend any course, cutting classes is far more common than crashing classes. My teaching is highly rated, and I publicly announce all my courses are open to everyone on earth. Yet guests fill under 5% of my seats.

Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), the sheepskin effect:

Graduation tells employers, “I take social norms seriously—and have the brains and work ethic to comply.” Quitting tells employers, “I scorn social norms—or lack the brains and work ethic to comply.” If you graduate, the signaling model says the market will lump you with the winners and pay you a special diploma bonus—often called a “sheepskin effect” because diplomas used to be printed on sheepskin. If you quit, the signaling model says the market will lump you with the losers and withhold the sheepskin’s reward. After all, employers won’t know why you failed to finish your degree. They’ll only know you failed.

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High school graduation has a big spike: twelfth grade pays more than grades 9, 10, and 11 combined. In percentage terms, the average study finds graduation year is worth 3.4 regular years. College graduation has a huge spike: senior year of college pays over twice as much as freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. In percentage terms, the average study finds graduation year is worth 6.7 regular years. Results are similar for advanced degrees; in several studies, their payoff is nothing but a sheepskin effect.

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One-third of the U.S. population spends 12 years in school, gets a high school diploma, then stops. Only 2% quit high school right after eleventh grade. One-seventh spends 16 years in school, gets a bachelor’s degree, then stops. Only 2% quit college right after their junior year.

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The GSS is ideal for isolating sheepskin effects: 99.5% of participants declare both their years of education and their highest completed degree. Ignoring degrees, the GSS features a large education premium: take another year of school, get a 10.9% raise. Correcting for degrees, however, this annual payoff plummets to 4.5%. Over 60% of the education premium turns out to be a sheepskin effect. High school and four-year college diplomas are especially lucrative: crossing each of these thresholds boosts income by almost a third. As expected, the most lucrative years are also the most popular. Thirty percent have a high school diploma with exactly 12 years of schooling; only 5% finish 11 years but not 12. Eleven percent have a bachelor’s degree with exactly 16 years of school; only 3% finish their junior year but not their senior year.

In 2011, Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), holders of advanced degrees made almost three times as much as high school dropouts:

Each step up the educational ladder seems to count. A high school diploma may sound unworthy of mention in our Information Age, but high school graduates out-earn dropouts by 30%.

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Mainstream defenders of education tend to take the numbers at face value. Since college grads earn 73% more than high school grads, expect a 73% raise when you finish college. Contrarian detractors of education tend to take the numbers at no value. For all we know, college grads would have made 73% extra even if they never set foot on a college campus.

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To properly measure the effect of education on earnings, to avoid what economists call “ability bias,” you must compare workers with equal ability but unequal education.

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The typical high school dropout was a below-average high school student. Dropouts who wonder how much they would have earned if they’d stayed in school should not, therefore, compare themselves to average high school graduates. They should compare themselves to below-average high school graduates.

The typical college grad, similarly, was an above-average high school student. B.A.s who wonder what they owe to their college diploma should not compare themselves to average high school graduates. They should compare themselves to above-average high school graduates.

The effect of education on income is like the effect of athletic practice on athletic prowess. People who practice more play better. Professional athletes practice the most and play the best. This doesn’t mean I can be a professional football player if I practice enough.

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To properly measure the benefit of football practice, to avoid ability bias, you shouldn’t compare me to pros who practice a lot. You should compare me to 165-pound 46-year-old nerds with bad knees who practice a lot.

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First, IQ pays. Holding education constant, an extra point of IQ raises earnings by about 1%.

Second, holding IQ constant, the education premium shrinks but never vanishes. In 1999, a comprehensive review of earlier studies found that correcting for IQ reduces the education premium by an average of 18%. When researchers correct for scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), an especially high-quality IQ test, the education premium typically declines by 20–30%. Correcting for mathematical ability may tilt the scales even more; the most prominent researchers to do so report a 40–50% decline in the education premium for men and a 30–40% decline for women.

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The highest serious estimate finds the education premium falls 50% after correcting for students’ twelfth-grade math, reading, and vocabulary scores, self-perception, perceived teacher ranking, family background, and location.

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Correcting for AFQT, self-esteem, and fatalism (belief about the importance of luck versus effort) reduces the education premium by a total of 30%. The sole study correcting for detailed personality tests finds the education premium falls 13%. The highest serious estimate says that once you correct for intelligence and background, correcting for attitudes (such as fear of failure, personal efficacy, and trust) and personal behavior (such as church attendance, television viewing, and cleanliness) further cuts the education premium by 37%.

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Correcting for mathematical ability in the senior year of high school shaves 25–32% off the male college premium and 4–20% off the female college premium.

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The mechanism is hard to nail down, but most researchers find correcting for family background reduces the education premium by 0–15%.

On reflection, though, correcting for family background probably “double-counts.” Both cognitive and noncognitive ability are moderately to highly hereditary, so you should correct for individual ability before you conclude family background overstates school’s payoff. This caveat matters. Rare studies that correct for intelligence and family background find that correcting for intelligence alone suffices.

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For cognitive ability bias, 20% is a cautious estimate, and 30% is reasonable. For noncognitive ability bias, 5% is cautious, and 15% is reasonable.

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On the reasonable assumption of 30% cognitive plus 15% noncognitive ability bias, dropping out of high school cuts income by almost 15%, a college degree boosts income by 40%, and a master’s degree boosts income by almost 70%.

When students challenge the relevance of their lessons, Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), teachers often reply, “I teach you how to think, not what to think”:

Educational psych­ologists who specialize in “transfer of learning” have measured the hidden intellectual benefits of education for over a century. Their chief discovery: education is narrow. As a rule, students learn only the material you specifically teach them…if you’re lucky. In the words of educational psychologists Perkins and Salomon, “Besides just plain forgetting, people commonly fail to marshal what they know effectively in situations outside the classroom or in other classes in different disciplines. The bridge from school to beyond or from this subject to that other is a bridge too far.”

Many experiments study transfer of learning under seemingly ideal conditions. Researchers teach subjects how to answer Question A. Then they immediately ask their subjects Question B, which can be handily solved using the same approach as Question A. Unless A and B look alike on the surface, or subjects get a heavy-handed hint to apply the same approach, learning how to solve Question A rarely helps subjects answer Question B.

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One classic experiment teaches subjects how to solve a military puzzle, then tests whether subjects apply what they learned to solve a medical puzzle.

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Since subjects hear these two stories back to back, you might think almost everyone would leap to the convergence solution for the medical problem. They don’t. A typical success rate is 30%. Since about 10% of subjects who don’t hear the military problem offer the convergence solution, only one in five subjects transferred what they learned. To reach a high (roughly 75%) success rate, you need to teach subjects the first story, then bluntly tell them to use the first story to solve the second.

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Under less promising conditions, transfer is predictably even worse. Making the surface features of A and B less similar impedes transfer. Adding a time delay between teaching A and testing B impedes transfer. Teaching A, then teaching an irrelevant distracter problem, then testing B, impedes transfer. Teaching A in a classroom, then testing B in the real world impedes transfer. Having one person teach A and another person test B impedes transfer.

To apply schoolwork in the real world, you must normally overcome each and every one of these hurdles. You must see through surface features to underlying structure. You must select the few relevant lessons, and ignore the rest. You must remember relevant lessons years or decades after encountering them. You must apply what you learned in a nonacademic location, without your original teacher (or any teacher!) to hold your hand.

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The measured effect of education on informal reasoning, though positive, was tiny. Fourth-year high school students were slightly better than first-year high school students. Fourth-year college students were no better than first-year college students. Fourth-year graduate students were barely better than first-year graduate students.

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Respondents with more educational credentials definitely get higher scores. The point is that students barely improve between their first and fourth years of study. While people with better reasoning skills do complete more education, their reasoning skills are better at the outset. If education seriously showed students “how to think,” three additional years of study would sharply amplify their initial advantage. Yet students’ scores barely budge.

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By and large, college science teaches students what to think about topics on the syllabus, not how to think about the world.

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Each major sharply improved on precisely one subtest. Social science and psychology majors became much better at statistical reasoning—the ability to apply “the law of large numbers and the regression or base rate principles” to both “scientific and everyday-life contexts.” Natural science and humanities majors became much better at conditional reasoning—the ability to correctly analyze “if…then” and “if and only if” problems.

On remaining subtests, however, gains after three and half years of college were modest or nonexistent. Social scientists’ verbal and conditional reasoning scores slightly fell. Psychologists’ verbal scores slightly rose, but their conditional reasoning failed to improve. Natural science and humanities majors gained slightly in verbal reasoning, and modestly in statistical reasoning.

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Students primarily improve in the very tasks they study and practice. Even this isn’t guaranteed; humanities majors’ verbal reasoning barely budged.

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No one, not even law students, improved much in verbal reasoning. Chemists’ scores on all three subtests stayed about the same. But medical and especially psychology students improved in statistical reasoning, and law, medical, and psychology students all improved in conditional reasoning.

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Transfer researchers usually begin their careers as idealists. Before studying educational psychology, they take their power to “teach students how to think” for granted. When they discover the professional consensus against transfer, they think they can overturn it. Eventually, though, young researchers grow sadder and wiser. The scientific evidence wears them down—and their firsthand experience as educators finishes the job.

The labor market pays you for what you know now, Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), not what you knew on graduation day:

For human capital purists, the coexistence of a high education premium and low learning [and] retention would be a puzzle. The less students know and remember, the greater the puzzle.

For the signaling model, in contrast, the coexistence of a high education premium and low learning [and] retention raises no eyebrows. While students could signal their intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity by acquiring and retaining a vast stock of knowledge, they don’t have to. Students can win employers’ favor by learning enough to get a good grade—then forgetting every lesson.

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But summer learning loss is only a special case of the problem of fadeout: human beings poorly retain knowledge they rarely use.

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Most people who take high school algebra and geometry forget about half of what they learn within five years and forget almost everything within twenty-five years. Only people who continue on to calculus retain most of their algebra and geometry.

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Surveys of adults’ knowledge of reading, math, history, civics, science, and foreign languages are already on the shelf. The results are stark: Basic literacy and numeracy are virtually the only book learning most American adults possess. While the average American spends years and years studying other subjects, they recall next to nothing about them. If schools teach us everything we know about history, civics, science, and foreign languages, their achievement is pitiful.

In 2003, the United States Department of Education gave about 18,000 randomly selected Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). The NAAL tested prose literacy (“knowledge and skills needed to search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts”), document literacy (“knowledge and skills needed to search, comprehend, and use information from noncontinuous texts”), and quantitative literacy (“knowledge and skills needed to identify and perform computations using numbers that are embedded in printed materials”).

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The ignorance revealed by the NAAL is numbing. Only modest majorities are Intermediate or Proficient on the prose and document tests. Under half are Intermediate or Proficient on the quantitative test. Reviewing specific questions underscores the severity of the ignorance. Barely half know that saving $.05 per gallon on 140 gallons of oil equals $7.00. Thirty-five percent of Americans can’t correctly enter a name and address on a Certified Mail form—with no points off for misspelling! Schools do far less to cure illiteracy and innumeracy than we’d like to think.

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While today’s dropouts almost always spend at least nine years in school, over half remain functionally illiterate and innumerate. Over half of high school grads have less than the minimum skills one would naively expect them to possess. Though college grads spend at least seventeen years in school, under a third have the level of literacy and numeracy we assume of every college freshman.

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Starting with history and civics, all national surveys find severe ignorance. The American Revolution Center tested 1,001 adult Americans’ knowledge of the American Revolution. Eighty-three percent earned failing grades. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute tested over 2,500 adult Americans’ knowledge of American government and American history. Seventy-one percent earned failing grades. Newsweek magazine gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test. Thirty-eight percent scored too low to become citizens of their own country. On the 2000 American National Election Study, the typical person got 48% of the factual questions right; you would expect 28% by guessing. These results are consistent with a vast academic literature on Americans’ (lack of) political knowledge.

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Barely half of American adults know the Earth goes around the sun. Only 32% know atoms are bigger than electrons. Just 14% know that antibiotics don’t kill viruses. Knowledge of evolution barely exceeds zero. Knowledge of the Big Bang is actually less than zero; respondents would have done better flipping a coin. Guess-corrected, the average respondent knows 4.6 answers. If adults learned everything they know about these twelve juvenile questions in high school science, they learned 1.4 answers per year.

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Schools make virtually no one fluent in a foreign language. Only .7% claim to have learned a foreign language “very well” in school; another 1.7% claim to have learned a foreign language “well” in school. Since these are self-reports, true linguistic competence must be even worse. The hard truth: if you didn’t acquire fluency in the home, you almost certainly don’t have it.

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If you fail Spanish, you don’t finish high school, you can’t go to college, and the labor market punishes you—even though most B.A.s are equally monolingual.

The staunchest defenders of education, Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), reject the idea of sorting subjects and majors by “usefulness”:

How do you know Latin, trig­onometry, or Emily Dickinson won’t serve you on the job? A man told me his French once helped him understand an airport announcement in Paris. Without high school French, he would have missed his flight. Invest years now and one day you might save hours at an airport. See, studying French pays!

These claims remind me of Hoarders, a reality show about people whose mad acquisitiveness has ruined their lives. Some hoarders collect herds of cats, others old refrigerators, others their own garbage. Why not throw away some of their useless possessions? Stock answer: “I might need it one day.” They “might need” a hundred empty milk cartons.

Every school teaches a mix of useful skills and filler, Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), of “wheat” and “chaff”:

The crucial question is: What’s today’s mix? 90% wheat and 10% chaff? 50/ 50? 20/ 80?

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In a modern economy, literacy and numeracy are the only skills that almost all jobs require, so English and math make the cut.

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High school science classes…are only stepping-stones for the tiny share of students who pursue careers in science or engineering. How tiny? About one-third of high school graduates have a bachelor’s degree; only 14% of students who earn a bachelor’s degree major in science or engineering. That multiplies out to roughly 5%.

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To belabor the obvious, the arts are rarely useful. We don’t speak of “starving artists” for nothing.

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Foreign languages, similarly, are all but useless in the American economy. Thanks to immigration, employers have a built-in pool of native speakers of almost every living language.

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Almost every modern occupation uses some math. Yet high schools teach and often require math rarely used outside a classroom.

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Geometry is the most common of all math courses: over four-fifths complete it in high school. Yet the subject, featuring countless proofs of triangles’ congruence, is notoriously irrelevant. Geometry rarely pops up after the final exam, even in other math classes.

Algebra I, which teaches students graphing and one-and two-variable equations, has many practical applications. Most students, however, continue on to Algebra II, which largely exists to prepare students for calculus. Calculus, in turn, gets you into college. Once college begins, however, you’ll probably never differentiate another equation unless you pursue a degree in math, science, or engineering.

Knowledge of statistics, in contrast, is useful whether or not you go to college. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman shows that statistical illiteracy underpins many foolish real-world choices. Yet only 7.7% of high school students pass a stats class.

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Being more relevant than Oxford in 1750 is nothing to brag about.

In The Case Against Education, Bryan Caplan asks us to put ourselves in the shoes of a Martian sociologist:

Your mission: given our curriculum, make an educated guess about what our economy looks like. The Martian would plausibly work backward from the premise that the curriculum prepares students to be productive adults. Since students study reading, writing, and math, you would correctly infer that the modern economy requires literacy and numeracy. So far, so good.

From then on, however, the Martian would leap from one erroneous inference to another. Students spend years studying foreign languages, so there must be lots of translators. Teachers emphasize classic literature and poetry. A thriving market in literary criticism is the logical explanation. Every student has to take algebra and geometry. The Martian sociologist will conclude the typical worker occasionally solves quadratic equations and checks triangles for congruence. While we can picture an economy that fits our curriculum like a glove, that economy is out of this world.

We should be equally puzzled, he notes, by the eminently practical subjects students don’t have to study:

Why don’t educators familiarize students with compensation and job satisfaction in common occupations? Strategies for breaking into various industries? Sectors with rapidly changing employment? Why don’t schools make students spend a full year learning how to write a resume or affect a can-do attitude? Dire sins of omission.

There has to be a logical explanation for the effect of Ivory Tower achievement on Real World success, he continues:

The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you reveal by mastering them.

Education signals three broad traits: not just intelligence, but conscientiousness and conformity, too:

What are modern model workers like? They’re team players. They’re deferential to superiors, but not slavish. They’re congenial toward coworkers but put business first. They dress and groom conservatively. They say nothing remotely racist or sexist, and they stay a mile away from anything construable as sexual harassment. Perhaps most importantly, they know and do what’s expected, even when articulating social norms is difficult or embarrassing. Employers don’t have to tell a modern model worker what’s socially acceptable case by case.

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An intelligent worker learns quickly and deeply. A conscientious worker labors until the job’s done right. A conformist worker obeys superiors and cooperates with teammates. If you lack the right stuff to succeed in school, you probably lack the right stuff to succeed in the labor market.