
Economist Bryan Caplan thinks education is mostly pointless showing off - davizao4
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-case-for-and-against-education/
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Eridrus
So, regardless of any of this, no-one is saying you should avoid getting
formal education; for all sorts of reasons, Education benefits the person
getting it. Or at least the fact that you don't learn anything isn't a reason
for an individual to avoid it, from an economic perspective.

But Bryan Caplan is trying to get to the difficult policy question of "should
we be trying to send everyone to college?"

So I listened to the podcast and most of the empirical evidence for this view
boils down to this:

If you compare earnings, the first N years of high school/college are far less
valuable to people than the actual event of graduating. This makes a pretty
strong argument that in terms of employment, the value of education is
signaling, rather than actual learning.

But my biggest complaint here is that even if you accept that most of the
employment value of education is signaling (which I do), that does not
preclude actually learning something from formal education and the signaling
effect may be masking the society-wide return to education.

He's also pretty dismissive of the correlation between math/science scores &
GDP, which I think support the model of signaling masking real societal
return.

They also very briefly touch on the fact that not all majors are the same, and
they even suggest that CS is a difficult major more similar to other
Engineering courses than Economics, which is probably arguable ;) But I
mention this since our experience in CS may not be a good basis on which to
base any thinking on the policy, since most STEM graduates outside of
engineering disciplines do not actually work in their field of study.

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combinations
I think there is value in school.

The people you meet, the range of ideas you are exposed to, the required work
ethic, Ect. These all contribute to the development of the brain.

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Eridrus
The podcast goes into how there is very little evidence that for the idea of
transfer learning, i.e. learning one task helping other tasks. Being exposed
to ideas in your chosen profession is probably useful, but there's basically
no evidence for the idea that being well rounded helps after you control for
intelligence.

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FrozenVoid
Its just the current mass education system is more of a giant filter test than
learning. Actual learning process is deeply personal and transformative.
Instead this is a high-stress environment with little actual learning and more
of performance show to force feed people with data in factory-like setting.

Those who learn for filter tests and those who learn out of interest for the
subject are different people. Turns out the system is geared for the first
type of people and their educated knowledge doesn't hold when they lose
interest in it, they have to take "refresher courses" and "recertifications"
for everything they learn.

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JakeAl
Education is what you make of it. Make of that what you will.

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sanxiyn
This is personal view. Caplan's work is mostly about social view.

What is claimed is that while you can make good use of education, society as a
whole loses.

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petermcneeley
This sounds similar to Peter Thiels views. (
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzdiWDw4teo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzdiWDw4teo)
)

