
School is all about signaling, not skill-building - kermittd
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-education-credentials-20180211-story.html
======
analog31
In my view, school does not admit to a singular purpose, even if a number of
people seem to achieve similar results from it. Instead, different students
can pursue different strategies through school, and get different things out
of it. Even if signaling is a benefit of school, it doesn't need to be the
only benefit.

School is a complex system. Take it apart. Figure out how it works. Adapt the
pieces to make it do something useful for you. In short, hack school. It
shocks me that a site devoted to "Hacker" news hasn't guessed that school is
begging to be hacked, and makes me wonder how many true hackers there actually
are.

Of course one possible hack is to follow a path of least resistance and emerge
after 4 years with nothing but "signaling." But it's not the only hack.
Signaling in the absence of real education could be viewed as a _pitfall_ of
school, not its purpose. A dark pattern, if you will.

In another age, this message would have been expressed by elders to their
children in some sort of patronizing way, such as: "What you get out of
college depends on what you put into it." I've certainly told this to my kids,
along with the somewhat more detailed explanation about hacking.

The coding interview is a clue. At its core is a question: "How did you hack
school to your advantage?"

Can school be hack-proofed? Experience with complex systems suggests this
might not be a good idea, as it can kill the good hacks along with the bad, or
make even worse hacks emerge.

~~~
alexandercrohde
Well part of why I upvoted this is because it would have been useful
information to me 15 years ago.

Certainly school can be used for any purpose (perhaps that's a truism). But
the author's point also includes the fact that the market (and society) is
largely indifferent to what you learn at school.

In order to "Hack" school we need to be real with ourselves about what the
world after school looks like.

\- I've never been asked GPA once (one data point)

\- Most technical questions I get asked are basic and solvable with a hash map

\- I've never been asked to write a proof as part of an interview

\- My degrees (business/psychology) have never been useful in my career.

\- Many many people have asked my wear I went to college, and I can tell they
care about the name of the school first and foremost.

\- Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to
be assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)

~~~
mcguire
* I've rarely been asked about my GPA either, which is good because I sucked. On the other hand, A good GPA would have made some things I wanted to do easier.

* Most technical questions are basic because most "technical" jobs are _very_ basic. However, there are people out there building operating systems kernels, secured software, and life-critical systems; I'm reasonably assured that you would have to demonstrate more than competence with a hash map.

* I too have never been asked to write a proof. But, thanks to my education, the techniques needed to write a proof are rather ingrained with how I understand writing code.

* I, too, ask people where they went to college, because if they went to the U. of Washington or Carnegie Mellon or someplace like that, I can't assume they'll know Kantian ethics but I can assume they'll have learned _something_ ; I can't make that assumption if they went to the U. of Phoenix, ITT Tech, or EPRI.

* Positions at the level of director do seem to be assigned by luck/politics/privilege. Positions at the level of internal medicine specialist, structural engineer, and the like tend not to be.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
Maybe for the elite. But for middle class people like myself, I developed
marketable skills, secured multiple internships, and found it easy to get a
full-time job straight out of school. I had about a years worth of industry
experience via internships (one for 6 months, two others 3 months each).

Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical
interview will sort out whether or not you actually demonstrate basic
programming skills very quick.

Software Engineering is a notable exception, most other fields don't quiz as
part of the job interview process: soft skills and credentials or state
licenses or bar exams are relied upon more heavily. Maybe signaling matters
more in these fields? Again, signaling is no measure of real skill.

Obviously, like most people I'm upset about the pay-to-play scheme but in
reality very, very few people choose that option. 99.9%+ of applications are
not pay-to-play, so we should still hold a good deal of faith in our higher
education system. It is imperfect and has many issues, but this article title
is broadly incorrect about the purpose of higher education today.

edit:

> Researchers consistently find that most of education’s payoff comes from
> graduation, from crossing the academic finish line. The last year of high
> school is worth more than the first three; the last year of college is worth
> more than double the first three. This is hard to explain if employers are
> paying for acquired skills; do schools really wait until senior year to
> impart useful training?

My first company that hired me out of college got a much better deal waiting
for me to complete my senior year. Yes, each year isn't worth the same. This
makes sense. Senior year was my capstone -- building valuable communication
skills in a team environment. Year 1? I was finishing the basics of CS 101. Of
course the last year is worth more than the first.

Would you pay 50% the price for a half-finished version of Microsoft Word?
Probably not. It'd be far less useful of a piece of software.

~~~
ozim
Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple
internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you
could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your
own time?

Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning
for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring
developer who is signaling that he is reliable and comes to work every day vs
someone who is inconsistent.

~~~
dogma1138
Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube?

I think the problem here is a bias due to the fact that the employment after
earning their computer science degree is for many people not about the science
part of it but rather about fairly mundane programming and general office
work.

Good luck arguing that chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, medicine
and many other fields that require specific tools and environments in order to
actually study not to mention make any progress in the field are all about
signaling.

~~~
jdietrich
The essential question is "why do we think that every skilled job requires a
four-year college degree?". It would be a peculiar coincidence if the vast
majority of jobs required exactly the same amount of academic education. Why
do so many people go on to do work that has little or nothing to do with their
major?

Here in the UK, a large proportion of healthcare is delivered by healthcare
professionals other than doctors. If I go to my GP (family doctor) with a
minor ailment, I'm likely to be treated by a Nurse Practitioner, who may have
a Master's degree in nursing or may have never attended college at all. If I
have a minor surgery, the surgery might be performed by a Surgical Care
Practitioner working under the supervision of a consultant surgeon.

Lambda School have conclusively shown that it doesn't take four years to make
someone into an employable software developer. How many other job skills could
be taught through a short bootcamp programme, intensive vocational training or
on-the-job training?

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Because most high school graduates don't have the soft skills (or the hard
skills) to work in a corporate environment.

I've worked with people with previous job experience that have gone through
10-week coding programs. And it shows. They might've been taught a framework
or a language, but their computer science skills aren't nearly as developed.
Some things take years to click, and growth occurs from years of writing bad
code.

~~~
hopler
College doesn't teach those soft skills. Jobs and skill training teach those
skills

You don't need college to write years of bad code. Internships or hobby
projects do fine.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
The credential signifies that you indeed spent years writing bad code, and got
better. Maybe it does have value there. Many companies are weary of hiring
someone who has a few years of self-taught experience.

------
hooch
“If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or
pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I
assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed,
the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four
years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious
thing: a diploma. The fact that almost no one tries this route — saving
hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way — is a strong sign that
students understand the value of certification over actual learning“

Isn’t this how Steve Jobs treated college? And “Apple” was his “diploma”?

~~~
rjf72
One key thing this paragraph misses is the characterization of this sort of
person. Imagine we have a person that would independently, without extrinsic
reward or 'push', show up to classes completely of their own accord. And we
must further assume that they would engage in all assignments and somehow try
to regularly test their understanding - the feedback exams offer is _crucial_
to demonstrating understanding. And we assume they're doing well on Princeton
quality and standard of work, all completely independently.

How did this person do in high school? Given high school is orders of
magnitude more trivial, we can assume they were likely at or near the top of
their classes, and probably would have shown remarkable results in skill
assessment exams. And with that sort of motivation he also probably would have
been involved in immense extracurricular and other such events. This person
would likely have been able to get into any university he ever wanted.

Top universities do provide a certainly better than average education, but
their main strength has nothing to do with their quality of education. It's
the quality of their student body - which turns success stories into a self
fulfilling prophecy. Imagine you start an 'basketball school' and only accept
people that are at least 6'6", highly athletic, can dunk from _x_ feet, run
100 meters in _y_ seconds, etc. Go figure -- you're going to 'produce' a
disproportionately huge number of NBA quality players simply because your
admittance is already heavily biased to individuals who are already headed in
that direction.

The point of this is that none of this has anything to do with signaling, but
it also has very little to do with the quality of education received. The
value of an e.g. Princeton degree is that you're the sort of person that could
get accepted into Princeton which would be comparable to the sort of person
that could get admitted to 'Basketball U'. Regardless of what happens during
those 4 years, you're already almost certainly going to be ahead of 99% of the
rest of the population. The degree just works as 'proof of filtering'. E.g.
even if our basketball university had a pretty bad education system, you'd
still see NBA quality players emerging from it at a way way higher rate than
the population of non-admitted individuals.

~~~
danenania
Adult learners are a demographic that could be highly motivated as you
describe but often wouldn’t have any chance of getting in through the
application process of an elite university. There are a lot of intelligent
people out there who didn’t engage well with school when they were young for
whatever reason but come to place a high value on education later in their
lives.

I think this group is quite poorly served by our current system.

~~~
drjesusphd
I disagree. I was able to get into one of the best graduate programs in my
field a few years after a mediocre undergraduate record. This took some
preparation, but it came down to finding other avenues to prove myself. The
committee knows your undergrad record doesn't mean much if it was many years
ago. "What else have you got?" they might ask. It takes some effort and
creativity, but it can be done.

Adults with a newfound motivation are valuable and they know that. But just
saying so isn't enough.

~~~
danenania
That's awesome that it worked out so well for you! It's not something that
I've tried myself, just the impression that I have. I do wonder though if grad
school admissions might be another story compared to undergrad, since they
probably see a lot more older applicants with work experience and are possibly
more used to adjusting their evaluations based on what the most
recent/relevant signals are (just as businesses do when hiring).

But leaving during undergrad (or just never going to college) then excelling
in self-learning and industry seems to put you in a much more awkward position
when it comes to continuing onward with education. You are far beyond most
undergrad-level courses, but in most cases you need that bachelor's degree to
even be considered for grad-level programs--or at least I believe that's the
case? You end up needing to waste years of your life and tons of money just to
qualify for the courses that would actually teach you something new.

So perhaps the problem is as much that there just aren't compelling tracks
offered to people who don't fit neatly into the lines as it is about
admissions flexibility.

------
Razengan
It would be cool if early school was like a video game tutorial, to help
children see their place in the world at large, as well as humanity's place in
the cosmos:

 _Welcome to Earth.

You are a human, and this is [country/city], in the year 2XXX.

We share this planet with many species, but we are the only ones we know that
can talk and invent and build.

The light in the sky is a star, and there are other planets around it, but
this is the only one we know that has life.

There are many other stars out there that you can see at night, and all of
them have planets of their own, and maybe someday you will visit them.

You are in school so you can learn how to do what you want._

...and so on, while showing a montage of places, creatures and inventions. :)

History classes should focus on the inconveniences and uglinesses our species
has plodded through (" _We did not always have cars or phones or toilets.._
"), not just a droning journal of events.

Maybe some of you would be interested in creating a YouTube series like this?
Perhaps like a Kurzgesagt [0] For Kids?

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q)

------
Ken_Adler
Crazy story: my son actually did what the author suggested, he talked his way
into a free education at Princeton!!!

He audited all the classes he wanted to... no diploma, but what a great
experience (and a great story....)

From the article:

Ponder this: If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need
to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a
professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial
education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At
the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack
one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that almost no one tries this route —
saving hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way — ....

~~~
avcdsuia
Not a US citizen, but AFAIK, a course includes lectures, office hours,
assignments etc. How did he manage to fully understand the materials without
all the resources that are provided only for registered students?

~~~
yorwba
Also not a US citizen and I don't know how it works at Princeton, but in my
experience, getting actionable feedback on assignments is rare. You may get
told where your mistakes are, but not how you should have done it instead.
Most of the value of assignments is in simply doing them; that forces you to
review the necessary material.

As for office hours, I never went to any, but I assume that they're not going
to check your student ID, just as they don't check before lectures.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
At my UK uni (some time back) we had tutorials and "office hours". Tutorials
would recap lecture material and have question/answer sessions, and set
"homework" questions; and be optional. Office hours would give chance to talk
with the professor, you just queued outside, or signed up for a time slot.

Tutorials were run by TAs recruited from the body of PhD students and so could
be of mixed quality (my metaphysics tutor was better than the lecturer), but
would at least have value in repitition.

Libraries were vital to me. As at the time were computer facilities (MathCAD,
Maple, Excel, Fortran, etc.). For some of my courses there were laboratories
(material science), and for Art History there were trips and a special picture
library.

You could sit in the back of lectures back then, but I think they check your
ID nowadays.

------
Zarath
Come on, have we really swung so far on the "game is rigged" and "college
isn't what it used to be" pendulum that we're acting like college doesn't
build useful skills. Before college I had never written a program in my life
outside of my TI-83. Coming out of college I was able to secure a full time
job at a highly respected software company. They didn't hire me because my
program was great (it wasn't that great), but they hired me because I can code
well, or at least I like to think so.

~~~
pembrook
We’re in the minority. Most professions aren’t engineering. Or medicine.

Think of the average student graduating with a generic business degree. What
actual skills does this person possess after 4 years of schooling?

This is why so many Fortune 500 companies have new grad trainee programs that
they funnel people through. The fact is, most of these generic “business” jobs
can be done by anyone with a few months of on the job learning.

How many project managers, marketing managers, account executives, sales
people, HR professionals, tech support, etc. could’ve stepped into those same
roles without spending 4 years at an extremely expensive party (as they would
have 50 years ago)?

~~~
snowwrestler
Surprisingly few. New grad training programs still depend on the "grad" part.

It's not like Fortune 500 businesses are stupid. If they could hire random
high school grads for all their jobs and pay them less, don't you think they
would? As you point out, college degree requirements have not always existed,
they were added. Chesterton's Fence is a useful mental guide here. People
don't generally make things harder on themselves for no reason.

~~~
hopler
Many many jobs today that require a college degree used to require a high
school diploma. Yes those require intelligence and studiousness in varying
degrees, but these skills can be assessed by interviews and hiring people in
entry level positions for 4 years (or less!), not making them sit through
irrelet college classes.

Half of a US college degree curriculum (the liberal arts distribution) isn't
part of the curriculum at all in the UK for a science degree; are those UK
degrees producing useless employees?

------
kevintb
I strongly disagree. _Elite_ colleges are all about signaling. But I don't
doubt for a second that my CS degree taught me an enormous amount - some
skill-building, lots of abstract thinking - that I wouldn't have been able to
achieve as quickly as anywhere else.

~~~
nafey
Okay but how about this: Say you actually dropped out of your degree one day
before completing it. Skillwise you are almost the same but your compensation
will take a drastic hit on average.

~~~
closeparen
It's not a good inference from the employer's perspective that he is skillwise
almost the same. The dropout happened for a reason, i.e. he was not on track
to meet the degree requirements, which at least creates doubt about the
underlying skill.

------
dash2
Article was fine until this:

    
    
      These behaviors make perfect sense if — and only if — 
      employers are eager to detect workers who dutifully 
      confirm to social expectations. In a society where 
      parents, teachers and peers glorify graduation, failing
      classes and dropping out are deviant acts.
    

This is a misunderstanding. Employers pay attention to qualifications, e.g. on
a CV, as an informational shortcut. If you don't get the qualification, then
you are pooling with everyone else who didn't - including nonconformists, but
also the incompetent and lazy. If you get the qualification, even only just,
then you are in the category with everyone else who did, including brilliant
top achievers.

Maybe employers do care about social conformity, maybe even overwhelmingly so
- but this evidence doesn't show that. Looks like a journalist misreading the
academic literature.

~~~
tylerhou
The author is an econ professor at George Mason.

~~~
xondono
The author has a book on the subject and is one of the main proponents of
signalling in education :D

------
ergocoder
In an ideal world, school is great. But, in a real world, it monopolizes
knowledge and makes a huge propaganda that it _is_ the only way to learn. We
have been doing this propaganda for decades.

Then, parents, who don't know any better, think that they need to send their
kids to colleges _at all cost_. They don't even care much about which college
or which subject it is. Then, some business capitalizes on that by making a
low-quality college. Then, we have this strange issue with student's debt
where the student is not really hireable.

I talked to my colleagues at Google anonymously through Blind. And a few, even
at Google, said (and many agreed) that either they took the student loan or
they became a drug dealer (or something equally bad). I was quite surprised
that even googlers would hold this kind of views.

I agree though that being $xx,xxx in debt is better than being a drug dealer.
But, in my opinion, those cannot possibly be the only two choices. I didn't
grow up in US, so maybe I don't understand the situation here.

------
personjerry
Just like in startups, you get what you measure. In school, you measure by
grades, so you get students who play the rules to get good grades.

Also see Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a
good measure."[0]

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

------
subjectsigma
Because this is Hacker News, let's stick with technology: have none of you
guys ever experienced the power gap? Seriously?

I went to a decent school, not great but pretty well known. I had friends who
went to community colleges and transferred to a school like mine, and friends
who went to Ivy League schools. Our senior year, the Ivy guys were writing
their own toy operating systems and compilers, and I was reading shitty
PowerPoints about how one might do that. The lower tier group? I was still
helping them with their homework, which was basically sorting algorithms. One
of them barely understood classes, and one of them was _still_ struggling with
properly constructing for loops after years of education. All of us paid
absurd amounts of money to be where we were.

The Ivy guys were also well-off and came from good homes; that just means that
money begets power begets money, not that their degrees were worthless paper.
It makes sense that a professor of economics would write tripe like this,
maybe it applies in his field but not here.

~~~
daenz
I've had this conversation with a coworker who was frustrated that people with
wealth could leverage that wealth to create more opportunities for themselves.
My response is essentially: "isn't that what you want to do for yourself?" He
seems to think it is more fair if someone with less wealth got access to those
opportunities, instead of the people with wealth. How is that more fair? Why
does it matter who gets the opportunities, as long as they're going to people
with a low risk of wasting them?

~~~
subjectsigma
I agree with you 100%, the point was that degrees are not worthless, not that
the system is inherently unfair.

------
BadassFractal
> Researchers consistently find that most of education’s payoff comes from
> graduation, from crossing the academic finish line.

Not even. Just being able to show that you "went" to Harvard is a powerful
enough of a signal. You can join, drop out immediately after, start a startup,
fail, an then likely end up somewhere really prestigious anyway.

~~~
sanxiyn
Yes, but Harvard etc is super special snowflake exception.

~~~
BadassFractal
My point is that signaling works without any sort of coursework. The instant
you make it into Stanford, you're a Stanford kid, which puts you into an elite
group of desirable employees.

And of course these colleges are special snowflakes, they wouldn't be signals
otherwise. Nobody cares if you went to a community college down the street, it
associates no household name with you.

~~~
sanxiyn
No, community college diploma is a strong signal compared to no diploma. You
seem too preoccupied by concerns of top few percent.

~~~
BadassFractal
Sure, I suppose you're right. I'm mentioning these top colleges because we're
on HN, which is heavily oriented around the Bay Area tech ecosystem, which
loves to dip into that pool.

~~~
sanxiyn
I agree. Most of discussion is irrelevant to most HN people.

------
known
Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson's study showed that, if teachers were led
to expect enhanced performance from children, then the children's performance
was enhanced.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect)

------
glglwty
Technologies like online education would crush the existing education system
if the playground is fair. Unfortunately the latter has public funding in it
and prevents the society from moving forward.

~~~
Godel_unicode
Except online education is dominated by the existing players, and they are
charging the same kind of money you would pay in person. If you're getting a
STEM degree especially, Coursera will charge you something like $600/credit.

This is because of, wait for it, signaling. You don't actually need all that
much education to be an entry level software engineer, especially outside
silicon valley. But you do need those letters after your name.

~~~
barry-cotter
Georgia Tech On Campus M.Sc. CS $40,000

Georgia Tech Online M.Sc. CS $8,000

------
lifeisstillgood
I think the article seriously underestimated the effort to make it through a
thre year degree at an elite college - let's say an MIT mechanical engineering
degree - my understanding it is 80 hour weeks, with yearly inflection points
where the faculty will try and eliminate the bottom 10% or so. get a first or
2.1 there and you are not signalling attendance but genuine effort. (Any
alumni able to comment? )

There are signals and signals and disparaging an entire school is ... unfair.

~~~
osdiab
I went to Stanford for Computer Science, and from my friends who went to Ohio
State, equivalent courses sound significantly harder there to me - not much
grade inflation, larger amounts of work. It’s anecdotal but I think the
primary difference is the power of the network you interact with - which feeds
a virtuous cycle of ambition and drive, given how empowering having that
network is. Not the difficulty or rigor of coursework, except in marginal ways
(for instance, d.school was nascent in popularity when I was at Stanford, so I
suppose I got a sneak peek into design thinking before it got more popular
elsewhere) but that’s not a dependable advantage of elite schools IMO and I
probably would have run into the concepts in industry either way.

~~~
mcguire
Ohio State is a fairly well respected CS program. (And I'm not just saying
that because one of my advisor's more successful students is on the faculty.)

[https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-
sch...](https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-
schools/computer-science-rankings)

US News puts them at #30, but that's really the 13th group---there's a lot of
ties.

I think I disagree with that list though---there's many schools higher in the
list that I've never read a paper from. They can't be good.

(UT Austin has dropped to 10th!! I think I want my money back.)

------
Spooky23
School has been undermined in some cases to be a signaling thing because it’s
the last legal way to discriminate at scale, especially in lower rigor
subjects.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Bryan Caplan is professor of economics at George Mason University and
author of “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of
Time and Money.”

Here I was thinking this was an article that genuinely sought to engage my
opinion, when in truth it was only an advert for someone's book.

I think I'll make it a habit from now on to scroll all the way to the bottom
of opinion articles to save myself some time.

~~~
davidivadavid
Trying to engage people's opinion is generally an advert for someone's ideas.

------
mcguire
There are some things very wrong with the American education system, but I
suspect a focus on "signalling" and a desire for job training over general
education is going to miss all of the important ones.

In the first place, the concern only with reading, writing, and 'rithmatic
along with standardized testing are probably destroying most of the value of
the public education system. Thanks, everyone. Good job.

Secondly, the belief that any bachelor's degree is as good as any other, along
with the corresponding rise of for-profit educational institutions (along with
not-for-profit ones which behave like for-profit institutions) leads directly
to this whole signalling flap.

A degree from Joe's Diploma Mill is a bad signalling indicator because the
education Joe provides is crap. A degree from Stanford is a good signal
because Stanford provides a good education. Don't go to Joe's; it's a waste of
money and time.

Back at UT, many students and the occasional visiting job recruiter complained
that the classes didn't cover "job-relevant" skills. (x86 assembler, anyone?)
On the other hand, those same recruiters kept coming back, and showering money
on recent grads; something they notably didn't do at, say, ITT Tech or DeVry,
in spite of the fact that those schools taught nothing but "job-related
skills."

Sure, a degree from Stanford is a signal that you are smart and hard-working.
That's because Stanford is hard to get a degree from unless you are smart and
hard-working. Some of that is simply jumping-through-hoops-ism, but most of it
is because Stanford requires you to learn hard shit. And that's why smart and
hard-working students go there.

(End of part 3; see part 2:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409381))

------
mcguire
(I'm going to break up my initial response to this article into several
pieces, because if I don't, everyone will read the first sentence, down vote
it, and ignore the rest. Plus, it gives everyone an opportunity to downvote me
several times. :-))

Is it ironic that this was written by Bryan Caplan, Ph.D., a professor[1] of
Economics[2] at George Mason University?

[1] I'm getting a certain amusement from the image of Prof. Caplan, at a
meeting of the current Economics faculty discussing prospective faculty
candidates, voting against all the U. of Chicago grads in favor of Earl, who
has a GED and audited a few economics classes.

[2] Economics? Really? The most signally of the signaling degrees. The field
which, aside from its ability to demonstrate rightthink, is worthless outside
academia and politics, not least because of its long history of disconnection
with reality.

(End part 1: mockery.)

~~~
triangleman
My understanding is that of all schools of economics, the Chicago school is
the least disconnected from reality, in that it rightly recognizes its own
"dismal" science as a social science first.

------
gist
The article gives the impression that he is a professor at Princeton but he is
not. He is a professor at George Mason University.

The picture caption is "Princeton" and this paragraph is what had me thinking
that:

> If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or
> pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor,
> I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education;
> indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end
> of four years at Princeton,

~~~
Mirioron
He got his PhD from Princeton though. That's probably why he mentions
Princeton as his example.

~~~
gist
It's super ironic that he would use the sleigh of hand in his writing in that
way. Sure at the end it's disclosed that he is not (currently) teaching at
Princeton.

------
therealdrag0
Author is in one of my favorite EconTalk podcast episodes: "Bryan Caplan on
the Case Against Education"

Probably similar content covered, but it's a good discussion. And he covers
some of the points I see people trying to argue in the comments here.

[0] [http://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-
edu...](http://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education/)

------
bel_marinaio
Does anyone else feel like college is mostly about class gate-keeping? I am
not saying education isn't important.

In these digital times is paying $100k+ really necessary to get the skills you
need for a good career? or is it more about separating the haves from the have
nots using a very expensive piece of paper?

------
lvs
All these anti-education articles are pretty tedious. If you believe it's the
schools who have it all wrong by teaching subjects that aren't useful for
building phone apps, you're probably already pretty set in your worldview.

~~~
nosianu
The article clearly is _pro_ education. It shows that the system is less so.
Example quote:

> _Almost everyone pays lip service to the glories of education, but actions
> speak louder than words. Ponder this: If a student wants to study at
> Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply
> show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make
> near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly
> curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton,
> though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The
> fact that almost no one tries this route — saving hundreds of thousands of
> dollars along the way — is a strong sign that students understand the value
> of certification over actual learning._

> _You can see the same priorities when students pick their classes. Students
> notoriously seek out “easy A’s” — professors who give high grades in
> exchange for little work._

Also, some comments here somehow manage to read into the article that it
claims that you don't learn anything. Even just the quote above shows the
opposite when the author describes the difference between going to Princeton
lectures for free or for a piece of paper. From the second quoted paragraph,
which is as testable statement, it seems that in practice _education_ is not
the main priority - and I don't see how one could interpret the article in a
way that he supports that. It clearly is a criticism of those sad facts.

The author clearly shows what he would like even in just this single sentence
alone:

> _indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts_

------
bwang29
Has anyone seen a framework for companies to screen emotional skills such as
resilience, drive and internal motivations for candidates and have done it
well?

~~~
zwkrt
The voight kompff test is still in beta. People change over time and have
complex motives which change in different environments. For instance, I know I
work harder when my coworkers are more personally friendly, but generally
despise work-related social events.

------
nezzor
Or both you know, that’s also an option.

------
known
Education = Teaching + Coaching

------
Ericson2314
It's an arms race tainting a lot more than education. Hopefully we can UBI +
healthcare a détente.

------
dredmorbius
There's a long history behind education, types of it, and the reasons,
rationales, and interests behind these. One of the better synopses of these
I've found is Wes Cecil's "Myths of the Modern American Mind: Education" (61
minutes, audio only):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFiiOm6fB3c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFiiOm6fB3c)

He traces the history back to Babylonia and scribal training, Plato's Academy,
Aristotle's Lyceum, medieval education, scholaticism and the rise of the Seven
Liberal Arts with their Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and Quadrivium
(Maths, Geometry, Music (or harmony) and Astronomy), the emergence of the
modern physical and social sciences, and the Prussian Educational System which
is the foundation of contemporary Western education.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education)

Throughout virtually all of this there's been a sharp division between
_intellectual_ and _technical_ education. The _liberal_ arts were
distinguished from the _technical_ arts, also called Artes Mechanicae
(mechanical arts), servile arts, or vulgar arts, originally: tailoring and
weaving, agriculture, architecture and masonry, warfare and hunting, trade,
cooking, and blacksmithing and metalurgy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_Mechanicae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_Mechanicae)

Since 1800 or so, the distinctions have largely been between pure skills,
including trade, vocational, and technical skills (including STEM),
professional training (law, medicine, military, religion, and general
administration), and humanities or liberal arts. The relative prestige of
these has shifted fairly markedly over this period, as well as the increased
specialisation within academic curricula and programmes, with the University
of Virginia offering eight fields of study in 1825, and Johns Hopkins
University using the term "major" for the first time in 1877. The emergence of
technical schools, such as M.I.T. (1861) with specialised courses of study
helped drive this transformation.

Cecil's treatment is on the light side, but engaging.

John Stuart Mill's observations on the indoctrinational role of education are
also interesting. As others have said, schools play multiple roles.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_role_of_universities_and_primary_education/)

[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599)

------
mcguire
I don't really want to dig into the details of the arguments for the value of
a "generalized, liberal arts education" here, mostly because I need to do some
research on those arguments before evaluating them.

But, on the other hand, I really do believe that an education in ye olde
trivium
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium)),
quadrivium
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium)),
and a number of other areas are important for the citizens of a modern,
democratic republic, quite aside from how "Literacy and numeracy are vital,
but few of us use history, poetry, higher mathematics or foreign languages
after graduation."

I see this education as important on at least two levels. First, to fight the
natural human tendency to assume that everyone else is like us (and that
anyone who is different is deviant): we're all programmers here, right? And
anyone who doesn't think in discrete, logical steps, is the bizarre alien
_them,_ right?

More seriously, I had to take Texas government and history classes in college,
the requirement for which (a history professor informed us with glee) came out
of a number of soldiers from Texas who were captured during the Korean War and
who decided to stay in China after the war. (Honestly, I have no idea how
those things fit together.) But those classes and others like them, while not
directly benefiting me as a computer programmer, did provide some background
and common ground between me and a huge number of other people who would
otherwise have nothing in common with me.

Secondly, to fight the natural tendency for someone who is well skilled in a
certain field to assume that field is all that exists. (You should recognize
this from this very forum, where people suggest technological fixes for
problems which are not technological in nature. And yes, there are problems
which are not technological nature.)

As for the wisdom of the students, choosing easy classes and complaining about
those on topics they'll never use in real life? I took Spanish as a foreign
language which I never really learned and promptly forgot, took four semesters
to get through two semesters of calculus (badly; all my math be discrete), and
those damn semesters of government and history. Guess what? None of those
things were useful to me in my subsequent career. Nope, not even calculus,
that horrid waste of time and grade points.

On the other hand, _I_ regard my lack of knowledge as a bad thing. A usable
foreign language would have been nice. Other programmers do use calculus; I
just had to avoid those jobs.

So, yeah, I pretty much disagree with everything in this article.

(End of part 2. See part 1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409228))

------
cromwellian
"You study arcane subjects year after year, knowing you’ll never use most of
what you learned after graduation"

Well, that wasn't true for me, and I'm pretty sure for those in engineering or
science, it isn't, but even the history, philosophy, and economics courses I
took I recall and use. Even Steve Jobs, who merely audited a class on
calligraphy, took a great value from it.

The fundamental flaw of Capland argument, who seems to be pushing this theme
for years, is to view education purely in terms of economic benefit. It could
simultaneously be true that the vast majority of your salary comes from
signalling, but it could also be true that you gained great value from your
education. Not everyone who gets an advanced education tries to maximize
salary.

Capland's analysis, for example, would completely ignore the value of someone
who chose to become a teacher or open source contributor.

Also, by induction, you could apply his argument to high school. Do we have
evidence during the industrial revolution where blue collar factory work
started to require more than an 8th grade education, that it made any
difference besides signalling on salary?

Or, if you look at developing economies, where people often experience
significant increases in wages as they move up the industrial ladder,
sometimes without even full literacy, but merely from on the job experience.
Should we assume education isn't worthwhile if you can't show a correlation
between education and wages other than signalling?

One of the frustrating things about these kinds of economic analyses is that
they narrowing look at only a sliver of what it is to be a human being, or the
potential positive market externalities by having educated population. If we
just measure the overall social improvements from the education of women, not
in terms of individual wage performance, but in terms of overall health of
society itself, it can't be reduced to a micro-analysis.

As a side note, I've seen Bryan's work forwarded within libertarian and right
wing forums, in large part, to justify arguments to defund and dismantle
support for college, both from a cultural aspect (Colleges seen as
liberal/left institutions) but also from a notion that they don't want the
government funding it. The fact that he's funded by the Cato Institute raises
my suspicion that there's a political angle involved.

Even if you could argue college is not producing economic gains, but merely a
signal, one has to look at a future where structural unemployment from
automation may make a lot of work unneccessary, period. Do we eliminate
education when work is no longer a necessity? Or could it be, that it might be
better if people have a lifelong opportunity for intellectual enlightenment,
it might be cheaper than funding prisons to house them, or falling back to
religious institutions to give humans something to do that has meaning besides
straight up consumption.

~~~
barry-cotter
> "You study arcane subjects year after year, knowing you’ll never use most of
> what you learned after graduation" Well, that wasn't true for me, and I'm
> pretty sure for those in engineering or science, it isn't, but even the
> history, philosophy, and economics courses I took I recall and use. Even
> Steve Jobs, who merely audited a class on calligraphy, took a great value
> from it.

The average graduate of a major in a foreign language can’t speak it at a
professional level. Given that I think we can at least say the average
person’s high school foreign language study is totally wasted. The average US
citizen doesn’t know each state has two Senators. People who retain knowledge
that they were not originally interested in and use regularly are abnormal,
nerds. Most people retain astonishingly little. I know someone with a
Geography degree who couldn’t identify the major rivers and mountain ranges of
Europe on an unlabelled map.

> The fundamental flaw of Capland argument, who seems to be pushing this theme
> for years, is to view education purely in terms of economic benefit. It
> could simultaneously be true that the vast majority of your salary comes
> from signalling, but it could also be true that you gained great value from
> your education. Not everyone who gets an advanced education tries to
> maximize salary.

That’s not his argument. His argument isn’t just that education is in large
part wasteful signalling. It’s also unpleasant. Most people care as little for
literature as I do for American football. Forcing them to learn about it leads
to no lasting knowledge or appreciation and makes their lives actively worse.

> Also, by induction, you could apply his argument to high school. Do we have
> evidence during the industrial revolution where blue collar factory work
> started to require more than an 8th grade education, that it made any
> difference besides signalling on salary?

Average education levels in England went down during the Industrial
Revolution, not up, as manual labour became less skilled.

>Or, if you look at developing economies, where people often experience
significant increases in wages as they move up the industrial ladder,
sometimes without even full literacy, but merely from on the job experience.

Yes, we can see that education is over supplied on a strictly economic basis
if we look at China, which grew richer much, much faster than it grew educated
once Deng opened it up, or if we compare changes in education levels with
changes in economic growth rates. No relationship.

> Should we assume education isn't worthwhile if you can't show a correlation
> between education and wages other than signalling?

No, education is pleasant for some, just as spending time with friends is, or
smoking. But we shouldn’t subsidise smoking and make non-smokers pay.

> One of the frustrating things about these kinds of economic analyses is that
> they narrowing look at only a sliver of what it is to be a human being, or
> the potential positive market externalities by having educated population.

If there are externalities the government should subsidise education. It does,
to an extent far above any plausible positive externalities. The credentialism
this makes possible is a massive negative externality.

> If we just measure the overall social improvements from the education of
> women, not in terms of individual wage performance, but in terms of overall
> health of society itself, it can't be reduced to a micro-analysis.

Oh yes it can. If you can point to what health of a society means we can make
a first pass at measuring it.

> Even if you could argue college is not producing economic gains, but merely
> a signal, one has to look at a future where structural unemployment from
> automation may make a lot of work unneccessary, period. Do we eliminate
> education when work is no longer a necessity?

No, for the same reason we won’t eliminate drinking coffee or walking in the
park. We’re rich. We like it, we can afford it. Let’s do it.

> Or could it be, that it might be better if people have a lifelong
> opportunity for intellectual enlightenment, it might be cheaper than funding
> prisons to house them, or falling back to religious institutions to give
> humans something to do that has meaning besides straight up consumption.

Intellectual pleasure is consumption, a pleasure for a relatively small
minority of people. School is the closest to prison most people get, the most
locked down, unfree environment they will ever encounter, sitting for hours
doing as they are told, when they are told, asking permission to use the
bathroom.

~~~
cromwellian
>It’s also unpleasant. Most people care as little for literature as I do for
American football. Forcing them to learn about it leads to no lasting
knowledge or appreciation and makes their lives actively worse.

>School is the closest to prison most people get, the most locked down, unfree
environment they will ever encounter, sitting for hours doing as they are
told, when they are told, asking permission to use the bathroom.

Summary: Kids hate school. I don't wanna eat my veggies. Your conclusion:
compulsory education is bad. My conclusion: make education fun and delightful.
Look at the Finnish model for example.

Even if most of humanity could survive economically, not being literate, the
world is far better off with universal education and literacy in innumerable
ways.

It's shocking to see someone even arguing that kids shouldn't be compelled to
be educated. Perhaps you could argue that adults shouldn't, but education
overall in sociological studies has been shown to be an inoculation against
violence.

Hatred of having to learn things you don't want to learn is not a condemnation
of education. People often don't even know whether or not they will like
something until they are exposed to it, and anyone with children knows this,
how "I don't wanna do this" can suddenly turn into "hey, can you drive me to
class, I don't want to miss this"

I absolutely hated history class in high school. I hated economics and
philosophy in college. Until after I had taken them, I then became intensely
interested in the subjects and voraciously read everything I could find.

We are headed into a world where people won't be able to delegate critical
thinking skills to institutions, because institutions will have trust in them
destroyed by fakery everywhere. Teaching people to think critically and be
skeptical, to reserve judgement, demand peer reviewed facts, to hedge against
rash action will be critical to stability in society in the future IMHO.

> Oh yes it can. If you can point to what health of a society means we can
> make a first pass at measuring it.

Many studies have correlated the education of women with numerous variables
that represent non-economic quality of life: reduction in infant mortality,
increases in life expectancy, reductions of violence. The UN and OECD have
many variables beyond economics that measure well being. There are even
surveys of overall satisfaction and happiness.

I also question conclusions that people "don't use" stuff they learn in
college. That treats learning as a vocational enterprise. You don't just
_apply_ specific things you've be taught by rote memorization and practice,
but you develop connections between subjects you've only briefly been exposed
to, that can affect your decisions later in life, sometimes serendipitously
and unconsciously. The same people who say they never use algebra or calculus,
end up solving problems in Excel using the same skills they learned solving
word problems in school.

I took 4 years of French in high school. I forgot most of it. However, when I
travel, most of the latin roots I learned have helped me decipher signs in
countries where I couldn't even speak the language beyond Helloy. And the
experience of what I did wrong in French, later helped me learn Mandarin by
avoiding the behaviors that turned me off in French.

I hated taking "required" classes in college. Now I am glad I did, because I
was so narrow minded and pigheaded at that age. I also used to hate travel,
really hate it. I was introverted, bored of long rides, uncomfortable in
foreign lands where I didn't understand anything. But after being dragged all
over the world, traveling and living abroad, my perspective on many things
changed.

Too many people want to live circumscribed in a bubble. Education in all its
forms, be it primary school, college, voracious reading, or travel, moving
people outside their comfort zone has many benefits.

Eat your veggies, they're good for you.

------
npunt
I get where the author is coming from, and agree that higher ed isn't
particularly efficient and has some serious problems. And yes, it is a 'game'
to an extent. I've worked with 100+ colleges & universities and found their
approach to educating large numbers of students to be sorely in need of
revision. However, I also found this article simplistic and very much the
product of an economist with a particular agenda rather than someone with more
of a background in learning whose take on it is reasoned and informed.

First, and this is important, he seems to value only knowledge/information
currently known. Part of learning is forgetting, and knowing that you've
forgotten something. His argument doesn't take this into account at all, and
essentially places equal value in someone who never knew something vs someone
who once learned something but forgot it. These are not equivalent at all, but
its a very economist way of reducing the world and accidentally losing
fidelity in the process.

A great deal of higher ed is about exposure to the breadth of ideas that make
up our current understanding of the world. You get a chance to explore fields
of study and use frameworks, processes, etc from them. All these shape your
perception and approach to life, help you discover what motivates you, and
provide on-ramps for re-learning later on. Contrast this with someone who's
never been exposed to things, and they simply wouldn't know what they didn't
know. In the age of Google and being able to find a solution to anything, you
still need to know what question to ask, and that requires an exposure to
different fields and approaches and to know what you once knew or were exposed
to, but have since forgotten. It builds intellectual humility, versus the
self-assuredness of ignorance.

Next, the turn of phrase in the intro that students "have to soak up precious
knowledge like a sponge" is basically the theory that the mind is an empty
vessel to be filled, which is a common misunderstanding of how humans learn.
We learn through interaction with our environment, and the things we learn are
as much perspective, approach & process, etc as it is about fact-based
knowledge. Not sure if author is using this term interchangeably with
learning, but based on other reading it seems like he may not have strongest
grasp of this distinction.

These learning science nuances are just one thing the author has a blind spot
for. I also don't see him mentioning anything about the role of education
beyond simply a job market feeder. This isn't and hasn't ever been the sole
metric higher education has ever held itself to - only trade schools focus on
this metric. It's incredibly reductive to view education in this way, not
least of which because you lose a necessary precondition for successful
democracy (an informed citizenry).

Here's another telling quote, clearly showing his argument has a pretty narrow
focus:

> Researchers consistently find that most of education’s payoff comes from
> graduation, from crossing the academic finish line. The last year of high
> school is worth more than the first three; the last year of college is worth
> more than double the first three. This is hard to explain if employers are
> paying for acquired skills; do schools really wait until senior year to
> impart useful training?

According to Amazon reviews of this guy's book, he likes to set up a lot of
straw men, and this is an example of one. Of course employers are _not_
necessarily paying for acquired skills, but they're also not just paying for
signaling (his focus) - they could be paying for acquired experience,
perspective, demonstration of sticking things through, self-knowledge, etc.

Again I think it's important to look at the words he's using to get a sense
for whether he understands the nuances of what he's talking about. "Skill" is
a particular thing that most of higher ed intentionally doesn't focus on
because they're not trade schools. Either he doesn't quite get that, or he's
choosing to reinterpret education's purpose for the sake of his straw man. If
we reduce everything to a market-oriented "skill", knowledge, theory,
perspective, etc have no value. A good economist doesn't leave value on the
table like that, unless they're trying to fit it into their particular
argument.

His anecdote about a guerrilla student auditing a degree's worth of classes
and not having them valued isn't a particularly smart take even from an
economics perspective. That's a one-off libertarian fantasy argument of
sticking it to the system. At scale this idea collapses, because a) schools
would crack down on free-riders, and b) once this good is more available in
the market, the market would respond by pricing it better. But with an n=1,
the market can't price it, because they don't know what it means. Did this
student actually show up to these classes, or just say they did? Did they get
to know their classmates and learn from them? Did they understand anything
they were being taught? As an entrepreneur who's had to hire quite a bit, I'd
see a prospective employee's claim of having attended Princeton for four years
but not getting a degree as needing _serious_ verification.

I think an economist's perspective is important to add to the discussion on
how to make higher ed better, and signaling is an area that higher ed needs to
get better at (see microcredentialing as one solution for instance). However,
while the author makes some good points about grade / degree inflation and
alludes to a few other things that really matter like rising costs, I also
don't think he's got the macro perspective really well sorted, at least from
the blind spots above - either he's willfully ignoring them for sake of
argument, or genuinely doesn't know them because he wasn't exposed enough to
those fields. Teaching a couple years at Princeton doesn't make one an expert
on the system as a whole, much as just getting an education doesn't mean you
know the first thing about how education works. Elite colleges work very
differently from other forms of post-secondary education, and lessons learned
& opinions formed there are not necessarily broadly applicable. Elite colleges
are so much more about signaling that its easy to over-index on that and form
a theory that sounds nice but isn't very accurate.

Any call for blowing up a system needs to be put in a larger context that any
large organization / institution is going to be inherently pretty inefficient,
but this doesn't mean the absence of it is a good alternative. Thing is he has
a particular POV on this, if you read more of his bio [1]. He works in a very
libertarian-focused economics dept at GWU and is funded by folks that are
taking a particular agenda toward education and have taken a (highly unusual)
active role in faculty selection [2]. This background alone shouldn't be
disqualifying (lots of agendas exist in ed, good to have diversity of
perspectives), but can be a lens through with you read this and whether he's
being intellectually honest in all his arguments.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Caplan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Caplan)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-
mas...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mason.html)

------
NoblePublius
Admissions based on standardized test scores ONLY. Make colleges co-sign
loans. Fixed it.

~~~
closeparen
The usual complaint about wealthy families buying college access is explicitly
standardized test prep courses and tutors.

~~~
barry-cotter
Why Elites Dislike Standardised Testing

> It is absolutely true that the SAT is the reason this scandal occurred. But
> for standardized testing requirements, the millionaires and celebrities
> charged in this scheme would not have needed to search for “side doors” to
> get their children into elite colleges; they could have walked right in
> through the front.

...

> SAT scores correlate strongly enough with IQ that the SAT is interchangeable
> with IQ as a test of general cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is highly
> heritable; the single strongest predictor of a child’s IQ is the IQ of the
> child’s parents. There is also a correlation between income and IQ. That
> means smarter than average parents are likely to have smarter than average
> kids and higher than average incomes.

> The educational attainment of an SAT taker’s parents is about as strongly
> correlated with higher scores as high income is; the median student whose
> parents hold graduate degrees scores a 560 on critical reading and a 576 on
> math, only slightly lower than the richest students in the dataset by
> income, and a full standard deviation higher than students whose parents
> hold only high school diplomas.

[https://quillette.com/2019/03/13/standardized-testing-and-
me...](https://quillette.com/2019/03/13/standardized-testing-and-meritocracy/)

------
ni3hao3
The upper class view education as necessary for signaling, the middle class
view it as necessary to build skills, and the lower class view it as useless.

------
adamnemecek
The main problem is that students in the US are insanely busy. The curriculum
is substandard no matter where you go. In the future, I’m hoping to see more
individual studying encouraged by the school. It’s a good skill to pick up,
esp considering skills might age faster.

Classes are a waste of time, out of the 1.5 hrs, there’s maybe 20 minutes of
content.

Teachers tend to be full of themselves and incompetent.

Professors are busy with research, grants etc. curricula tends to be out of
date.

God when I think about the shit I could have done in the 16 years that I spent
in school I legit want to puke.

But the worst people are the administrators. I’m yet to see a single school
administrator make a rational decision. This is particularly apparent in the
responses to school shootings. Yeah, make it more like prisons, thats are
gonna help. Also the prevalence of women in school administration is not good
for the male school population, they make decisions that tend to ignore
certain gender differences.

Don’t even get me started on the idiocy that is school athletics.

~~~
throwaway_9168
Why didn't you drop out then?

~~~
adamnemecek
Visa.

~~~
throwaway_9168
So you added to the demand for this otherwise mediocre product (education),
and then wonder why the product quality isn't better? I think it is just
supply-demand economics.

~~~
sanxiyn
In my opinion all education criteria must be eliminated as soon as possible
from all immigration rules worldwide, but until then, what can I do.

