

Debating the Signaling Model of Education - cwan
http://volokh.com/2010/09/06/debating-the-signaling-model-of-education/

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zootar
I haven't read Caplan and Dickens' full exchange, but I doubt that the present
article adds much to the discussion. The author emphasizes two points:

1\. A cheaper and shorter academic program will not attract a lower caliber of
student as long as it is challenging enough.

2\. "Many blue collar and service jobs have extremely boring and unpleasant
elements that are hard for workers to avoid. If your goal is to signal
conscientiousness and conformity, a year of good performance at McDonald’s is
probably a better signal than a year of academic success at most colleges."

The first point relies on intelligence and short-term effort being the
relevant criteria. But Caplan's assertion is that conscientiousness and
conformity are the characteristics that employees seek to signal. Those
characteristics may be better evidenced by sustained effort. In any case, at
some point, a distance run of increasing intensity but decreasing length
becomes a sprint, a completely different sport. As you shorten the length of
your education, eventually you'll get something that is more like an IQ test
or other standardized test than a 4-year degree.

The second point seems to be totally unsubstantiated. If you take (present and
former) fast food workers as your hiring pool, you find you've eliminated
practically none of the loafers. That a potential recruit has both a PhD and a
previous career at McDonald's could well be a sign of something good, but I
doubt it could be concluded that the recruit was particularly conscientious
during the McDonald's stage of his career. Work at McDonald's is closely
supervised, requires little concentration, and never demands any effort
outside of scheduled work hours. The necessary work ethic is not at all the
same as that for the high-autonomy jobs sought by university graduates. The
babysitting example is even more specious. Responsible for an infant, behind
the wheel of a car, operating power tools, most functional human beings manage
to bring to bear the requisite level of care. It's harder to do when lives
aren't imminently at risk.

But the biggest fallacy is that manual labour is strictly harder than mental
labour. Mental labour doesn't usually make you physically uncomfortable or
physically tired, but in some important way, thinking is the hardest kind of
work there is. At the very least, physical laziness and mental laziness in a
potential employee are statistically independent events.

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pierrefar
A good way to do a cheaper and better signal is to contribute something back
to the community. In the good old days, people volunteered for various things
in their city/state/country. These days, you can easily contribute code to an
open source project, or run user groups. An engineer can hack together a cool
DIY project and let the internet run with it. Are you a writer? Publish using
on-demand services like Lulu.

The key part to this is marketing and raising awareness. Without harping too
much: social media makes marketing for one-person projects doable.

