Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education.
Bryan Caplan January/February 2018 Issue
I have been in school for more than 40
years. First preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high,
and high school. Then a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a
doctoral program at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my
first “real” job—as an economics professor at George Mason University.
Thanks to tenure, I have a dream job
for life. Personally, I have no reason to lash out at our system of
higher education. Yet a lifetime of experience, plus a quarter century
of reading and reflection, has convinced me that it is a big waste of
time and money. When politicians vow to send more Americans to college, I
can’t help gasping, “Why? You want us to waste even more?”
How,
you may ask, can anyone call higher education wasteful in an age when
its financial payoff is greater than ever? The earnings premium for
college graduates has rocketed to 73 percent—that is, those with a
bachelor’s degree earn, on average, 73 percent more than those who have
only a high-school diploma, up from about 50 percent in the late 1970s.
The key issue, however, isn’t whether college pays, but why. The simple,
popular answer is that schools teach students useful job skills. But
this dodges puzzling questions.
First
and foremost: From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours
studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English
classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical
writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no
student can follow? When will the typical student use history?
Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks
“What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something.
-go to links-
No comments:
Post a Comment