Is Education a Waste of Time and Money?

• The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
• Bryan Caplan
• Princeton University Press (2018)

How could anyone argue the case against education? Well, catch teachers on a bad day and they'll give you an earful: shortsighted politicians, clueless boards, self-serving administrators, students enslaved to their smartphones, social promotion, grade inflation, pointless tests, and - with grading - a seven-day work week.

College and university teachers would say much the same. I can vividly recall Lionel Trilling smiling at a couple hundred of us Columbia students while lecturing on James Joyce's Ulysses and saying, "I do hope you all understand the contempt I hold you in. In my day, we read Ulysses against our professors, not for them." (No one volunteered to tell him what we were reading against him: Ian Fleming's James Bond novels.)

Even as I started a very happy 41-year career in community college teaching, I knew something was wrong. Vancouver Community College was just a couple of years old in 1967, and one of the deans explained what we new instructors would be doing: "We're teaching kids for the boring jobs."

So Bryan Caplan will get a lot of silent support from educators when he says the system is a waste of time and money. I found myself in annoyed agreement with many of his assertions - for example, that we forget almost everything we learn in school unless we keep using it. If my life depended on solving a quadratic equation or listing the chief exports of the Belgian Congo in 1955, I'd be a goner.

A molehill to die on

Nevertheless, I reject Caplan's general thesis. That's because Caplan, an "anarcho-capitalist" economist, chooses not a hill to die on, but a molehill: the economic value of education. Worse yet, he picks the worst place to dig his foxhole: on the side of the employer.

Caplan argues that a college or university diploma (or high school certificate) is a "signal" to employers: its holder has put up with a long process designed to show that he or she is intelligent, conscientious and conformist. That is, students have to be smart to grasp the material (whatever it might be), careful and honest in the assigned work they do, and willing to follow the orders of their professors and the norms of their schools.

This is no blinding revelation to anyone who's taught career-program students how to find jobs. But I taught it from the students' point of view, not the employers'.

"Your biggest problem is employer anxiety," I told them. "They don't trust their own judgment. They're terrified they're going to hire the wrong person and then have to fire them and find someone else, so they'll look for any excuse to reject you."

So my students' resumes and cover letters would be written in management dialect; we trust those who speak our language. What's more, they'd short-circuit the hiring process with "information interviews," meeting employers face to face not for a specific job but for advice on what employers were looking for. This would reduce the bullshit in the formal job interview because the employer was delighted you'd already presented yourself as a savvy and reliable colleague, not a dubious applicant.

Suckers for good marketing

My students understood 50 years ago that it's not what you know, it's whom you know. I just told them they were right. So I found Caplan's hyperventilation about the "signal" of a degree from a prestigious school a little overwrought. He never wonders why hard-nosed managers are such suckers for an Ivy League degree. (I could have told him about some of my Columbia classmates, as well as myself, as undeserving beneficiaries of superb marketing.)

I was also amazed that Caplan showed no interest in the origins of the educational status quo or the implications of changing it. In fairness, he was born in 1971 when the status quo was newly established and he's never known anything else.

But North American education until the 1950s was a war of attrition against students. The sooner they flunked out or dropped out, the sooner they could find jobs on the fishing boats and in the sawmills. The survivors (including most of the children of the rich) could go on to university and then to managerial jobs in the private sector or serve as mandarins in government. What they studied in prep school and university didn't matter - Latin, Greek, the pre-Raphaelites, they were just ways to pass the time and make useful connections before taking up real work.

No longer a holding tank

The Second World War and, especially, the Cold War demanded a change. A modern state needed huge numbers of skilled scientists and engineers, and the Soviet threat meant ordinary workers might veer far left unless they had some hope of social mobility for themselves and especially for their children. Education could no longer be just a holding tank for the privileged and a few real scholars.

The Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957 trig-gered a powerful response in the U.S. and Canada. Money gushed into ed-ucation at all levels, while U.S. media warned of the menace of the Rus-sians' superior academic skills. Colleges and universities sprang up to meet enormous demand as even workers' families realized they could send their children to post-secondary and then on to real careers.

High schools got bigger as more kids stuck around to graduate, and post-secondary got bigger as well. More students meant more teachers and administrators, and budgets that depended on enrolments. Losing students meant losing money. American and Canadian education became too big to fail - and too scared to fail students.

Chasing a worthless scrap of paper

Hence a big problem cited by Caplan: credential inflation, driven by grade inflation. A bachelor's degree was devalued to just a lottery ticket for a job interview, not a guaranteed good job. The paper chase extended to MAs and PhDs - and there were always more degrees than jobs.

So employers for a quarter-century or more have been hiring wildly overqualified people for jobs they could learn in a morning. In that sense, much education is indeed a waste of time and money - especially the student's.

Caplan's not the only one to deride this mess. So do a lot of employers, even though we subsidize them by training their employees for them. But neither Caplan nor the employers seem to consider what our bloated school system can achieve despite its problems.

The arts as useless?

Caplan goes on and on about the usefulness of literacy and numeracy, but ranks a bachelor's in math as having medium usefulness and degrees in English and communications as low usefulness. Under 25 per cent of degrees, he says, are actually useful. What's more, he ranks visual and performing arts in the "low usefulness" fields.

Yet in Canada alone, the culture industries' economic impact in 2014 was $61.7 bil-lion. That was 10 times that of sports ($6.1 billion) and twice as big as agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting combined ($29 billion). Culture contributed 3.3 per cent of Canada's GDP in that year, while in the U.S. it was 4.2 per cent - $730 billion US. Almost five million U.S. salary jobs depended on the arts.

By contrast, the U.S. employed just 21,300 economists in 2016. At a median salary of $101,050, they made $2.15 billion US - a drop in the bucket compared to the arts.

So the case against education is a pretty feeble one, even on Caplan's economic terms. We could certainly improve education - partly by better teaching, partly by more and better career/vocational training, and largely by opening up more apprenticeship routes to employment. But it's absolutely worthwhile teaching "useless" subjects to at least a few students because we have no idea what will be useful in future.

Today's employers are as clueless as they were 50 years ago about what future fortunes would be built on. But Steve Jobs took a "useless" calligraphy course and applied what he'd learned to make the early Mac computers' fonts far more useful than those of his kludgy competitors. By grubstaking students with a wide range of information, skills, and choices, we improve their odds of coming up with utterly unexpected advances.

So on bad days when teachers are feeling particularly burned-out, they might console themselves that, as useless as Bryan Caplan thinks they are, they're actually a lot more useful than they think - not just for what their students need today, but what we'll all need tomorrow.