 Trevor Burrus Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell And I'm Aaron Powell. Trevor Burrus Joining us today is Brian Kaplan, Professor of Economics at George Mace University. His latest book is The Case Against Education, Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Brian. Brian Kaplan Very glad to be here. Trevor Burrus So the book is obviously a very provocative title, especially coming from a highly educated professor. So why are you against education? Brian Kaplan Well, I see myself as a whistleblower. I've been in school continuously for over 40 years. I've seen an enormous amount of waste of taxpayer money, and I think it's up to me at least to let taxpayers know that they're getting ripped off. Trevor Burrus That's one way of looking at it, but you're pretty straightforward. Brian Kaplan Right. Trevor Burrus Just against, I mean, you're for education, but it's about the education system. Brian Kaplan So yes and no. So of course I do focus on education as it actually exists. I do also go after the idea that it's a great idea to try to enlighten everybody, even people who are totally apathetic and don't have any interest in the stuff. So I would say that the idea that it's a good idea just to enrich everyone by having them learn stuff, whether they like it or not. So I'm against that too. Trevor Burrus So then can you, I guess, get what exactly you mean by education in this case then? So it sounds like you're describing kind of the more classical, we're going to read history and literature and learn physics and so on. I mean, do you mean that or do you just mean any sort of skill or knowledge acquisition? Brian Kaplan I mean, so what I say is I was deliberately vague about that because I don't like to have arguments about words. I just use words in the way that they're commonly used. So when I say education, most people primarily have in mind formal education, although there's also a number of things that are kind of like that and I criticize those too. But yeah, most of my focus is on the education system, formal education. Although even the idea of informal education is something that it's a good idea to ram down everybody's throats. You do take that on too. Trevor Burrus The education though is a public good, isn't it? Brian Kaplan That's the kind of thing where you have to actually go and look at the data to find out whether it's a public good or not. The main thing that I say is actually it's much more like a public bad where individuals acting selfishly tend to get too much education rather than too little, which is the hallmark of a classic public good. And the reason that I say is that most of the payoff from education doesn't come from acquiring skills. It mostly comes from getting certified, from having an institution say this person is a great day worker, let's put some stickers on his forehead. And then the key interesting thing about that is that if everyone has a bunch of stickers on their forehead then to get a good job you need to have even more stickers than other people, which leads to one of the primary features of the modern labor market, which is massive credential inflation. It's very hard to get a job even as maybe a waiter without a degree that would have made no sense to someone seven years ago. So now it's very common for college graduates to be waiters or bartenders. Seven years ago this wouldn't have been so. It's not like there's been an increase in the cognitive skill required to be a waiter. You know the real story is just that when a ton of people have degrees then if you want to compete you need to have a bunch of degrees too. Brian Kaplan So then do your students not learn anything? So the answer is that my students, on the day of the final exam at least a lot of my students have learned a lot of stuff, however stuff that they're probably never going to know again unless they become professors. Then out of those students the fraction that actually remembered the material a couple years later I think that's really low. And then you know even if they you know so even if they ever were in a position where they might apply what I taught them the problem is people are really bad at that. So there's a whole lot of experimental educational psychology that just tries to see how good are people in applying what they learned in one context in a totally different context when there isn't anyone to go and say use the information you learned on problem one to solve problem two. If you don't have that kind of guidance then what educational psychologists say is most people even who remember the material just won't think to access it when opportunity presents itself. Brian Kaplan But they learn how to read and think about problems. Is it like mental gymnastics or like some sort of mental muscle even if you don't remember the exact meaning of something you taught in class like you know supply and demand and how to negotiate solve prices and stuff. You are better at thinking maybe when you leave than when you went in. Brian Kaplan Right right. So just to back up a little bit so I mean I absolutely agree that some of the stuff that people learn in school is very useful. So literacy and numeracy primarily and then depending upon what your job is you might actually use engineering or computer science or you know even English or history. However this idea that if you've forgotten everything that you were officially taught there's still some residual learning that's not measured and it's there somewhere. This idea has been studied empirically for over a century now by people who really want to find something in this educational psychology. There's a whole field that they call transfer of learning that plays a crucial role in the argument. And the main thing they find is that they just can't find it. There's this very little sign that people actually learn general thinking skills. And especially that if you're trying to teach them one thing that they pick up something else. I mean like the real story is more that people don't even really learn what you try to teach them. So if they don't even really learn much of what they're officially tested on something that's something you're constantly trying to teach them. The amount that they learn of other things is just minuscule. Now again if you say but some people do know how to think how did that happen. Look at this is all based upon you know statistical analysis. So there could still be a very rare number of people who learn how to think and they're just so uncommon that they don't show up in the data which is I think a reasonable story. Is there value though in simply the exposure. So let's set aside like elementary school level. We're talking like high school and on into college that you having this stuff crammed down your throat as you said introduces people to new things and so new ways of living or new career paths that they would not have necessarily been aware of. So I went to college thinking that I was interested in one thing but the exposure to the ideas and the various topics that you know I had to take as core requirements and whatever else led me down a new path that I would not have ended up on otherwise. Yeah I call this the tasting menu idea of school and as an idea I think it's great. So if young kids could really be exposed to a wide variety of different plausible life paths and then they could you know find out of each one through experience and then get some ideas about what they might like to do with their lives that'd be great. But if you look at actual education it's very different from that. You know in K through 12 basically you're exposed to this ossified list of maybe eight options almost none of which are realistic. So I could be a poet I could be a novelist I could be a professional athlete and a historian right and like you know these are all fields that you expose people to but once they're exposed like well where do you go from there there's almost no jobs in these areas other than to teach the very subject certainly you know for music acting you know drama all these areas are ones where you may you're giving people a sampling of something where it's just pie in the sky the odds that anyone actually ever do it is very slim. Then again in college this college is the same way where you study a bunch of subjects most of which have been no relation to any plausible career path. You know what's very striking is you know like you take a look at something like the psychology major you know like every year we graduate more psychology undergraduates than there are working psychologists in the country. So it's not the kind of thing that is the kind of thing where you kind of give people this false idea that they might be able to do it when most of them never will. Now I remember when I was an intern at Cato many years ago Carl Hess Jr. came and talked about a educational experience he had that his dad Carl Hess Sr. set up and basically what his dad did is said alright so I want my son to learn about a bunch of different options so his dad called up like 26 friends in 26 different industries and said can my son come and work for you for two weeks and filled up a whole year for a son to go and explore. Now here he was supposed to 26 different things that actually are happening that are realistic for him that would be a great idea but you know to go and defend the existing education system like for giving exposing people to a bunch of options and you know it's really is a pretty short list of options that we've just been repeating for centuries unfortunately. Is there a divide in the way that we think about education and or I guess I there is a divide in the way we think about education and I wonder how that divide plays out in this thesis because on the one hand there's the education as job training it's to you know provide you with the skills to go out into the world and find a lucrative career and so we get the push this is where we get a lot of the push for you know we need lots of STEM programs in our high schools and colleges and then on the other side is the education as enrichment as kind of building up a body of knowledge or at least an exposure to a body of knowledge that that forms in the basis of our shared humanity and our cultural history which isn't necessarily about job training and there you know are as you said very few jobs in those kinds of fields are both of those equally bad from your perspective should we be focusing more on one than the other. So here's what I say you know education of job training you know given how unhappy most people are in school if you can say yeah well you're unhappy but you're gonna get some useful training and just suffer through it and then you'll have a better future at least that argument's coherent. You know most of my sketches is about the second story about you know like building appreciation of ideas and cultures just almost no one acquires this appreciation. In fact you know there's probably a good number of people who are turned off to ideas and culture just because they have such a horrible experience in school but in terms of you know this conflict I mean it's very common for people to say well sure you're an economist and economists have this very narrow being counting views they're focused on this job training view but again if you go and actually look at surveys of students and ask them why are you in school what are you doing by far the normal answer is the economist answer I'm here to go and get a better job and make more money all right and there's no way I'd be here if it weren't for those for that for those prospects being dangled in front of me. So I say in terms of what most students are in school for I think it really is for the for the this career preparation or at least for opening doors to the career that they want to do so you know in terms of how we're doing that I think you know education does a fine job of opening doors just as a bad job of actually training people for those jobs and again say well like why does it really matter which is which I say well selfishly speaking it doesn't really matter so whether the door you whether you open the door whether you improve yourself doesn't really make any difference but from the point of view of taxpayers it makes all the difference in the world because if what taxpayers are paying for is to improve workers then when those workers go out in the you know go out into the world they produce more stuff and they enrich the world more than they would have on the other hand if you're just getting just opening doors well everyone can't have the doors open for them if the doors are open to everyone then they're open to no one really then you just need to have add another inner door to go and weed out people the enormous mass of people made it through the outer door so you know that's again what I'm talking about with credential inflation about how as education has spread the main result isn't that everybody's got a really great job but the main result is use need a lot of degrees just to get a mediocre job I'm curious do those answers stay the same over time so you you may ask the students who are in it right now what they're in it right now for and they say well because I want to get a job but if you go back to those people when they're you know in their 60s or older and say what do you think you got out of your education like would you have done it if you know if you had to do it over again would you and what did you find valuable do they give that same answer do they say it was job training or do they say no I got something else out of it it's a very question so as far as I know that surveys never been done it's just too hard to actually manage it's easy to go and survey students when they're in school hard to go and then survey them when they're out of school I think you're probably right that older people are more likely to go and endorse this grandiose story about how they were improved as human beings and learn to appreciate ideas and culture and that's where I really do think it's important to go and to say all right so right tell me what books you read this year tell me what movies you saw this year right and you like what you will find is even people you think it was well educated have very low brow tastes don't say are not in fact interested in terms of the way they allocate their time and ideas and culture you know of course with a fewer exceptions like people listen to this podcast you guys are great but again like if you think about most of your classmates the idea that you would be listening to this podcast is like why when I could go and just let and just watch late night television or watch sports or whatever this is what normal people actually choose to spend with their time whether they're 20 or 60 so you know and one of the main themes in my book actually is to be very careful when people give you an answer that sounds like people want to hear it so I get in the book I have a section on what I call social or what's called social social desirability bias this is what's like how a psychologist name for the very human trait of wanting to say and believe things that sound good and make you seem like a nice person right and you know when you're 60 someone says well what did you really get out of it oh I got this great appreciation it made me a human being blah blah blah but again it's important then to go and look at behavior and see if is there a gap between what people say and what people do and you there totally is world of difference between what people say which is what people want to hear and what they do which is what they actually like now I want to just clarify we've touched on it a bunch of different ways but in terms of clarifying the the exact sort of debate that your book wades into an air we've kind of air kind of mentioned it too but the debate is kind of the human capital theory of education versus the signaling theory of education and that that's been going on for a while correct yes yes and no actually so in terms you know so you're just just to back up so you know there's two main stories about why education raises earnings that social scientists tell which it does right I mean that that's actually true which it does yeah the human capital story says look school is a skill factory you go in there they pour skill into you and then you are better and you produce the extra earnings that you get after graduation the signaling model says no no no different story what's really going on as you go there you jump through a bunch of hoops and if you do well they put stickers on your forehead saying great a worker and then once again the labor market treats you better all right now you're in a sense you're right this debate has been going on since the 70s but the I mean really really the main debate is just in terms of pure theory so like Michael Spence won a Nobel Prize for for for his work on the signaling model of education so in terms of like just the pure math of what's going on there's been a lot of a lot of give and take over the last 40 45 years but in terms of empirical work in terms of understanding of saying which model actually fits the world human capital has always had had the upper hand by a lot and continues to have the upper hand right and again that's really why I wrote the book is I think that it does not deserve the upper hand there's an enormous mass of evidence from many different disciplines that are all very supportive of signaling and and and very hard for the human capital model to explain and I don't want the signaling model just be stuck in this ghetto of high theory even if it's a ghetto with Nobel Prize winners in it I think it's something that we should take seriously as a description of the way actual education actually works and to be clear you say several times throughout the book that you're not making the claim that there there is no human capital gain from education that'd be crazy so yeah literacy and numeracy are genuinely taught in school and then you know there's a you know so computer science people learn that in school and you use that in the jobs there's yeah there's plenty of stuff that people do learn in school that is useful to them one day but it is but I still say it's a small minority of the time that people spend in school and it's a small minority of the explanation for the rewards that you get in the labor market. How much though of what we learn in school after see in elementary school you learn how to read and and you also learn some math and that continues on in middle school and high school but how much then of the other stuff that we do so the history and the social studies and all of the stuff you do as part of a general arts and sciences curriculum at the undergraduate level is just reinforcing that literacy and numeracy that you know at some point like it's not enough to just know how to read words but you have to be able to learn how to read complicated things and pull the ideas out of them and the way you do that is by studying complex topics in written form and similar with math so that that stuff you know if we took if we took those things away we would lose a degree of the literacy and numeracy yeah so in the book I tried to ballpark how much of that stuff could really be going on just the main big fact to know is that your description of what people are learning in you know like in K through 12 is optimistic even for college graduates so you know like the fraction of even college graduates who can read read read a complex text and pull much out of it you know that's maybe you know you know so you may be like the top quarter to a third of college graduates could actually be even decent at tasks like that so you know like for your front for people who who finish high school and then stop college like hardly anyone actually ever gets to that level but yeah but you like it like your more general point of just reinforcing really like just to get basic literacy and numeracy which you know so many American adults still don't have you know like so you know like by you know like some of the some of the best studies adults maybe about a third of adult Americans are only semi literate numerate can barely do things like really like like consult a TV guy didn't figure out the time things on can barely fill out a registered mail form correctly things like this so you know there you are so there is probably a you know like you know some marginal improvement there but again like it's just not a very good way to actually improve the skills that the people have like you really want to go and focus on exactly the kinds of tasks that you plan expect to be doing so one of the big lessons of educational psychology is that people need to practice the very thing they're going to do going and teaching them something that's very different from or much harder than what they really need to do generally just like leads to some improvement in that task but you know those but not much in what they really need to actually learn so yeah so I mean if you really want to get people you know like reading better better just give them you know basic texts and like work your way up from there not give them something you know like have them read the row and try to analyze it which most people will never do so when you say most people will never do there's a there's an underlying sense this might be kind of there's almost a determinism here so I wanted to ask about that because are you saying that when we so when we say that say only a third of college graduates can read and comprehend complex tasks is is that because the tools the way that we're going about educating students up through college to get them to read complex texts are not well thought out not very powerful could be better or are you saying that there's just the majority of people will never be capable of doing this like no matter how good our training was no matter how much time we put in they're just never going to be at this level cognitively or whatever else yeah so I'd say it's a mixture of the two so I remember when I was talking to psychologist Steve see and I was asking him is there any known cognitive tasks where people where people can't be trained to do better where practice doesn't work and you know like he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the discipline thought about it for a couple minutes and no there's no known task where practice does not improve performance so yeah I mean I I'm very confident that you could improve people's performance in anything at the same time however there are many people with the amount of practice they would need would be you know 10 or 20 years so there is that that it would just be just be highly impractical to actually do it but again it's not that it's totally impossible that it's just that it's not realistic but that seems like a lot of people would be quite offended by by sort of saying we're gonna give up on some of these people and just assume that they're not going to read or care about Shakespeare or understand certain things or think about bigger ideas later in their life that seems kind of a elitist and be just so inegalitarian that it would offend sensibilities of most Americans yeah I mean you probably write on that you know of course it may be that they'd be happy to do what I say if I if I just rebranded it so I mean you know here's the way that I think about all of my work my strength is getting to the bottom things and saying it very clearly other people have the may have the strength of marketing it in a way that it becomes palatable I don't know I mean on the the elitism point it's able like which is more elitist to say that some people are never are never going to appreciate Shakespeare or to say that everyone ought to appreciate Shakespeare I mean I mean to me like both there's an elitist ring to both of them they're two incompatible views so I mean I would be inclined just to say that people think that it's not worth living unless you've savor Shakespeare I mean I'd say why not just call them the elitists and complain about that but you know the other thing is just that you know this offense has a very high cost because there are a lot of kids who just hate school they find it super boring and if we have a system where everyone gets prepared for college even though it's totally unrealistic to think that they are going to succeed in college then you went wasting an opportunity to teach them something else you know and this is why I have a chapter in the book on vocational education and how great it is especially for kids who just don't like school and people would rather go and learn how to do something practical and again from the point of view of society so you like I mean wouldn't be far better you know even to train someone to be a good McDonald's worker than for them to end up in jail which again is where a lot of are a lot of a lot of American kids who just don't like school end up right so they they're pressured to go and study stuff that has no interest to them and then they're told that they're not good at it which they're not and then finally they just drop out and then like very high rate of turning to crime wouldn't be better if they if from a much earlier age from when they were 13 or 14 to strain them to do any job at all so that they are part of the workforce or independence self-supporting adults I understand I think that there is a term for these sort of like this in the signaling model and other situations where you can have a destructive equilibrium and like the classic cases standing up at the concert where oh yeah if if people in the front row stand up that everyone has to stand up and no one can see any better and there's a first mover problem where no one can sit down and make everyone else sit down a collective action issue and of course that could go on for a while you could have people didn't bring boxes to stand on and everyone has to stand on boxes and then you could you could eventually everyone could be standing on 100 boxes and and if you're the guy they're saying hey guys we could just take away all of our boxes and not have to spend money on the boxes and still see in the same way that would be generally a good thing now that makes sense in like that concert example but it seems really hard that to imagine how if this is sort of what education is doing is okay we all got bachelor's degrees that's like a box we're standing on and then we got to get master's degree even to be a waiter it seems like it would not be as stable and persistent as it has been for so long that no one could come along and say hey guys this is a little bit crazy especially when there's profit in it I mean if you said if you were here saying I've discovered that the steel industry rates a hundred billion dollars a year or something like that most or 800 or a trillion however much their the education system is wasting most economists would say you're probably wrong because the steel industry would figure that out and they have a lot of incentive to figure that out and so why isn't that happening in education right so two things first of all there's almost a trillion dollars in government subsidies on the side of status quo so the current system is not past the market test not by any stretch of the imagination so all the you really need for my story to be right is that governments will go and throw that throw bad money after good endlessly like what like decade after decade my first book the myth of rational voter argues this is totally reasonable because it you know like voting is not like being a shareholder in us you know like in the steel industry or being a manager in the steel industry it's not like being a shopper you know if there's a product there's a product that's junk you know there's the toenail fungus cream that doesn't work if you're an individual shopper you just don't buy it and even if everyone else insists that it works you've saved your money but if you vote on what's the best toenail fungus cream and everyone most people disagree with you there's no real gain to you of being the naysayer or trying to change it so I mean like just remembering all the government subsidies and favor the status quo that's one big part of it and on top of it you know the other thing is that one of the big things that education signals is conformity saying look I understand the norms of the society I comply with them I don't rock the boat I go along with things and if that's one of the things that you're signaling that I say there's an inherent lock in there because if someone comes up with a really new imaginative way to signal conformity what have they really signaled they signal non-conformity right so I say this is a catch 22 so you know I think there is something special about things like education where you know government support aside just like you don't want to be the person or you don't want to be the parent of the person who goes and does start signaling things a weird way because the world holds it against you. I wonder how much of it is also less from the side of you know conformity or incentives not to change things but just that in this country the people who tend to set the policy be in a position to make decisions about these kinds of issues the ones who would you know have to lead that charge also tend to be the kind of people who did get something out of their education or did find it valuable or did like it and so they there's because I often people seem to just assume that everyone else is like them so like that I got I would you know do college again in a second and in fact would probably spend the rest of my life taking classes if I didn't have to earn a paycheck but you know but I'm weird in that way but but there's a tendency for people in my position to kind of assume everyone else's like us. Right so I mean you know your general point that people tend to think that everybody's like them is right and I think that's a lot of why professors are so gung-ho on education is they had good experiences they think everybody else is having them I don't think that's quite so true in the business world I think there's a lot of people in business who just thought that school was a joke and they just game the system in order to get the credentials and now they look back and say that was really silly so you know I mean there's probably some tendency for people who are involved with hiring to have been relatively good students and so they may have some they may have some halo effect for them but again I would say that this is a case where they are what Trevor was saying makes sense where if it really were the case that there's a lot of qualified people that you could get for lower wages if you were just people if you just go and hire people that credentials that really were a viable business strategy I do think it would be happening right now so my mind the main thing to explain is why why it is that for that is not profitable to go and be more open-minded and what I say is that you know like you know since one of the things education is signaling is conformity you don't want to get these open-minded people who are talented but didn't go and do regular credentials you're worried this person won't be a good worker they're going to rock the boat does the signaling model does it do enough to explain why at least I'm not an education policy analyst but from the little I know about say the western world the OECD OECD world that the education system is generally the same at least in the things that we're talking about you take a bunch of useless classes from five years old and you continue to take useless classes and all this stuff it seems that why would it be if that's true I mean I know Germany and stuff have a little bit differences but if that's generally true why isn't there a country out there just breaking the mold and destroying everyone in you know cost effective education systems and effective worker job placement strategies you know there are big differences in the amount of GDP the different countries spend on education and you know again important to remember so you know like if you're spending 6% of GDP on education and then you manage to cut it down to 3 is that going to give you a dramatic change in the standard of living in that country like 3% that might not even be noticed you know all that much but again in term of course it still adds up to many hundreds of billions of dollars so that still be super wasteful nevertheless terms like why we don't see that much variation it's worth remembering so like they're all supported by their governments like every single every single country there's heavy government support for education so there's very little individual advantage in trying to do something else right why is it the taxpayers in at least one country don't say hey this is our money don't waste our money I'd say you know like that you know if you if that question is on your mind I would say it should be actually be very general so if you think there's you know so again if you think that there's a lot of government waste everywhere then you might wonder like why don't taxpayers open up to it or will you like notice it then again I say you know like you might book the myth or rational voter my first one I say look like voters like there is very very little in fact basically zero and individual incentive for a voter to look at the world calmly and realistically instead people vote based on wishful thinking right and educational transform our society and its grade in every way that's the kind of wishful thinking that resonates with human nature all over the world you know as for why that is you know like you know there's there's human universals there's like saying think of the children makes a lot of evolutionary sense that that kind of kind of rhetoric would have would touch human hearts all over the planet so you know like I think that's you know that makes a lot of sense and same thing you know like with love of country and we have to stand up to our enemies and like you know like all of these political slogans that are often false but nevertheless are endlessly appealing and are a great way for politician to to get power you know like all the stuff is out there how much from employers perspective does education especially credentialed education function almost like a minor league in sports that you know I don't have if I if I have a job opening and I've hired a fair number of people in my time at Cato you know you get hundreds of resumes sometimes even more and and you've got to go through them and so the things that you look for aside from just you know basic ability to write a grammatical cover letter and so on is well experience but for for people who don't have work experience they can't have work experience to draw on so you can't you can't use that to see you know what are they capable of how long have they been employed in different places where they you know a good employee so they lasted a while or not so so college just serves as another way to get there that you know I don't college may not have taught them anything but I know that if they made it through they possess a basic ability to do work to stick with things to show up on time to complete projects and and so even if we you know even if they're not necessarily getting anything out of it I don't want you know switching to a system where it's just as you said the kind of bright unschooled person there may be those out there but they're awfully hard to find and it's a higher risk because I don't have that kind of baseline metric I can use to judge just the fundamental competence right I mean that all makes perfect sense in fact it's pretty much my argument but what I'd say is if we went back to 1945 when only the 25 percent of students have finished high school back then you can use the high school degree to do the same thing that you now use the college degree to do so you know that's what we're we're we're we're we're Trevor's analogy of standing up at a concert and getting more and more boxes is exactly the on point that of course when everybody else says degrees then you're going to get passed over you don't have one but does it make sense for government to pour money under the system to improve access if the main effect is just that you need more degrees than ever in order to even get someone to take a good look at you soon again remember like all these government subsidies are there it does make life easier for employers in a way but you know always important to ask the you know the Bastiat question which is well what would we have instead right so and what I say is you know like if we didn't have the system we'd have instead would be a lot more apprenticeships a lot more on the on the job learning you know there's this there's so many other possible ways that we might be certifying worker quality right but yeah but your but your mechanism exactly right especially you know like you know to get your foot in the door so I mean one common objection to the signaling story is just that employers will once you're hired employers will find out whether you're worthwhile and they'll they'll they'll flush you they'll fire you in a few months if you're not any good I say like even if that's true you're not going to be observed for three months until you get hired in the first place and if people throw away the applications for anyone who doesn't have a college degree then of course you're going to get one it's super valuable to get your foot in the door if that's the only way you can ever even get considered based upon your merits it still strikes me as incredibly odd in this sort of $20 bill lying on the sidewalk problem that that employers could open up their their applications and have a test and have an IQ test or have some sort of other test and say we're you know we're willing to take anyone even if you've never got a college you know if you go through these these three hours of tests and we've figured never I mean it your point is well taken it just it just seems like there's $20 bill. It's about how big the pool of qualified but uncredential people is so if you like half the people that you're throwing away would be good for the job then yeah there's a $20 bill on the sidewalk and employers are going to profit it they become more unminded but if you're down to a world where only five or ten percent of the people you're throwing away would have been worthwhile in that case it makes a lot of sense to say well to be like to judge people more fair and more fairly or not more individually we'd have to spend five times as much time in hiring and that's really expensive and distracting to people who have who create a lot now on the question of why not just substitute standardized tests you know there is there is a view that I attack in the book that that IQ testing for employment is illegal in the United States. I mean I kind of believed it myself until I actually looked at the facts and said no it's like while there are some court cases that put put up some some hindrances to that they're not very effective and the cost of and the expected legal cost of going into giving IQ test to hire is very small and like maybe maybe if you're a very high-profile company you might have trouble getting away with it but almost any mid-size employer could use IQ tests if they wanted to use them for hiring so my story about why IQ tests are not being used much more widely you know they are used to some extent but just not that often is that if you if you were to go and start hiring high IQ people without credentials the problem is you would get the the people who have high IQs but either they're lazy or they're non-conformist either the people don't work very hard or they're just defiant and difficult and I know a lot of people like that actually people are really smart but I would never hire them once because I know their personality and and generally they are the less you know my less credentialed friends but yeah I love them but I don't want to hire them. Are there industries that are moving in this direction or better at it like I'm thinking specifically of the the technology and startup scene which seems to place less emphasis on having that Stanford computer science degree and more on just being a really good coder. So there's a lot of rhetoric to this effect although my view is that when you actually go and try to get beyond anecdotes the statistics the system you know if anything the IT is more credentialist than it was 30 years ago so again like this like the story that I've heard from insiders is like this back in the 70s and 80s if you could program no one cared whether you were dropped out of high school and there was a big enough pool of good programmers who had dropped out of high school or at least hadn't gone to college that it was foolish in those days to be so snobby and say we're not going to consider you but now the the fraction of good coders who didn't go to college is very is actually quite low so it's once again it actually makes more sense now to be finicky and snobby and to say we're not going to really worry about those people. Now I have asked about you know I mean I've had some friends at Google and I said well I've heard that sometimes you hire someone who just wins a coding contest even regardless of their credentials and like yeah yeah that's true I said so how good do you have to be to get into hired by Google without an actual degree just by winning a contest and I might again like this is all just not you know off the record not no this is not so you know closely verified but you know the story that I've heard from insiders is yeah maybe we hire five people a year who don't have formal credentials better but one contest and then I said then like how many people do you hire a year who didn't win contests but have awesome credentials like yeah thousand thousands so you have to be way better to get in through these back doors although it does happen if they want to ask you a question about a quote just one line you had in the book 50 years ago college was a full-time job you said that it was very very different in terms of how much effort and things that required why why wouldn't that have changed in that way do you think yeah that's a great question so I think a big part of it is just that as the number of kids that are going to college has increased I've been like the actual academic interest and preparation of these kids is so low that you have to sort of make it easier in order to give them any hope so there's that you know like if you're a professor you don't want to fail after class so if you start lowering standards a lot then it's very automatic that you just start making it easier so that so that people can hack it so I think that's a big part of it I mean something else is just to look at it from the professor's point of view so to me what's really amazing is that professors don't just give all a's because it makes your life easier right there's almost no pressure from higher from higher ups in the administration to not do that really the the main constraint the main thing that stops professors from just saying a's for everyone is their own academic conscience and just the thinking I could not as a decent economist go and give a's to kids who can't even draw supply and demand correctly so in a way in terms of the self-interest that people actually hold the power what's puzzling to me is that college isn't even easier so again like back in the old days when the students were high where just better students were motivated then you know then when you're making this trade-off between well what does my conscience allow and what makes my life easier those days you actually assigned a lot of work nowadays you know like it's very tepid just to cut corners and most professors give into those temptations I mean I agree it is a bit puzzling from a signaling point of view how easy college is and blogger Noah Smith has said this is why signaling can't be true and I said well to understand how easy something is you just have to look at the completion rate so you know like if only 40 percent of full-time college students finish the finish their degree on time then clearly for 60 percent of people this counts as hard it may be very puzzling as to why they find it so hard because you say can't you find some really easy major and just do the bare minimum and that's it but like you can lower standards a lot and still there's a lot of people who struggle to get over them or at least like like they you know struggle to get out of bed in order to bother to go to the exam is that the number 40 percent yeah so 40 percent is is a good number for the share of full-time students who finish in four years if you go up to five years then it's like 55 percent six years like 60 percent there's a there's a little bit of an issue with students with transfer students so you may need to pump the numbers up a little bit to take that into account so if we are going to try and start fixing this I mean what what do we what do we do in this I mean we have seems like there's some problems you would have if we had a free market education to begin with one would be that maybe 14 year olds don't really know enough to invest in their own future if they're taking loans and things like this or maybe people want want to invest in their future if they're going to a bank and saying I'd like to you know go to school that we we break the whole education so 14 year olds can do a bunch of different things but but do they want to do that and maybe forcing them to do these things via the state is something we should be doing just because they they would rather just play xbox all day in the book I talk about my actual realistic policy perosals and then I go into my radical libertarian mode briefly just to say on a section called what I really think so again the main thing I'm pushing is just cutting spending just spending last in order to encourage fewer people to go a fewer people to go do regular school at all levels now in terms of what would libertopia be like imagine a world where government know there's a separation of school and state and government doesn't have any role at all so again of course the main people that will be involved in the lives of teens you know like like in libertopia yesterday or their parents so yeah their parents so their parents are unlikely to say I'm going to support you while you go and play xbox for all this time their parents are going to be concerned about getting their kids to go ahead and and prepare them for their future so again realistically it's going to be parents that are going to be footing most of the bill especially for younger kids you know again like what about like you like the other kids with very responsible parents or kids who don't are kids who just don't like orphans or things like that they're again in libertopia the answer is always well there's going to be private charity scholarships that kind of thing again worth pointing out that you know even say you know like in the 1930s or 40s it would still be very common for people in their mid-teens to become to be self-supporting workers so you know I think that is a much better world you know to have one where 15 year olds actually can afford you know the job and can pay their rent and take care of themselves and you also just you know in terms of you know preparing people for life and free society I think it's that there's a great value in teaching people from an early age that the market is a place where they can independently sustain themselves so I mean I've always said the view that or long in the view that the worst thing about the Great Depression for libertarians was just teaching teaching a whole generation of people that you could be doing everything right and yet still not be able to take care of yourselves how does how do we then deal in such a system with I don't know call it the diamonds in the rough or the you know the stories that you hear of the kid who grew up poor and was you know really bad in school early on and then discovered that like one teacher who turned them on to something and they went on to you know Juilliard and to be you know a fantastic career as you know a musician or they discovered these these kind of soft talents that aren't the trade school things and that you know everyone if we just kind of cut people off at the beginning and said well there's not you know we're not going to expose you to all those skills how are we going to find those kids who have the capacity to do so much more or do we just have to say well you know we're going to lose some of them but it's better overall yeah so I mean you know the big point I would make is always you know so like what would happen instead so if people started their lives in a much earlier age how would the whole world be different so I mean right now there are tons of people who never get to realize their dreams because they have to finish college to even get a chance right so and in a system where educational levels are a lot lower I think there's going to be a lot more learning by doing a lot more chances for someone just try and show what they're able to do so it's always worth remembering what have we lost with the current system we've lost as a chance for 15 year old to just go and become an apprentice and learn by doing so and like you know we tend to think well if they were any good they would have gone to college probably there's plenty of people that would have been good on the job that just don't like college and like like that you know like so on average college graduates are better but the averages don't describe everybody so we have we've lost so many opportunities right now with the current system and then yeah does the current system also create some opportunities yes so you know like my best friend at Princeton grew up in a log cabin in the in the Poconos and then they build it with their bare hands or like like they like it was saws but you know like they built a log cabin in the winter in the mountains they were that poor and he's my best friend at Princeton so yeah the system was great for him but you should always do the thought experiment of what would like how would opportunity in general be affected not would one person that I know be worse off in a different system so in the final calculus of the book you I mean the book is incredibly empirical and it's it's excellent and you deal with all of the the counter arguments and everything we've been talking about here but in the final calculus would you be hazard a guess of how much of education is signaling and how much is human capital and then how much money are we wasting do you think yeah so my preferred number is 80 percent of education is signaling and and then you know and then I'd say roughly that is a pretty good estimate of the share of it that we're wasting so you know like it would be about 700 billion dollars a year it's billion with a b so I think that I think that's that's a very fair number from the taxpayers point of view and that's the that's about the U.S. military budget which is what yeah what what Trump asked for which is which and you break it up in the book the it wouldn't it be great if they army had to what is it hold a bake sale to buy a bomb bumper sticker kind of thing it's like well actually we spend way more than that on the education system than the military which is which is the part of the point that that money could be used for a lot of things that are valuable yeah I mean again I'm not pro-military myself but still worth pointing out that we do spend more on education than on the military so when people act like the education system is starved that's the demented and does it seem to you now uh some of these came up where maybe I I see anecdotally at least an increasing skepticism of college is a lot of these discussions are becoming more common and the idea of creating different apprenticeships and ways of verifying you know because signaling is important you know verifying that you can do things but also having more human capital and it seems that we might have more technologies to do that and improve education going forward so do you think that the tide is kind of turning in some sense against education just more more more all the time we can't we can't add another layer to you know we went from high school to college college and I gotta go to grad school but there's not gonna be grad grad school we can't add another and people are gonna have to grow up and start working stay in your parents and currently stay in there yeah exactly so I mean is this the time to kind of that things might start shifting you know not all of it because as you said it's so popular just spending money on kids but start shifting in a positive direction very marginally maybe I don't I don't expect any big change immediately so again of course I would love it if my book became a huge best-seller and change the way that everyone under thinks about education but realistically that's not going to happen so you know there's a lot of resentment against education but not the kind of resentment that's going to lead people to vote for a guy who says I'm going to cut the education budget by 10 percent you know like so that that still seems really weird and again a lot of people just seems like surrendered no no no don't cut spending improve it even though of course people have been trying to improve the spending and improve education for since the beginning of the system it's just that again the idea that the real problem is not so much the kind of education that we're giving but just the total level is way too high that's a very hard idea for people to accept so I don't think that there's going to be any big change I actually have a bet saying that the fraction of of a recent high school graduates that will be in college is not going to go down by more than a marginal amount on the book I talk quite a bit about online education and whether that's going to change the system I don't think so I mean primarily just because right now you know if you have a kid that could go to do well in a regular college and then he says well I could but I'm just going to go to online college normal parents reaction is no no don't you'll be shooting yourself in the foot right because like we like you know right now we still have the people doing the online education or people who have some issue with doing it the real way right now you know I think online education is actually great for learning but in terms of the single you send still seems to be not it still seems to be subpar and again as long as that's how what perceptions are like then they will be self-reinforcing so you know I'd say like on Wednesday when I'm speaking in Cato the response is going to be Kevin Kerry and he's like in his work and then at the end of college talks quite a bit about well we like first when online education first came along we thought it was going to be like natural was bring the whole system down and that didn't happen and now we're focusing on credentialing because that seems so important but again there's the problem coming up with credentials that people consider to be as good as regular ones as hard if the people that want to do something different are really artists trying to take the easy way out so there's a long history of libertarians talking about education some of it pretty reasonable some of it pretty fringe and weird within that spectrum of libertarian views on the topic where do you fit how do your views compare to those of other libertarians right so I would think of myself as much more on the radical wing at least in terms of I say we should cut education spending right yeah and it didn't buy a lot now in my view so most libertarians who work in education don't want to say that it's just a very uncomfortable and awkward position to take and instead they want to focus more on things like how vouchers will go and improve the quality of the education system give parental choice but again those vouchers are still being paid for by taxpayers so you know in my mind this is you know this is a lot like a debate about government subsidies for football stadiums and I think of like you know the better libertarian view is cut the subsidies like government should not be going and picking winners and trying to force feed this industry and I think of a lot of other libertarians are more like saying look we're not good we need to go and figure out a way to get better better stadiums with our money or maybe we subcontract the construction of the stadiums again which all may be an improvement but doesn't really get to the heart of the matter which is there's a huge waste of taxpayer money and there's no really good argument for why it is that we need that government should be going and taking taxpayer money and subsidizing this industry instead of just letting people spend their own money in their own way free thoughts is 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