I am quite unqualified to review Bryan Caplan’s blockbuster The Case Against Education, by virtue of the fact that I have not (yet) found time to read all of it. But I think I have a pretty good idea what’s in it, and an even better idea of what others are saying is in it. So this will be a review not of Bryan’s book, but of the various paraphrases that are floating around the internet. Those paraphrases might or might not be accurate representations of Bryan’s thinking, but they deserve to be treated as arguments in their own right. So this will be a review of those arguments.
Argument 1: The Argument From Uselessness. The argument tends to run something like this:
Except in a very small number of careers, nobody ever solves a quadratic equation on the job. Therefore the fact that schools require everyone to study quadratic equations is a waste of time and effort.
It is true that except in a very small number of careers, nobody ever solves a quadratic equation on the job. It is also true that no professional athlete ever does a pushup on the playing field. Does it follow that for professional athletes, pushups are a waste of time and effort?
I expect that even Bryan will agree that a great many people occasionally need to solve linear equations, in the pursuit of answers to questions like “How long till my cab runs out of gas?”. So we teach them that. Then we can do one of two things: We can stop there, or we can encourage them to think about whether there are any other equations we might be able to solve. The instinct to push on a little farther is a valuable asset, and one that it’s possible to cultivate.
A good teacher might now proceed as follows:
1) Invite students to try to invent a method that will work for other polynomial equations. Watch them fail.
2) Suggest that they restrict their attention to quadratics. Lesson learned: If the problem is too big, narrow it down and try again.
3) Watch them fail again. Eventually, either lead them to discover the technique of completing the square, or just present it to them. This is a pretty out-of-the-box idea, but it totally works. Lesson learned: Think outside the box.
4) Practice solving a bunch of equations by completing the square. Watch the students get good at finding roots for 14x2+x-4 or 6x2+13x+6.
5) Suggest that instead of having to solve each quadratic equation separately, we can use the same technique to solve all of them at the same time by completing the square in Ax2+Bx+C, and watching the quadratic formula fall out. Lesson learned: Abstraction is a great labor-saving device. You can keep doing the same thing over and over in the same way, or you can do a generalized version of that thing just once, memorize the answer, and use it forever.
Those are some pretty good lessons. Like pushups, they are damned good practice for a whole lot of practical on-the-job activities.
Now you might, perhaps, argue that students could learn the same lessons in a more useful context, say by building robots instead of solving equations. I doubt it. We’ve already agreed that we want our students to solve linear equations. Once we’ve taught them that, we can either plow on to the next level or stop dead in the water. The latter teaches a truly terrible lesson, namely: Don’t be curious.
Or, you might argue that although we can teach the quadratic formula, we can’t teach habits of thinking — students either come by those habits naturally or not at all. That, I think, is patently absurd. We learn to think by watching others think. We learn to move from the particular to the general by watching others move from the particular to the general.
Or you might argue that the quadratic formula is not always taught this way. Sometimes it’s just presented as a formula to memorize, with no particular context or motivation. And from this the students gain relatively little. I agree. It’s also true that some physical trainers do a really really bad job of teaching the proper form for a pushup. I still don’t want to conclude that athletes don’t need pushups.
Argument 2: If knowledge is so valuable, why doesn’t anyone steal it? The argument here is that people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend classes at Harvard, even though nothing stops a non-matriculated (and non-paying) student from sitting in on exactly the same courses. This suggests that students value not the knowledge, but the credential. And “therefore” we can conclude that classes are not really about conveying knowledge — they’re about proving to the world that you’re the sort of person who can sit still in a classroom week after week.
But there’s a reason I put those scare-quotes around the word “therefore”. Here’s a perfectly reasonable alternative conclusion: Harvard students learn a lot in their classes and are willing to pay a high price for the package that consists of both the knowledge itself and a certification that they’ve acquired that knowledge.
Great products fail all the time because they’re not properly advertised. In those cases, it makes sense for the seller to pay a high price for advertising. (And it can also make sense to forgo creating the great product in the first place if you think you won’t be able to advertise it.) A Harvard education might be a great product that has little value until it’s advertised with a sheepskin. It can still be a great product.
Argument 3: The Argument from Snow Days. According to this argument, students cheer when school is canceled. But a day off diminishes their knowledge acquisition without diminishing their credential acquisition; therefore it must be the credentials, not the knowledge, that they really care about.
Anybody who makes this argument has probably never tried putting a hot fudge sundae in front of a dieter. Frequently, the dieter is grateful for the sundae. Does that mean that dieters don’t care about their diets?
No, it means that human beings are complicated. It’s very convenient, and often entirely appropriate, for economists to model people as having well-defined preference orderings, even while acknowledging that communities of people have no such thing. But sometimes it’s important to recognize that individual people have no such thing either. There’s a whole community of agents vying for power in your brain. Some want you to count calories; others are delighted by a hot fudge sundae. Sometimes the latter grab the mike and yell “Hooray for sundaes!”.
It’s perfectly possible for schools to convey valuable knowledge, for students most of the time to want that knowledge, even when it comes at the cost of considerable effort, and for students some of the time (when different parts of their psyche sieze control) to be gleeful at an opportunity to subvert that purpose.
Argument 4: The Sheepskin Effect. It is alleged that students with four years of college earn far more than students with three and a half years of college — and that the difference is too large to be plausibly explained by an extra semester’s worth of knowledge acquisition. Therefore those who graduate must be receiving rewards for something other than knowledge acquisition. The most plausible “something” is the stamina to stick things out to the end, which is a quality that schools can certify but cannot create.
The logic here is hard to dispute. But experts (who I won’t name without permission) have told me that the evidence for the sheepskin effect is much less compelling than is being widely reported. I have not investigated this further and am therefore officially agnostic.
*****
None of the above should be seen as an endorsement of the current system of education, or even as a dissent from any of Bryan’s policy recommendations. It is an attempt to look with a critical eye at some of the arguments that are currently being bandied around, often with loose (or sometimes un-loose) attributions to Bryan. I chose them to respond to because they happen to be the argument I keep stumbling across.
“According to this argument, students cheer when school is canceled. But a day off diminishes their knowledge acquisition without diminishing their credential acquisition; therefore it must be the credentials, not the knowledge, that they really care about.”
It’s also possible that the average value of a class is large and positive, though the marginal value is close to zero. It might be rational to be happy about being able to take n-1 classes instead of all n; that doesn’t mean the first n-1 didn’t increase your human capital.
Bryan once asked, would you rather have a Princeton diploma without the education, or the education without the diploma? If you even have to think about it, then you’re casting considerable doubt on the human capital story and lending credence to the signalling story.
My friend pointed out that it’s possible that:
1. People who attend Princeton acquire a lot of useful marketable skills.
2. Employers can’t measure those skills in an interview, so they look at your diploma and conclude that you must have those skills.
3. Therefore, getting that diploma without attending the school (in Bryan’s hypothetical) tricks the employer into believing that you’ll be a very valuable employee.
So the human capital story could still be correct and yet you’d still rather have the diploma without the classes.
I thought this was an amusing argument at first; the more I think about it though, the more I think my friend’s toy model of education is actually pretty plausible.
Wonderful post– I’ve discussed with my AP Stats class Caplan’s work and will share this with them as well for balance.
@The Original CC
If the marginal class has no value in adding human capital then it should not be offered. Of course it might be offered if the purpose is to signal stick-to-it-iveness. Your argument identifies an example of the inefficiency that Caplan is decrying.
Neil, you’re correct of course. It’s possible that a semester has one too many classes in it. And that’s certainly an inefficiency.
But the fact that people cheer when their class is canceled doesn’t bolster Caplan’s implicit claim that the average value of the classes is close to zero.
Educators make a different type of argument when talking about classes that definitely don’t add much to your future earnings (like, American History), but that teach things which they think residents of the country “ought to” know. They are claiming, in other words, that such knowledge creates positive externalities.
To which I would always ask: Are adults required to learn those things?
Presumably part of the argument for an informed populace is to have informed voters, which means the case for requiring adults to learn these things is even *more* compelling than the case for young people!
Now, presumably most adults had to get through these classes at some point, but that’s not the question. Do they still remember those facts? If they don’t, and if it’s important for citizens to know these things, why aren’t we marching those adults back into the classrooms for a refresher?
I’ve never heard a satisfactory answer to this, which reinforces my belief that the reason most people are fine with mandatory American History classes is that the classes not mandatory for *them* any more.
Now, I’m not sure what the right answer is. Perhaps there is a level of American History knowledge that is so important that there is a compelling case for the government to require it. But that’s an argument for requiring everyone to learn it, not just students.
I’ll take a leap here and suggest solving quadratics is akin to teaching students “how” to think rather than simply “what” to think.
I once tried to introduce a new network protocol into a humongous corporate network. This was years before the world wide web and its remaking of TCP/IP into the obvious standard. Successful implementation would have empowered nearly 20,000 users virtually overnight. I was told, “NO!” one hundred and eleven-teen times.
I interviewed dozens of managers and network engineers. The best I could get was what they they learned from classes or lectures; simply that the protocol in question was too “chatty” to ever be seriously considered. No one internally had actually poked any further.
Save for one network engineer who had actually tested this protocol in a lab environment, deemed it unreliable and quickly closed his study.
I mimicked his study and soon learned he had misconfigured his routers. I then bench-marked.
Our protocol was chattier than TCP/IP (which is what we called IP back then) but IP wasn’t widely used because of the cost of manually managing and assigning workstation addresses and/or the cost of developing and rolling out DHCP servers to automatically assign said addresses.
And short of users having to memorize the IP addresses of network services IP also required the roll out and management of “Name Servers”.
Since our protocol resolved all these issues (as per the OSI model) I thought a little extra chat was well worthwhile.
I then benched against the corporate standard (which also resolved some of the above issues) and learned we were actually less chatty.
A couple engineers I met during my interviews had taken interest in my work and we started meeting at the corner bar after hours. Together we built a lab, retested, wrote up our studies and developed a protocol management and implementation plan.
I then set about the task of circulating our document to all the layers of management that had already told me no. To my surprise they all rubber stamped it. It turns out that because the document even existed they thought the project had been approved.
We rolled out and it was (mimicing President Trump here) HUGE!
The only push back I got was that it still must be a crap protocol because they didn’t have to do all that work with the corporate protocol. Good point so I dug in. I then published a paper stating that their protocol had all same issues (as our protocol), that the only reason it worked was the installed base was both small and parochial and that it would break once it hit a critical mass.
My paper was ignored so I wrote a new communique stealing from Mohammed Ali and predicted the date of major network crash.
I thought that paper had also been ignored until I was called into corporate and accused of sabotaging the corporate network. Turns out we had a huge network crash within days of the date I had “predicted”. I thanked them but told them I wasn’t smart enough to do anything like that. (Given my lack of education and limited, monosylabic vocabulary it wasn’t a hard sell.)
I then sat with a network engineer, showed him what we had done with our protocol (and why) and then showed him in what ways the corporate protocol had similar issues. He was a quick study, he learned in a half hour what it had taken me months to learn. He then set out to draw up and implement a few changes and everything was up and running the next day.
I’m sorry for the long, rambling (and somewhat selfserving) rant but the point is there is a difference in being taught what to think and learning how to think.
If you’re going to “buy” a degree you’re going to lean towards classes that teach you what to think, where you can pass by mimicing the professor’s words and you’re going to celebrate a day off because it won’t hinder you any towards that degree.
But even if your goal is to learn how to think you may still relish a snow day just to play with your thoughts.
More evidence for Caplan’s thesis is the prevalent and infamous “Will this be on the test?” question. Most students don’t give a damn about what they are learning, they just want to do as little as possible to get their degrees. They are good at cost minimizing, I will give them that.
Why is this thought-provoking topic not provoking more commentary? Come on folks, I want more discussion.
From my personal experience as someone who has a law degree and a degree in translation studies, I can say that legal translations created by people without a law degree tend to be really, really bad.
And while I also have considerable experience with translations relating to accounting and financial reporting, I *know* that I’m not nearly as good in those areas as I am with legal texts.
When it comes to financial statements, I’m just a gifted, hard-working amateur, and I’ll never be as good as I would have been had I received systematic training in this field.
As for the more basic math stuff – I recently took up furniture making as a hobby, and I found myself in a situation where being able to solve quadratic equations was actually useful (Pythagoras).
Why can schools not improve the stamina of people who attend them?
Also, with regard to the no. 4 “sheepskin/stamina” argument:
It’s really unclear how big the certification effect is. This depends on multiple factors. Consider the following scenario:
Assumption 1: Average stamina among both the non-attending population and the overall school-attending population is similarly high.
Assumption 2: Employers value stamina highly.
Assumption 3: Only students with stamina substantially below average drop out (e.g. the lowest 10 percent of the stamina distribution curve).
If this was the case, then any drop out would be harshly penalized, but this penalty wouldn’t really tell you much about the absolute value of education, only about the relative value of education vs. very low stamina.
Advo, what you’re referring to is what economists call “ability bias”. Basically, one cannot look at two different grousp of people (e.g. married vs unmarried men) and declare that their differences in income stems from the characteristic that divides these two groups. In the case of married vs unmarried men, the former make a lot more money, but there is much evidence that causality goes the other way: high-earning men are more likely to get married. Either women prefer them, or maybe the traits that favor high earnings also make these people wife-seekers. (Imagine a guy who spends all day playing Fortnite. It’s not just that few women would wish to marry him, it’s also that he probably doesn’t really want to disrupt his lonely existence by entering a committed relationship.)
So ability bias exists, and in fact is one of the reasons the economic return to education is often overstated: people with more education make more money, but they were also smarter, more hard-working, etc. to begin with. Now, does ability bias affect the sheepskin effect? Absolutely: as you rightly note, students who give up are less intelligent, less organized, etc. than those who graduate. Caplan himself advocates measuring ability (IQ and possibly more traits), then statistically controlling for ability; this cuts the estimates to the economic return of education by 40-45%. The book’s claim about signalling is about the other 55%; so, when Caplan says education’s return is 80% signalling and 20% human capital, he actually means 44-11 or thereabouts.
Now returning to your point, it’s not just that students who fail to graduate are worse workers than those who graduate. The difference exists even between education years: those who drop out when they’re freshmen are worse workers than those who drop while sophomores and so on. So, when you statistically control for ability bias, so as to look at the effect that education itself (whether via signalling or human capital) is having on earnings, you see a decline in the return for ALL education years. Graducation year, sophomore, freshman, whatever.
So the result before and after controlling for ability bias is very similar: about 70% of the wage premium comes from graduating! I find this figure astonishing and I believe it massively undermines claims that the economic return to education comes from human capital (or from building a contact network).
Reader,
so if signalling is really important, then I would assume that controlling for ability, someone who drops out as a freshman would earn less than someone of equal ability who didn’t even try to get an education? Is that observable in practice?
A second point is the question what “graduating” actually signals.
The main thing it signals, I would think, is that you actually learned something. I would assume that there is a positive correlation between how much people learn while studying and the likelihood of graduation.
So maybe the employer thinks that someone who drops out during graduation year actually learned substantially less during the previous three years than someone who goes on to graduate. The graduation signal would then concern the actual value-added by the education, not some innate personal trait.
Has this been examined, for example by controlling for grades during the years prior to dropping out?
As a third point, I’d like to come back to the “school teaches stamina” theme. In his initial post, SL asserts that “stamina is a quality that schools can certify but cannot create.”
This is not obvious to me at all. My university education consisted of systematically working towards a number of short- and long-term goals. I had a great deal of independence in how approached this.
I know that I got better at it over time.
If you graduate, your prospective employer will know that you learned how to work independently towards long-term goals. If you don’t, he’ll know that you didn’t.
This is, again, not signalling of innate ability, but signalling of who benefited from education and who did not.
‘so if signalling is really important, then I would assume that controlling for ability, someone who drops out as a freshman would earn less than someone of equal ability who didn’t even try to get an education? Is that observable in practice?’
No, those who drop out during college earn a little more than those who don’t try it at all. Rough US numbers:
-Raw college premium: 70%
-After adjusting for ability: 40%
-After removing graduation year: 10-15%
A rather astounding fact is that the first year adds something like 5% to your income, the second adds something similar… and the third seems to add nothing. It seems dropping out that late in the game sends an “anti-signal” that cancels out whatever extra earnings you get from the additional human capital the third year may provide.
It’s of course possible that the first and second years also send an “anti-signal” and the actual effect of human capital is greater than the 5% or so observed increase in earnings. Caplan doesn’t consider that possibility, rightly in my view; in the book instead he lays out two possibilities:
“Conservative”: signalling accounts for the sheepskin effect and nothing more. (Sheepskin is defined not as the total effect of graduation year, but as the “extra” effect that the graduation year provides, as compared with a normal year).
“Realistic”: signalling accounts for the sheepskin effect, PLUS a small part of the earnings of the previous years. In other words, Caplan considers that attending school for one or two years may send a positive signal. (I’m not sure how he accounted for the third year, since the return then is around zero; all his spreadsheets are online, though).
Throughout the book he presents calculations under both hypotheses. Even “conservative” signalling results in a pretty disastrous economic return to education.
Also worth noting that the sheepskin is much bigger in college than in high school. This jibes with my experience, TBH: even though a lot of the high school subjects are superfluous, the setting does teach you to show up on time, speak correctly, follow the rules and so on. (Caplan’s counter-argument is that you can learn that as well on a job; of course attending high school is better than attending neither high school nor the workplace). The human capital effect of university is much harder to defend.
(And the master’s? It’s been studied little, but the few papers on its economic return tend to show it’s *all* sheepskin. Again, this makes sense: how often do you here of investment banks who hired MBA dropouts?)
I really recommend that you read the book. Even if you disagree with Caplan’s diagnosis (and his pretty radical recommendations), it’s chock-full of statistics and insights you probably haven’t read about anywhere. E.g., I knew that education tends to cut crime; this is actually one of the main drivers of the economic return to high school (it’s worth keeping them in school even if they learn nothing because they’re less likely to land in jail). But I had no idea that education’s reduction of crime also shows a sheepskin effect! In other words, the reduction in crime you get from the last high school year is much larger than that from previous years.
From the Amazon description “Bryan Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students’ skill but to certify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity -”
It is surely the case that one of the purposes of the education system is to certify the above, but also to certify the student’s skill and knowledge as well as to impart that skill and knowledge in the first place. I can certainly believe that the proportion of each of these is not quite what conventional wisdom assumes. The certification aspect is very useful to employers. Without it they would have to devise their own tests or something – hugely wasteful.
Why do students not steal the courses? Part of this is the same as why people lock their fridges. Undertaking a commitment on which you will be judged is an external discipline that may carry you through when your internal discipline ebbs a little. The same for snow days.
MOOCs are relevant here. Why steal when you can enrol for free anyway? From wiki The medians were: 33,000 student enrollees; 2,600 passing; and 1 teaching assistant helping with the class. That is about 8% passing. Elsewhere they say completion rates are 15%. Either way, a far higher drop out rate than conventional courses, but they end up with thousands passing.
One question I don’t know Caplan answered is why do not employers hire cheaper high school graduates and determine their intelligence, work ethic and conformity on the job? Most employment is at will and those who don’t measure up can be fired easily.
To answer my own question, we are in an equilibrium where those who are intelligent, have work ethic and conform go to college so the remainder are dregs.
Does Caplan (whose book I haven’t yet read) make distinctions among schools, both in terms of quality and in subject matter? Is there any real doubt that someone who wants to be a physicist should study physics or that would-be doctors should go to medical school? On the other hand, I saw something the other day to the effect that business is the most popular undergrad major, and I suspect that a business major is mostly useless except for people who take the accounting track. And the US is chock full of colleges which seem to me to be about worthless in terms of content, as shown by the fact that it’s easier to get into many, perhaps most, colleges than the navy or the air force.
And why would that be, if dropping out early means that you’re a terrible worker?
What positive signal does it send if someone starts college but drops out early?
Looking at this, I’m beginning to think that maybe we’re looking for an underlying economic logic that perhaps doesn’t exist, or only to a very limited extent.
As regards signalling and the lack of a third-year benefit:
My take would be that dropping out in year three sends a worse signal than dropping out in year two. After all, why would you quit just before the finish line? That makes it looks like there’s something wrong with you.
On the other hand, you will still have acquired more knowledge than someone who drops out a year earlier, and so the bad signal balances out with the additional knowledge.
Still, I think, the critical question for those who think it’s all about signalling your commitment and discipline is:
“Why would dropping out shortly after beginning higher education be considered a positive signal compared to not beginning higher education at all?”
Did Caplan address that at all?
Advo @ 20
“Why would dropping out shortly after beginning higher education be considered a positive signal compared to not beginning higher education at all?”
Perhaps because you need to get accepted at a higher ed institution in order to drop out, and that signals something?
“If the marginal class has no value in adding human capital then it should not be offered.”
One of the main arguments for subsidized or government-funded education is that some of the benefits of education are external. One of the consequences would be that people end up with more education than is in their own private interest. That would make sense of the cheering when school is cancelled, since the marginal private value may be zero, whereas the marginal social value is positive.
Of course the counter-argument is that students aren’t paying for it, or even if they are they are not getting money back for missed classes. But the government also requires students to go to school, which suggests that even with the subsidy, they go to school more than is in their private interest.
As to why teach things that people never use or remember? First, even if only one in twenty ends up using the quadratic equation in later life, we don’t know which that will be when they are twelve years old. Everyone ends up learning things of (tremendous) value to them later, even if most of it isn’t, but there’s no real way to know at the time which topics to teach which student, so we teach them all everything.
Is it really a hurdle to get accepted? If you have reasonable high-school or a good SAT?
Would that provide an additional signal beyond those?
James Kahn @ 22
Good point re subsidization. I have observed that in classes where students are paying full fare, such as MBA classes, they are not so happy about missed classes, and may even complain.
Re: Argument 4: The Sheepskin Effect. While I don’t do this type of research, I am reasonably versed in the challenges. What we would love is to have a group of people with 8 semesters (and the diploma) and a second group that differs in no other way than they have 7 semesters (and no diploma). Unless I can convince my university to allow me to randomly kick out some students after 7 semesters, I suggest obtaining that second group (that differs in no other way) will be a major hurdle.
Not only might the degreed group have more “stick-to-itiveness,” they might differ in other ways. I teach a course that is a requirement for majors and is often their last course. If I fail them, they will not graduate that semester. While this rarely happens (the weaker students cannot complete the prerequisites), I suggest that many who come up just short in hours typically will be much different than those who get the degree. I submit that those that fail my course are often ticking time bombs of sort in that they just barely cleared earlier hurdles, learned less in prerequisite classes, and, now, with many more plates in the air exhibit their shortcomings.
Besides, let’s say I can obtain the two groups. What should the pay be for those with the 7 semesters? Maybe we’d posit they would be 7/8ths along the way between the earnings of one with no college and one with a bachelors. (And, of course, we would have to properly control for major.) But, that would suggest the value of the courses in the last semester are equal to those in any other semester. But many programs, like mine, have the most valuable courses later, not earlier. So, the difference should not be 1/8 of the value of the degree but a larger number.
Finally, I submit to you that if you asked those who recruit our graduates, they would suggest that the 7-semester group is material different than the graduates. Otherwise, they would hire them at reduced pay and have them complete the degree part time.
Oh, and BTW, I love to here someone in the know comment on the difference in qualifications between a new Navy Seal and someone who left after 7/8ths of the course.
The “conformity” part is interesting — seems anecdotally like fields that might be expected to value this less (or maybe even *devalue* it) are more prone to hire non-college grads…software development or advertising (e.g. the infamous “MBA bias”) come to mind. So not necessarily “dregs” in those worlds
The quadratic equation part reminded me of a meme that made me lol the other day: “Sure glad I studied parallelograms instead of how to do my taxes…really came in handy this parallelogram season”
To make learning something “worthwhile”, how high does the probability have to be that you will use it later in life?
Hint: the answer is NOT 100%.
To see why, consider a class that teaches you how to save your life in 100 different situations (e.g., how to survive a fire, how to avoid eating a poison mushroom, …). Would this class be worthless or worthwhile if you didn’t use 97% of what you learned in later life?
Neil: “Why is this thought-provoking topic not provoking more commentary?”
So, a sojourn through a 4 year college is an investment, and economists debate the return; is it profitable?
I don’t know, but in a similar vein, I’ve done research on yacht club membership, not yet published. Beyond doubt, this investment pays off big – members have much higher incomes than not.
Clearly, gov’t should subsidize loans for memberships, which would spur construction of yacht clubs. The club membership committees would select qualified youths, who would immediately be granted loans on their acceptance, guaranteed by Uncle Sam; no loan risk to the yacht clubs!
This program would be a great boon, boosting GDP, while teaching many refined social skills.
If our leaders, in their short sightedness, spurn this suggestion, I shall offer my consulting services to Bangladesh. If implemented, doubtless they will eventually enjoy the world’s highest standard of living. Anybody here ever visited the Greenwich yacht club?
“Beyond doubt, this investment pays off big – members have much higher incomes than not.”
To be fair to academic studies they do at least attempt to control for other factors, which your yacht club study apparently does not.
Don’t laugh, Richard D. Yacht clubs are subsidized—through the tax system. They can organize as a tax-exempt 501[c][7] recreational club, so all fees received are not taxed. And members may deduct fees as a business expense if they use their yacht or club amenities for business purposes. Ever wonder why you see so much capital tied up in idle yachts? But since this is your research field, you know all this.
Neil @ 16
His answer is that, despite the “at will” status, companies find it difficult to fire people. It’s a troublesome process, and it lowers the morale of fellow employees.
Education allows us to leap frog generations of evolution. On the flip side survival is no longer in our genes. I can’t catch a fish or grow a tomato. My kids can’t repair a roof or fix a leaky toilet.
My grandkids can’t fill out a tax return or manage a budget.
We take education for granted, we leave too much to chance.