I think generally rejecting education as not cost effective is too clever by half.
If it was purely signalling, surely we would see interesting less expensive (in time and money) alternatives to send the signals, our economy is rather creative and adaptable in other ways.
Further to attribute my experiences in STEM to “but it might be different in STEM, what about the Lawyers?” If school is valuable in STEM but not in other things, make the case.
Further, we know school is valuable beyond signaling in business. Companies will hire people and PAY them to get MBAs. Not a result you’d expect if the MBA was primarily a signalling device.
I don’t think either of us has the last word on this question, and it will likely be useful to think about how to make education more valuable. But sometimes things ARE as they seem, probably, actually, more often than not.
Even if Education is not uniformly the most efficient way to spend effort, if it is needed to produce resources, if it triples the value of 1⁄2 the people who go through, it pays for itself on average pretty quickly. Yeah it would be nice to fine tune it and squeeze more return and have less waste, but it would be a mistake to claim it was useless and then have to say “but maybe not for MBA” “but maybe not for STEM” I can tell you for finance, accounting, I think you’ll be making exceptions, and rather than accept the claim on its face that things are not as they seem and then walk it back to maybe they are in this narrow case, maybe overall things ARE as they seem, but there are a few exceptions.
I think generally rejecting education as not cost effective is too clever by half.
If it was purely signalling, surely we would see interesting less expensive (in time and money) alternatives to send the signals, our economy is rather creative and adaptable in other ways.
Further to attribute my experiences in STEM to “but it might be different in STEM, what about the Lawyers?” If school is valuable in STEM but not in other things, make the case.
Further, we know school is valuable beyond signaling in business. Companies will hire people and PAY them to get MBAs. Not a result you’d expect if the MBA was primarily a signalling device.
I don’t think either of us has the last word on this question, and it will likely be useful to think about how to make education more valuable. But sometimes things ARE as they seem, probably, actually, more often than not.
Even if Education is not uniformly the most efficient way to spend effort, if it is needed to produce resources, if it triples the value of 1⁄2 the people who go through, it pays for itself on average pretty quickly. Yeah it would be nice to fine tune it and squeeze more return and have less waste, but it would be a mistake to claim it was useless and then have to say “but maybe not for MBA” “but maybe not for STEM” I can tell you for finance, accounting, I think you’ll be making exceptions, and rather than accept the claim on its face that things are not as they seem and then walk it back to maybe they are in this narrow case, maybe overall things ARE as they seem, but there are a few exceptions.