But I happen to think that formal education beyond the primary school level is mostly a sorting mechanism with elaborate signalling races developing around it.
This flies in the face of my experience. And I do believe I can cite evidence against it but it is not from studies per se.
I actually had a very good public school education, in a well off suburban school district in 1960s and 1970s Farmingdale, New York. In addition to this being a well funded district that people moved to for its reputation, I was sorted from 3rd grade through 9th grade into a special program with even better teachers and curriculum aimed at the top 2% in IQ terms of the district.
Even with that excellent background, it was not until Swarthmore College that I understood why missing a day of class could possibly be of any concern (because the pace was so fast). Further, I would estimate that I learned, hard to say, 10X as much science and math in 4 years at Swarthmore than I had in 12 years of Farmingdale.
I then spent 2 years as a technician working with radio astronomers at Bell Labs. Yes, I learned so much there that for a while I would tell people I did my undergrad at Bell Labs. But to be fair, it would probably be more analagous to having done my MS at Bell Labs. My undergraduate education was superb.
I then went to graduate school at Caltech, and surprisingly instead of signalling my sorting, I learned and did independent research, presented my results to the elite, and developed into somebody who could reasonably say that if he didn’t understand a particular physics/astronomy presentation, that it was the presentation that sucked, not me. Yes, I learned LOTS MORE even in graduate school, in math methods and statistics/probability, and quantum mechanics and classical mechanics and, holy of holies, electromagnetics, my own specialization. Oh and in solid state physics, I was working on superconducting devices.
So my own experience is I learned gobs and gobs and GOBS of stuff in college and gradual school.
Does the possibility exist I could have learned this on the job? Sort of but not really. First off, classes were INTENSE, much harder than job. Second, jobs you tend to learn what you need to do your immediate task, classes front-load you with stuff, some of which you may never use, but lots of which you wind up trotting out over the next 50 years of your career.
So that’s my personal experience. What is the evidence beyond that that school is real, not just signalling?
1) Greatest researchers tend to be at universities. They tend to prefer to work with students and post-docs (still an educational job IMHO). 2) Even the most iconoclastic geniuses in math and science will typically skip lower levels of education, but be brought in at unusually young ages to the highest levels of education. Wolfram graduated with a PhD from Caltech when he was 21 (IIRC) and was hired as a professor by Caltech at that point. Physicists and Mathematicians seem to want people from these programs, and it doesn’t seem to me primarily because they are trying to skip having to make their own decisions on who to work with. 3) I interview for engineering positions at my company. We have information on where applicant came from and what degree we have, but our interviews are still primarily technological tests. We want to know if applicant knows CDMA and LTE and 802.11xxx and GPS and AWGN and dB and Matlab and all the things we associate with people who get stuff done. As a participant with others in the interviewing of others, I have NEVER heard a discussion of the quality of school or which degree the applicant had. It is always a substantial discussion. And our ranks of hires include people with BS and years of experience, as well as MS and PhDs with less work experience. At some level X years of experience seems to equate on average to Y years of higher education. But the point is both experiences are different and both are valuable in employees. We have plenty of PhDs from great places, plenty of PhDs from podunk places and plenty of BSs.
So my own experience is I learned gobs and gobs and GOBS of stuff in college and gradual school.
Of course you did. But you aren’t thinking opportunity costs here. People learn gobs and GOBS of stuff outside of college and high school. Like this site shouldn’t exist if this wasn’t so. ;)
And since outside of school people they learn stuff they actually use often (they basically are forced to do spaced repetition) or are interested in they arguably retain far more of that. Look at things school is supposed to teach us, like learning a foreign language.
Since I’m linking to Caplan I also recommend you read:
I interview for engineering positions at my company. We have information on where applicant came from and what degree we have, but our interviews are still primarily technological tests. We want to know if applicant knows CDMA and LTE and 802.11xxx and GPS and AWGN and dB and Matlab and all the things we associate with people who get stuff done. As a participant with others in the interviewing of others, I have NEVER heard a discussion of the quality of school or which degree the applicant had.
Remind me what fraction of students go into STEM fields. Then consider if this is true for people who hire say lawyers.
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.
So my own experience is I learned gobs and gobs and GOBS of stuff in college and gradual school.
Of course you did. But you aren’t thinking opportunity costs here.
Well, yes I am. I quit a job as a technician at bell labs to go get my PhD at Caltech. As much as I was learning as a tech at Bell Labs, I was not going to be given my own projects to pound on, was not even allowed to write my own papers by my boss (this varied across bosses at bell labs, mine published work I had contributed to without my name on the publications, telling me I was getting paid as a tech and if I wanted my name on pubs I should go to grad school). I was not going to go to the insanely great classes I attended at Caltech, although I was able to attend a class a semester at nearby Rutgers at grad level in physics.
I came out of grad school and got a job as a professor at a research university. Seven years as a techician in the 10 area of Bell Labs and I would have still been a technician. I might have moved in to development and been a 2nd class citizen member of techical staff.
You can tell me that you know better than the technical leadership in universities and at bell labs whether the MS and PhD are “worth it,” but I don’t believe you and have no reason to believe you without some evidence, just as I believe the people who went to medical school over the people who tell me I can cure my cancer with peach pit extracts, vegan diets, cleanses and vitamins.
The preponderance of the evidence is that people making micro decisions choose education, people making hiring decisions, choose the educated and even pay to educate their employees. To convince me that the market is systematically failing to this extent, you will need evidence beyond assertion and iconoclasm.
I should make it clear, I recognize I am sort of a poster boy for when education would make sense, in terms of being extra smart and in terms of the kinds of jobs I like to do. But your assertion of signalling value only “forgot” about STEM, MBAs, and people who want to be professors, and doesn’t address the market failures of such seemingly efficient businesses as Bell Labs, Caltech, and Qualcomm in finding value in the educations of the educated and not just in their educability.
This flies in the face of my experience. And I do believe I can cite evidence against it but it is not from studies per se.
I actually had a very good public school education, in a well off suburban school district in 1960s and 1970s Farmingdale, New York. In addition to this being a well funded district that people moved to for its reputation, I was sorted from 3rd grade through 9th grade into a special program with even better teachers and curriculum aimed at the top 2% in IQ terms of the district.
Even with that excellent background, it was not until Swarthmore College that I understood why missing a day of class could possibly be of any concern (because the pace was so fast). Further, I would estimate that I learned, hard to say, 10X as much science and math in 4 years at Swarthmore than I had in 12 years of Farmingdale.
I then spent 2 years as a technician working with radio astronomers at Bell Labs. Yes, I learned so much there that for a while I would tell people I did my undergrad at Bell Labs. But to be fair, it would probably be more analagous to having done my MS at Bell Labs. My undergraduate education was superb.
I then went to graduate school at Caltech, and surprisingly instead of signalling my sorting, I learned and did independent research, presented my results to the elite, and developed into somebody who could reasonably say that if he didn’t understand a particular physics/astronomy presentation, that it was the presentation that sucked, not me. Yes, I learned LOTS MORE even in graduate school, in math methods and statistics/probability, and quantum mechanics and classical mechanics and, holy of holies, electromagnetics, my own specialization. Oh and in solid state physics, I was working on superconducting devices.
So my own experience is I learned gobs and gobs and GOBS of stuff in college and gradual school.
Does the possibility exist I could have learned this on the job? Sort of but not really. First off, classes were INTENSE, much harder than job. Second, jobs you tend to learn what you need to do your immediate task, classes front-load you with stuff, some of which you may never use, but lots of which you wind up trotting out over the next 50 years of your career.
So that’s my personal experience. What is the evidence beyond that that school is real, not just signalling?
1) Greatest researchers tend to be at universities. They tend to prefer to work with students and post-docs (still an educational job IMHO).
2) Even the most iconoclastic geniuses in math and science will typically skip lower levels of education, but be brought in at unusually young ages to the highest levels of education. Wolfram graduated with a PhD from Caltech when he was 21 (IIRC) and was hired as a professor by Caltech at that point. Physicists and Mathematicians seem to want people from these programs, and it doesn’t seem to me primarily because they are trying to skip having to make their own decisions on who to work with.
3) I interview for engineering positions at my company. We have information on where applicant came from and what degree we have, but our interviews are still primarily technological tests. We want to know if applicant knows CDMA and LTE and 802.11xxx and GPS and AWGN and dB and Matlab and all the things we associate with people who get stuff done. As a participant with others in the interviewing of others, I have NEVER heard a discussion of the quality of school or which degree the applicant had. It is always a substantial discussion. And our ranks of hires include people with BS and years of experience, as well as MS and PhDs with less work experience. At some level X years of experience seems to equate on average to Y years of higher education. But the point is both experiences are different and both are valuable in employees. We have plenty of PhDs from great places, plenty of PhDs from podunk places and plenty of BSs.
Of course you did. But you aren’t thinking opportunity costs here. People learn gobs and GOBS of stuff outside of college and high school. Like this site shouldn’t exist if this wasn’t so. ;)
And since outside of school people they learn stuff they actually use often (they basically are forced to do spaced repetition) or are interested in they arguably retain far more of that. Look at things school is supposed to teach us, like learning a foreign language.
Since I’m linking to Caplan I also recommend you read:
The Present Value of Learning, Adjusted for Forgetting
Why Is the National Return to Education So Low?
Does High School Algebra Pass a Cost-Benefit Test?
Remind me what fraction of students go into STEM fields. Then consider if this is true for people who hire say lawyers.
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.
Well, yes I am. I quit a job as a technician at bell labs to go get my PhD at Caltech. As much as I was learning as a tech at Bell Labs, I was not going to be given my own projects to pound on, was not even allowed to write my own papers by my boss (this varied across bosses at bell labs, mine published work I had contributed to without my name on the publications, telling me I was getting paid as a tech and if I wanted my name on pubs I should go to grad school). I was not going to go to the insanely great classes I attended at Caltech, although I was able to attend a class a semester at nearby Rutgers at grad level in physics.
I came out of grad school and got a job as a professor at a research university. Seven years as a techician in the 10 area of Bell Labs and I would have still been a technician. I might have moved in to development and been a 2nd class citizen member of techical staff.
You can tell me that you know better than the technical leadership in universities and at bell labs whether the MS and PhD are “worth it,” but I don’t believe you and have no reason to believe you without some evidence, just as I believe the people who went to medical school over the people who tell me I can cure my cancer with peach pit extracts, vegan diets, cleanses and vitamins.
The preponderance of the evidence is that people making micro decisions choose education, people making hiring decisions, choose the educated and even pay to educate their employees. To convince me that the market is systematically failing to this extent, you will need evidence beyond assertion and iconoclasm.
I should make it clear, I recognize I am sort of a poster boy for when education would make sense, in terms of being extra smart and in terms of the kinds of jobs I like to do. But your assertion of signalling value only “forgot” about STEM, MBAs, and people who want to be professors, and doesn’t address the market failures of such seemingly efficient businesses as Bell Labs, Caltech, and Qualcomm in finding value in the educations of the educated and not just in their educability.