Obviously, signalling is an important part of university education. People pay $100′s of thousands of dollars for a degree, not for an education. And people are much more concerned about making sure they get the degree, and much less worried about whether or not they got the education.
I suppose it is less obvious whether the “human capital” is really developed by education, but I believe it is and I suspect most people who succeed in school or in teaching believe it does. I was an entirely different person after my BA in Physics than before, with mad skills at analyzing all sorts of physical systems and formal systems. I knew and used mathematical techniques up the yinyang as well as a tremendous amount of physics and chemistry. The skills I acquired as an undergrad were essential for my graduate work. I was again an entirely different person coming out of graduate school, able to be expert in some areas, and able to tell the difference between what I was expert at and what I was not expert at.
In my opinion, you would have to be blind to miss the importance of signalling in higher education. In my opinion it would be easier to miss the importance of the training, but that effect is real nonetheless.
Obviously, signalling is an important part of university education. People pay $100′s of thousands of dollars for a degree, not for an education. And people are much more concerned about making sure they get the degree, and much less worried about whether or not they got the education.
I suppose it is less obvious whether the “human capital” is really developed by education, but I believe it is and I suspect most people who succeed in school or in teaching believe it does. I was an entirely different person after my BA in Physics than before, with mad skills at analyzing all sorts of physical systems and formal systems. I knew and used mathematical techniques up the yinyang as well as a tremendous amount of physics and chemistry. The skills I acquired as an undergrad were essential for my graduate work. I was again an entirely different person coming out of graduate school, able to be expert in some areas, and able to tell the difference between what I was expert at and what I was not expert at.
In my opinion, you would have to be blind to miss the importance of signalling in higher education. In my opinion it would be easier to miss the importance of the training, but that effect is real nonetheless.