Just as many people believe in following God’s path and letting Him take care of the rewards, many people believe that by doing the Right Thing educationally (being a Good Student and jumping through the appropriate hoops through correctly applied sincere effort) they’re doing their bit for the System. These people might be bemused at the cynicism involved in separating out “human capital” and “signaling” theories of education.
Well there’s a few issues here you’ve failed to disentangle that, in my opinion, make this model the most applicable for the average student:
Actual income/job/achievement statistics can vary quite widely depending on otherwise subtle variables, like majoring in pure mathematics versus computer science (for example), or pure physics/chemistry versus engineering. Slightly different choices can lead to very different results, these days.
However, employers and society don’t actually want hyperspecialized drones as permanent employees. Of course, nowadays employers often don’t want to actually hire permanent employees on indefinite contracts with real salaries, but still: doing an education of 100% job-training and 0% education has traditionally been low-status for the good reason that it wasn’t held to build up very much human capital.
Future shock: the job you do at 30 might not have existed when you were 20, and the job you started out doing at 20 will almost definitely disappear or change radically in its skill-set requirements by the time you’re 40. This isn’t just a problem for Luddites, because society doesn’t really know yet how to retrain and re-employ people that quickly. The result is that you can easily get a market flooded with obsolete human capital, while simultaneously a few cutting-edge firms struggle to hire more people in some field than actually exist (for instance, machine learning experts), while simultaneously even filling that latter demand might not use up the former supply of labor.
Despite all this, society is generally held to have an ethical obligation to make some productive use of everyone it can, and reward them with something on the same order of being as the lifestyle everyone considers normal and average. Not everyone has to have a TV Dream Life for working three hours a week, but people do still possess a moral expectation called the social contract, completely detached from today’s economic facts, that somehow putting in 40 hours of hard manual labor or reasonably comfortable paperwork in an office ought to ensure them access to an apartment furnished with clean running water, indoor heating, electricity, and a functioning kitchen.
The karma/religion model did actually work in the past. Job training was more plentifully available in the publicly-funded education system, more of the education system was publicly-funded (in the form of greater subsidies for public higher education), and while nobody quite agreed on the real point of education, most of the business world agreed that most graduates (from secondary or tertiary education) were, on average, productively employable at something. Sure, everyone knew damn well the degrees had very little to do with the jobs, in most fields, but where the human-capital model didn’t work, the signalling one did, helped along by the fact that jobs in the past required a genuinely lower level of theoretical knowledge and intelligence to do. Nothing was optimal, today is better in many ways, and yesteryear’s system was a patchwork of badly-designed compromises, but for the short period of time in which people’s lives actually reflected the conditions that had spawned their societies’ social contracts, those patchworks did get people through life. Since it worked, people developed faith in it—cargo cult educational economics.
One sidenote I want to make is that I feel like I’m observing an economic-educational mini-Singularity, in the “Accelerando” sense: circumstances have changed faster than the vast majority of human beings can actually keep up with. We high-tech types on LessWrong can sit around tsk-tsking at the rest of the population for failing to keep up, but personally I think anyone wanting to do that ought to show us how he predicted every turn of business and technology for the past decade or two, placed the correct bets on the stock markets, and made loads of money by knowing better than everyone else.
We can listen to moralizing lectures from someone who displays at least as much ability to genuinely optimize the world for his ethics as he does to complain about other people failing to follow his advice. Other than that, people follow a cargo-cult model of educational investment because they are damn well bewildered by the realities flying at them head-on.
Well there’s a few issues here you’ve failed to disentangle that, in my opinion, make this model the most applicable for the average student:
Actual income/job/achievement statistics can vary quite widely depending on otherwise subtle variables, like majoring in pure mathematics versus computer science (for example), or pure physics/chemistry versus engineering. Slightly different choices can lead to very different results, these days.
However, employers and society don’t actually want hyperspecialized drones as permanent employees. Of course, nowadays employers often don’t want to actually hire permanent employees on indefinite contracts with real salaries, but still: doing an education of 100% job-training and 0% education has traditionally been low-status for the good reason that it wasn’t held to build up very much human capital.
Future shock: the job you do at 30 might not have existed when you were 20, and the job you started out doing at 20 will almost definitely disappear or change radically in its skill-set requirements by the time you’re 40. This isn’t just a problem for Luddites, because society doesn’t really know yet how to retrain and re-employ people that quickly. The result is that you can easily get a market flooded with obsolete human capital, while simultaneously a few cutting-edge firms struggle to hire more people in some field than actually exist (for instance, machine learning experts), while simultaneously even filling that latter demand might not use up the former supply of labor.
Despite all this, society is generally held to have an ethical obligation to make some productive use of everyone it can, and reward them with something on the same order of being as the lifestyle everyone considers normal and average. Not everyone has to have a TV Dream Life for working three hours a week, but people do still possess a moral expectation called the social contract, completely detached from today’s economic facts, that somehow putting in 40 hours of hard manual labor or reasonably comfortable paperwork in an office ought to ensure them access to an apartment furnished with clean running water, indoor heating, electricity, and a functioning kitchen.
The karma/religion model did actually work in the past. Job training was more plentifully available in the publicly-funded education system, more of the education system was publicly-funded (in the form of greater subsidies for public higher education), and while nobody quite agreed on the real point of education, most of the business world agreed that most graduates (from secondary or tertiary education) were, on average, productively employable at something. Sure, everyone knew damn well the degrees had very little to do with the jobs, in most fields, but where the human-capital model didn’t work, the signalling one did, helped along by the fact that jobs in the past required a genuinely lower level of theoretical knowledge and intelligence to do. Nothing was optimal, today is better in many ways, and yesteryear’s system was a patchwork of badly-designed compromises, but for the short period of time in which people’s lives actually reflected the conditions that had spawned their societies’ social contracts, those patchworks did get people through life. Since it worked, people developed faith in it—cargo cult educational economics.
One sidenote I want to make is that I feel like I’m observing an economic-educational mini-Singularity, in the “Accelerando” sense: circumstances have changed faster than the vast majority of human beings can actually keep up with. We high-tech types on LessWrong can sit around tsk-tsking at the rest of the population for failing to keep up, but personally I think anyone wanting to do that ought to show us how he predicted every turn of business and technology for the past decade or two, placed the correct bets on the stock markets, and made loads of money by knowing better than everyone else.
We can listen to moralizing lectures from someone who displays at least as much ability to genuinely optimize the world for his ethics as he does to complain about other people failing to follow his advice. Other than that, people follow a cargo-cult model of educational investment because they are damn well bewildered by the realities flying at them head-on.