The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money.

• Author: Robinson, Jenna A.
• Position: Book review

* The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

By Bryan Caplan

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 395. $29.95 cloth.

I don't want Bryan Caplan to be right. For many years, I have worked to reform higher education in the belief that the system is broken but ultimately repairable. Caplan's new book, The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, says otherwise.

Caplan's basic premise, that our sprawling system of secondary and postsecondary education is largely wasteful, is hard to swallow. What about the fascinating courses? The brilliant lecturers? The breakthrough scientific innovations? The towering libraries filled with the history and insight of the many scholars who have gone before? Surely all of this wouldn't exist without good reason.

And what about the relentless rush of data showing that, on average, college graduates earn significantly more money than high school graduates? And that high school graduates, in turn, vastly out-earn their peers who dropped out of high school? The data and the conventional wisdom apparently agree that education, if approached seriously, is a worthwhile investment.

Caplan debunks or incorporates these arguments, as relevant, with his theory of signaling. College, he says, is mostly a signal to employers that a graduate is intelligent, conscientious, and conformist. Employers value these traits. Thus, they pay more for employees who have successfully completed a degree than for those who have not. "The labor market doesn't pay you for the useless subjects you master," Caplan says; "it pays you for the preexisting traits you reveal by mastering them" (p. 13).

Caplan is careful to say that education is not exclusively a signal. He admits that there is some element of human-capital creation that explains the high returns to education. In particular, he notes that statistics and econometrics are useful in many data-driven occupations as well as in everyday reasoning and that the simple reading, writing, and arithmetic learned in elementary school are necessary basics for almost all future learning and working.

But his critics maintain that education is mostly human-capital creation--that is, education pays because students learn real skills valued in the market. Caplan uses a simple question to demonstrate the difference between the two competing theories. "Imagine this stark dilemma: you can have either a...