For the record, I’m actually totally on board with making some big changes to the education system. The Case Against Education is a great argument for opposing “free college for all” and making some significant cuts (maybe 5, 10, up to 20% even) but not for cutting 80% like Caplan wants to do for ideological reasons (which he acknowledges himself in the full context of the first excerpt I gave from him).
I would also support significant privatization of the education system, for reasons Hanania has outlined recently.
The details are important here so I would want to be pretty systematic about reviewing how the current allotment is spent... in general terms I would be amenable to subsidizing college tuition less.
Caplan argues that masters then undergrad then high school is the pecking order for what to cut first, which sounds roughly right but I'm not sure how much that depends on other assumptions he makes about what schooling actually does that I disagree with.
That sounds fair. I am personally quite comfortable cutting all subsidies for higher education, and rebuilding the k-12 system from the ground up. However, I think the over subsidizing of college and higher is important to stop, whereas I would be comfortable for the time being merely moving k-12 educational funding to the parents and pushing school choice. I think we could go a lot farther, but just giving parents a choice on where to send their kids (and a pseudo market for school performance) would likely be a big improvement.
IMO it's hard to deny that formal schooling teaches a lot of conformity... on an emotional level isn't that the reason why libertarians hate it so much?
Well, yes and no. There are two uses of conformity we are talking here: the personality trait of the propensity to conform, and conformity of knowledge/ideas.
The personality trait, which is I believe what Caplan has in mind when he talks about signaling, is largely genetic, around the order of 80% (which is roughly the norm for “how much you are like your parents” heritable traits, but it might be like 60% or whatever). School, or the military or jobs for that matter, can affect that a bit, but only at the margin. You are just as likely to teach “just tell them what they want to hear, then do whatever you want “ as you are to teach nonconformists to conform. As evidence I point to the fact you and I have been through a lot of school, yet we are who we are :D
As to conformity of what to think, I agree, schools push that very hard. Not with 100% success, but it is of course much easier to fill heads with stuff than it is to affect the wiring. Everyone relies on their basic models of reality for thought, and you can do a lot of altering those models based on the primary information that builds them. This seems to be why so many “rebels” turn into good little NPCs later in life: their entire world view has been shaped to be such, and once they are out of the rebel against adults teenage stage they settle in.
I think most libertarian types object to the latter conformity training, to the extent they are aware that there are two different types.
I think one issue is that people who are good at conformity are good at school. They'll conform to whatever system you give them. The super non-conformists are either going to fail in any prevailing system (e.g. criminals) or thrive regardless of the prevailing system, even if they would rather operate, or do operate, outside of the prevailing system (e.g. HS/college/grad school dropouts who become business owners/millionaires/billionaires regardless of educational attainment).
So then the libertarian argument isn't that school *teaches* conformity, but rather that it *rewards* conformity and punishes nonconformity without conferring enough other benefits along the way. The conformers do well in school for reasons that are mostly unrelated to how much they learned or how much value they received from school. So schools are anti-libertarian because they are a mandatory waste of time (i.e. a restraint of liberty) for people who would have thrived anyway and for people who would have failed anyway. And for everyone in the middle, it's still a waste of taxpayer money because there are cheaper ways to find and reward conformists than 20 years of taxpayer-funded and/or subsidized education.
I would suggest that one problem with the education system is it's overbundled. K-12 schools have a composite mission of educating, babysitting, enforcing and teaching social norms, and keeping an eye on kids and their families in a kind of quasi-law-enforcement/quasi-social-worker/quasi-doctor role. Jack of all trades, master of none. This is evidenced by the fact that a kid with an IQ of 130 is rarely bumped up two grades or allowed to finish each year of school in 3 months and then have the rest of the time off. He or she must sit and be bored while the rest of the class goes through their motions (and, more likely than not, face discipline for understandably acting out.) If education was the sole mission, smart kids would not be held back, unruly kids wouldn't be allowed to stay and affect the learning of everyone else, and non-proficient kids would not be forced to stay in school (or would be forced to stay until they reached proficiency).
It all just seems like a massive case of 'going through the motions.' Which is why I blamed status quo bias above. Chesterton's fence and all that, but....the underlying metrics show that almost no interventions have made a difference despite 60 years of pouring trillions of dollars into this project. The mountains of evidence favoring dismantling K-12 are so high, you'd almost have to raise the burden of proof ABOVE beyond a reasonable doubt for the pro-dismantling argument to fail to pass muster.
That over-bundling point is super important, I think. Much of that problem could be solved with aggressive school choice, I think. If parents could choose schools that advance students at the rate of their grasp of the material, or focus on discipline, or hell, just be a standard "sit here for 8 hours and try not to get into trouble" box like most schools, at least parents could choose the bundle that they think is best for their kids. Trying to be everything to everyone, the charitable diagnosis of our schools' problem, and keeping out competitors leads to a system that is always going to be over bundled and under performing in something needing customization so thoroughly as education.
Our school system is indeed horribly inefficient. Trying to learn in a jail like environment with others who don't want to learn is brutally stupid. The real value of going to a good school or college is to be able to get away from such disrupters.
On the other hand I have attended college classes where I learned things that I doubt I could have taught myself. I can just sit down a read a history book as easily as listen to a lecturer. Learning a new branch of math is far more challenging. Simply having the homework deadlines and tests to prepare for provides a discipline supplement of great value.
I often wonder if the difficulty of learning math compared to history is partially in the feedback and application. History is easy because our brains love stories and that is sufficient (who cares if the details aren't perfect). With things like math, however, you really have to apply them to a particular problem and see that you get the right result, something very hard to do if you don't already know what the answer should be! That makes learning geometry and some trigonometry easier for me due to being able to apply it to carpentry etc., and basic calculus made sense once I realized it was just going from position to velocity to acceleration like physics. Other times where I can't test out the answer in the real world or just intuit roughly what it should be and compare are a good bit tougher, and drop out of my head a lot faster when I don't use them. I think you are right that the homework gives you both good motivation to practice, and the feedback on what you are doing wrong. Assuming it is done right, that is, and isn't just busywork that is never carefully reviewed. There's definitely a right and a wrong way to do homework, I think.
Having applications in mind most definitely helps with learning math! The people who write math textbooks are the people who love the purity of math, and thus are incredibly slack on providing applications. My experience learning linear algebra was perhaps the worst in that regard, which is odd in that linear algebra is perhaps the main bit of semi-advanced math that I have used the most during my career.
Another notorious defect in most math books is that they start from some first principles and then creep forward step by and then the Big Reveal: Here is something you can do with this!
Here's an example: calculus books make one wade through epsilon delta proofs before introducing differentiation. This is backwards. You should start with numerical differentiating and integration, and maybe even solve some nontrivial differential equations. THEN, you drill down into asking what happens if you make step sizes ever so smaller.
Hah, yes! That is the great irony of math especially: the people who write the books are very different from the people that use them, in that they care about math as an end in and of itself. All subjects tend to succumb to that, and thus fail to interest the non-specialist, but man, math really does.
It is funny too, I had basically the same exact experience with calculus, but in reverse. My high school calc teacher was really good, and was also the physics and programming teacher, and so as much as he just loved how the math worked he always had lots of neat examples of what it meant. Plus he went pretty quickly to differentiation after a minimal amount of "ok, here's what limits are." Super useful, made sense, very neat.
Then first year college calculus was the exact bloody opposite. It was nearly the end of the semester before we did normal differentiation. I kept getting points off on exams because I just did that instead of wading through all the other crap. I did worse in Calc 1, a course I had effectively already had, than I did in all the other higher level courses.
My iron rule after that was to never take functional math classes from a mathematician, only people in applied fields (while double checking they are following the assumptions and not breaking e.g. statistics).
May I make a small request. For those of us raised on British English the use of the word "school" in American English can be quite confusing. Outside the US school always means primary or high school, or confusingly sometimes night school (for adults), but never university. At times this essay seems to be talking about universities, other times under-18 education, at one point it talks about children before moving smoothly back to students and so on.
I'm left confused about the extent to which this argument is meant to apply to under vs over 18 educational institutions.
By the way, where I went to under-18 school we did have to wear uniforms.
My ancestors didn't bleed on Bunker Hill so we could keep using the King's English! You can take your bins, your jumpers, and your velocipedes and get right back across pond, you limey bugger!
:D
I hear you though, even within the US it gets a bit confusing when people use primary and secondary school. Do they mean k-12 as primary, or k-6 with high school being secondary? The nomenclature is a bear. That's before you get into Brits saying "Wait... what do you mean by 'public school', exactly?"
For my part, I use "schooling" as distinct from "educating" to differentiate the process of going through school (which is the most general term here for all types) from the process of actually learning things. When it comes to differentiating between K-12 vs College/University, I am not particularly concerned with the difference at a theoretical level. The US system has a ton of waste in both, although on a per dollar basis the university system is probably worse because it is more expensive, the topics covered are often less useful, and the students have a much higher opportunity cost of attending because they could get useful jobs instead. When it comes to reforms one needs to specify, but when it comes to the general "spend a lot of time and money sitting around and not learning things" the sins are pretty comparable. In many ways, college in the US is a lot like 13th-16th grade. (And college students are almost indistinguishable from high school kids in terms of behavior... childhood really has been extended a long time.)
Caplan, to his credit, is a lot more particular about his nomenclature than I am here, to be clear. His book is extremely detailed.
Some schools in the US do still have uniforms, such as the one my oldest attended her first year. That was a charter school in a school choice regime state (MN), so that gives one an inkling of what could be done.
Until then, yeah just providing a definition at the start would be enough to avoid confusion here I think. But I agree that the issues aren't hugely different.
This was really good. Looking back at my own education, it could have easily been compressed at least in half without sacrificing anything worthwhile. I can still remember my kindergarten teacher forcing everyone to go over these stupid phonetics exercises that were entirely pointless for those of us who already knew how to read, so I started to read a book. She got very irritated that I was not following along with the rest of the class; and she ordered me to stop reading my book, so I could pretend to learn how to read at the same pace as everyone else. I couldn't articulate it at that age, but I knew right then that the whole thing was bullshit.
Yea, that is sadly pretty commonly descriptive, and really gives the lie to the idea that education is the point, and makes one lead away from "schools teach conformity" I think. As you say, that was probably exactly the point you decided "people in authority don't know shit" and "these rules are for chumps."
I was lucky in elementary school in that most of the teachers were perfectly happy to let me sit quietly and read while they were doing whatever. In high school they were in more of a nit, and fought against me taking upper level classes above my grade. Between that and actually spending time with the teachers, any inkling I had that it was possible, indeed likely, that most authority figures were dumb as a mud fence was forged into steel. Only one or two were worthy of respect, and the system itself certainly wasn't. I can only imagine the trouble I would have gotten into if I didn't grow up 10 miles outside of town, and so spent most of my time well away from all that.
I was lucky to have a group of friends with absurdist senses of humor. Lord knows there was plenty of absurdity, and having people to share the jokes and create funny scenes with helped me get through public schools with at least a little bit of my sanity still intact. The humorless authority figures were like caricatures straight out of a Monty Python sketch. I guess in that way, my education prepared me for the equally absurd authorities in today’s clownworld.
Yea, Monty Python turned out to be a very valuable inoculation of sorts for me, too. It is a shame we got the Ministry of Danger-Hair instead of the Ministry of Silly Walks, when you get right down to it.
You could argue we have ministries with Danger-Hair levels of zealotry that deal with Silly Walk-level subject matter. Makes it all the more aggravating.
With regards to 2. the description by Nick that you quote is actually more similar to the UK system. So you should be able to do some cross-national comparison to tease out more of the truth on the sheep-skin effects. I am sure there are lots of different systems round the world that can make for good tests of that and some of the other things going on with this topic.
Good job of covering the issue. I am generally on Caplan's side and is why I have been trying to change my own courses to include more practical stuff that can actually be useful, rather than just the signal.
I am a little curious about the comparison of UK vs US schools. Caplan is talking about US schools (which Nick should know if he read the book), but it would be interesting to see how the effect plays out in countries with fundamentally different systems. Although most countries have western style, which is to say Prussian style, education system, the fine details might lead to interesting distinctions. I kind of wonder if that hasn't already been done, regarding the sheepskin effect, as Caplan notes that there are piles of research done trying to disprove it, most of which eventually admits defeat. If there are studies looking for it cross country, he probably has it... I remember seeing the literal piles of literature in his office when he was working on the book, two stacks both as high as my thighs, and I am a lot taller than Caplan! :D
I am really glad to hear you are considering carefully what you teach... so many profs in the US just blindly follow the textbook and how they were taught. Do you have any lecture vids floating around? I don't think any of mine are, although I suck at Googling things so there might be a few illicit recordings I don't know about. It always amazes me though how economics professors manage to make economics boring... what do humans like more than studying why humans do things? (Well... ok... I should rephrase that as "what do humans like more than studying why humans do things, that you can do in a classroom without getting in trouble.") What other subject lets you talk about drugs, violence, video games, fashion, medicine, pets, wild animals, cars and the Roman Empire all in one coherent three hour lecture?
Admittedly, coherent might be overstating it a little...
In the UK we typically have three years at university. And we do kick out a reasonable number at the end of the first year, and a few at the end of the second year. At the final year a few will also fail to complete or to get an honours degree. In almost all those cases it is reasonable to say that those students did not engage with the course and did not learn very much. So someone dropping out after two years would not reasonably be said to have 2/3 of the learning of someone who completed the course.
I don't think that changes the substance of arguments very much, but does make picking up the signalling versus human capital effect a bit more difficult (whilst also potentially providing more interesting data that can be used).
One of my (many) things to do is to organise my teaching materials in a separate site. If I ever get that done, you will know!
Does the UK have the proliferation of universities that the US has? Here in the US, I only ever hear about Oxford, Cambridge, and a few others. In the US, you can randomly string any three letters together and you can probably find a community college, online college, for-profit college, private college, private university, or state university that starts with those three letters. They are everywhere. I wonder if the UK has a similar situation or if they have restricted university attendance more than the US has.
, and according to Statistica there are 265 in the UK, and apparently about 4000 in the US. The UK has about 65 million people, so 1/5 of the US or so. Given that it looks like there are fewer colleges in the UK, and only ~56% of the relevant UK population go to college compared to ~85% of the relevant US pop.
Do 85% of 18-24 year olds really go to college in the USA? That seems high to me, but I suppose I can believe it.
Oh, I see, it is 85%, but ALL students regardless of age compared to the population 18-23. So the number is a bit inflated by "adult learners" as they are called. (Implying 18 year olds aren't adults.)
There's also the problem of creep, where what used to thought of as something like a "teacher's college" gets called "university," and what used to be thought of as "useless" gets called "expensive private college or university." But I suppose my original question assumed that was going on, at least in the US.
We have a lot, and there have been specific reforms to open it up to more people. When my parents went to university it was probably about 10% of 18year olds, now over 50%. So we suffer the same signalling and positional externalities issue you do.
I can't really believe US enrollment is 80%+! I would guess you real figure is close to ours 50-60%, still way too high.
Explains why jobs that used to require high school diplomas now require bachelors or masters degrees. You end up with the same job you would have in 1980, except now you have to wait 4 years to start while the educational-industrial complex takes a hundred grand off you.
I think that is exactly it, too. Same job you would have had, are out a ton of money, a ton of money gets redistributed from the general populace to colleges and universities from the state and federal governments, and a bunch of faculty and worthless admins, not to mention actively deleterious admins, collect a large salary and social status, while at the same time everyone who doesn't have a college degree and actually works doing a blue collar job is shamed and looked down upon as not even good enough to go to college.
Yea, that stat being (#enrolled in a college)/(population 18-23) is likely to over inflate, considering how many people go to grad school (and thus are past the 23 bound) as well as people enrolled in "continuing education" type stuff for work. I would have been in the former group, not starting my PhD till I was in my early 30's. So maybe the real number is something like 60-70%, due to a lot of people getting two year associate's degrees or something, but that is still crazy high.
That is interesting. In both k-12 and college in the US almost no one gets held back a year (required to retake a year of school) or failed. I have heard tell of colleges that punish teachers for failing students in general, and set limits on how many students in a class can be failed. Non-tenured faculty living or dying based partially on student reviews means failing students is asking to be fired. I recall my undergrad advisor explaining that after 300 level classes students just don't fail, period.
A common thing I have heard is that Harvard is hard to get into, but easy to get through. Seems similar.
We aren't quite that bad. We kick out up to a quarter of our students at the end of the first year. Most of whom have barely been to a class and came to university with a pretty poor academic background as is, so just not suited for university, or at least to a somewhat demanding course.
I went to one of the HPY schools. In my non-STEM major and general ed/core curriculum classes, it was a breeze to get a B or C, but one had to try really hard to get an A or a D. Most of what I thought were A efforts yielded an A- or B+. Really poor efforts typically yielded a C+ or higher. (It is my understanding that the STEM majors were more difficult.)
For reference, I'd estimate my IQ/SAT scores put me solidly in the 2nd quartile (25-50%) among my peers there, and I had a below-average work ethic (certainly below the average of my HPY peers) so it's safe to say the professors were giving passing gardes to almost all students.
Could you clarify what you mean by HPY schools? I am not familiar with the acronym, and Duck Duck Ho is failing me.
It is funny though, I had a very similar experience in college. I took a sci-fi literature class for an english requirement, figuring it was right up my alley, I could really apply myself and do well. First exam, C-. After that, went full on "fuck this noise", stopped reading, went to class and played Pokémon Gold, and then on subsequent exams just went Turing Test: Leftist Model.
A+ from then on.
Important lesson for me :D
(I did like two books in the set though: "Stars My Destination," and "Gun, with Occasional Music.")
Harvard (or) Princeton (or) Yale. I went to one of those three. Doc, you can figure out which one it is because you know who I am, but for anonymity's sake, I'll keep it vague for everyone else.
What we are trying to do (we being the rest of the programme team) is put specific effort into teaching skills that will be used on the job. It sounds obvious but so much of education just doesn't do that.
In my field (Economics) that means having more focus on practical data analysis and software skills. We want all our students to have some basics of a programming language, be pretty fluent in excel and the rest of the office suite and know what they are doing with a dataset to some level.
We also work on soft skills. For example putting effort into presentation skills and teamwork.
That does seem useful, although I can't help but notice economic concepts seem a little put off there. Does the practical data analysis focus more on cost/benefits, digging into really understanding the relevant trade offs and all that sort of thing?
Less flippantly, I think it is almost always possible to teach an important concept in a way that also enhances another skillset. So I think of these as complements not substitutes.
Most typical economics problem set type questions you would do in a seminar are amenable to being done in a spreadsheet or programmed in some way for example.
Agreed, I think that is the most valuable thing from programming especially, that it makes you think VERY carefully about otherwise abstract concepts. Hand math/analysis isn't quite so good for that, as it allows for a lot of handwaving.
On the other hand, I do think there is a danger of only teaching or approaching problems in a way that allows for easy mathematical analysis. We tend to teach supply and demand exactly backwards, for instance, starting with a given set of curves and working out what happens with various changes, as opposed to starting with observed prices/quantities, taking note of changes, and then trying to figure out the curve shapes. I say backwards because of course we cannot observe the curves directly and have to impute what they might be, but we always approach problems the opposite way. I think in many ways, learning how to think about problems and identify what we would even need to know to properly do the math is more valuable and important than how to do the math itself. I see far too often people saying "well, this data is crap, but it is the best we have, so let's do math!" then treating the results as though they mean anything, both in academia and industry.
Agree that maths for the sake of maths is not a good route. Hence in previous posts the point on soft skills and other things that can be useful in later life alongside the data analysis and more technical stuff.
I taught a course on public choice for several years (Caplan's 'Myth of the Rational Voter' was on the reading list'). Of the couple of hundred students I taught in that period how many have made any use or even could remember anything substantive about what I taught them? Very few little/I imagine.
We had a good time anyway, and I hopefully inculcated a healthy scepticism of politicians and government, but as per the original article, the real achievement of the course was just a signal. So if I can get some actual skill development and some useful things for the rest of life along with a few interesting ideas and the signalling part, then this will be a big improvement.
Regarding the sheepskin effect, I would note that in some fields the senior level courses are way harder than the freshman level courses. Also, the senior year tends to be mostly in-field courses vs. things like basic English or electives.
Fields that are math heavy have courses that build on top of each other. Poor retention of early subjects causes a cumulative effect leading to dropping out.
"The status quo bias is strong with this one."
For the record, I’m actually totally on board with making some big changes to the education system. The Case Against Education is a great argument for opposing “free college for all” and making some significant cuts (maybe 5, 10, up to 20% even) but not for cutting 80% like Caplan wants to do for ideological reasons (which he acknowledges himself in the full context of the first excerpt I gave from him).
I would also support significant privatization of the education system, for reasons Hanania has outlined recently.
When you say cutting X%, do you mean cutting funding for college level or k-12?
The details are important here so I would want to be pretty systematic about reviewing how the current allotment is spent... in general terms I would be amenable to subsidizing college tuition less.
Caplan argues that masters then undergrad then high school is the pecking order for what to cut first, which sounds roughly right but I'm not sure how much that depends on other assumptions he makes about what schooling actually does that I disagree with.
That sounds fair. I am personally quite comfortable cutting all subsidies for higher education, and rebuilding the k-12 system from the ground up. However, I think the over subsidizing of college and higher is important to stop, whereas I would be comfortable for the time being merely moving k-12 educational funding to the parents and pushing school choice. I think we could go a lot farther, but just giving parents a choice on where to send their kids (and a pseudo market for school performance) would likely be a big improvement.
IMO it's hard to deny that formal schooling teaches a lot of conformity... on an emotional level isn't that the reason why libertarians hate it so much?
Well, yes and no. There are two uses of conformity we are talking here: the personality trait of the propensity to conform, and conformity of knowledge/ideas.
The personality trait, which is I believe what Caplan has in mind when he talks about signaling, is largely genetic, around the order of 80% (which is roughly the norm for “how much you are like your parents” heritable traits, but it might be like 60% or whatever). School, or the military or jobs for that matter, can affect that a bit, but only at the margin. You are just as likely to teach “just tell them what they want to hear, then do whatever you want “ as you are to teach nonconformists to conform. As evidence I point to the fact you and I have been through a lot of school, yet we are who we are :D
As to conformity of what to think, I agree, schools push that very hard. Not with 100% success, but it is of course much easier to fill heads with stuff than it is to affect the wiring. Everyone relies on their basic models of reality for thought, and you can do a lot of altering those models based on the primary information that builds them. This seems to be why so many “rebels” turn into good little NPCs later in life: their entire world view has been shaped to be such, and once they are out of the rebel against adults teenage stage they settle in.
I think most libertarian types object to the latter conformity training, to the extent they are aware that there are two different types.
I think one issue is that people who are good at conformity are good at school. They'll conform to whatever system you give them. The super non-conformists are either going to fail in any prevailing system (e.g. criminals) or thrive regardless of the prevailing system, even if they would rather operate, or do operate, outside of the prevailing system (e.g. HS/college/grad school dropouts who become business owners/millionaires/billionaires regardless of educational attainment).
So then the libertarian argument isn't that school *teaches* conformity, but rather that it *rewards* conformity and punishes nonconformity without conferring enough other benefits along the way. The conformers do well in school for reasons that are mostly unrelated to how much they learned or how much value they received from school. So schools are anti-libertarian because they are a mandatory waste of time (i.e. a restraint of liberty) for people who would have thrived anyway and for people who would have failed anyway. And for everyone in the middle, it's still a waste of taxpayer money because there are cheaper ways to find and reward conformists than 20 years of taxpayer-funded and/or subsidized education.
I would suggest that one problem with the education system is it's overbundled. K-12 schools have a composite mission of educating, babysitting, enforcing and teaching social norms, and keeping an eye on kids and their families in a kind of quasi-law-enforcement/quasi-social-worker/quasi-doctor role. Jack of all trades, master of none. This is evidenced by the fact that a kid with an IQ of 130 is rarely bumped up two grades or allowed to finish each year of school in 3 months and then have the rest of the time off. He or she must sit and be bored while the rest of the class goes through their motions (and, more likely than not, face discipline for understandably acting out.) If education was the sole mission, smart kids would not be held back, unruly kids wouldn't be allowed to stay and affect the learning of everyone else, and non-proficient kids would not be forced to stay in school (or would be forced to stay until they reached proficiency).
It all just seems like a massive case of 'going through the motions.' Which is why I blamed status quo bias above. Chesterton's fence and all that, but....the underlying metrics show that almost no interventions have made a difference despite 60 years of pouring trillions of dollars into this project. The mountains of evidence favoring dismantling K-12 are so high, you'd almost have to raise the burden of proof ABOVE beyond a reasonable doubt for the pro-dismantling argument to fail to pass muster.
That over-bundling point is super important, I think. Much of that problem could be solved with aggressive school choice, I think. If parents could choose schools that advance students at the rate of their grasp of the material, or focus on discipline, or hell, just be a standard "sit here for 8 hours and try not to get into trouble" box like most schools, at least parents could choose the bundle that they think is best for their kids. Trying to be everything to everyone, the charitable diagnosis of our schools' problem, and keeping out competitors leads to a system that is always going to be over bundled and under performing in something needing customization so thoroughly as education.
Our school system is indeed horribly inefficient. Trying to learn in a jail like environment with others who don't want to learn is brutally stupid. The real value of going to a good school or college is to be able to get away from such disrupters.
On the other hand I have attended college classes where I learned things that I doubt I could have taught myself. I can just sit down a read a history book as easily as listen to a lecturer. Learning a new branch of math is far more challenging. Simply having the homework deadlines and tests to prepare for provides a discipline supplement of great value.
I often wonder if the difficulty of learning math compared to history is partially in the feedback and application. History is easy because our brains love stories and that is sufficient (who cares if the details aren't perfect). With things like math, however, you really have to apply them to a particular problem and see that you get the right result, something very hard to do if you don't already know what the answer should be! That makes learning geometry and some trigonometry easier for me due to being able to apply it to carpentry etc., and basic calculus made sense once I realized it was just going from position to velocity to acceleration like physics. Other times where I can't test out the answer in the real world or just intuit roughly what it should be and compare are a good bit tougher, and drop out of my head a lot faster when I don't use them. I think you are right that the homework gives you both good motivation to practice, and the feedback on what you are doing wrong. Assuming it is done right, that is, and isn't just busywork that is never carefully reviewed. There's definitely a right and a wrong way to do homework, I think.
Having applications in mind most definitely helps with learning math! The people who write math textbooks are the people who love the purity of math, and thus are incredibly slack on providing applications. My experience learning linear algebra was perhaps the worst in that regard, which is odd in that linear algebra is perhaps the main bit of semi-advanced math that I have used the most during my career.
Another notorious defect in most math books is that they start from some first principles and then creep forward step by and then the Big Reveal: Here is something you can do with this!
Here's an example: calculus books make one wade through epsilon delta proofs before introducing differentiation. This is backwards. You should start with numerical differentiating and integration, and maybe even solve some nontrivial differential equations. THEN, you drill down into asking what happens if you make step sizes ever so smaller.
https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/a-practical-arts-paradigm?s=w
Hah, yes! That is the great irony of math especially: the people who write the books are very different from the people that use them, in that they care about math as an end in and of itself. All subjects tend to succumb to that, and thus fail to interest the non-specialist, but man, math really does.
It is funny too, I had basically the same exact experience with calculus, but in reverse. My high school calc teacher was really good, and was also the physics and programming teacher, and so as much as he just loved how the math worked he always had lots of neat examples of what it meant. Plus he went pretty quickly to differentiation after a minimal amount of "ok, here's what limits are." Super useful, made sense, very neat.
Then first year college calculus was the exact bloody opposite. It was nearly the end of the semester before we did normal differentiation. I kept getting points off on exams because I just did that instead of wading through all the other crap. I did worse in Calc 1, a course I had effectively already had, than I did in all the other higher level courses.
My iron rule after that was to never take functional math classes from a mathematician, only people in applied fields (while double checking they are following the assumptions and not breaking e.g. statistics).
May I make a small request. For those of us raised on British English the use of the word "school" in American English can be quite confusing. Outside the US school always means primary or high school, or confusingly sometimes night school (for adults), but never university. At times this essay seems to be talking about universities, other times under-18 education, at one point it talks about children before moving smoothly back to students and so on.
I'm left confused about the extent to which this argument is meant to apply to under vs over 18 educational institutions.
By the way, where I went to under-18 school we did have to wear uniforms.
My ancestors didn't bleed on Bunker Hill so we could keep using the King's English! You can take your bins, your jumpers, and your velocipedes and get right back across pond, you limey bugger!
:D
I hear you though, even within the US it gets a bit confusing when people use primary and secondary school. Do they mean k-12 as primary, or k-6 with high school being secondary? The nomenclature is a bear. That's before you get into Brits saying "Wait... what do you mean by 'public school', exactly?"
For my part, I use "schooling" as distinct from "educating" to differentiate the process of going through school (which is the most general term here for all types) from the process of actually learning things. When it comes to differentiating between K-12 vs College/University, I am not particularly concerned with the difference at a theoretical level. The US system has a ton of waste in both, although on a per dollar basis the university system is probably worse because it is more expensive, the topics covered are often less useful, and the students have a much higher opportunity cost of attending because they could get useful jobs instead. When it comes to reforms one needs to specify, but when it comes to the general "spend a lot of time and money sitting around and not learning things" the sins are pretty comparable. In many ways, college in the US is a lot like 13th-16th grade. (And college students are almost indistinguishable from high school kids in terms of behavior... childhood really has been extended a long time.)
Caplan, to his credit, is a lot more particular about his nomenclature than I am here, to be clear. His book is extremely detailed.
Some schools in the US do still have uniforms, such as the one my oldest attended her first year. That was a charter school in a school choice regime state (MN), so that gives one an inkling of what could be done.
One day we'll reconquer the new world. One day :)
Until then, yeah just providing a definition at the start would be enough to avoid confusion here I think. But I agree that the issues aren't hugely different.
This was really good. Looking back at my own education, it could have easily been compressed at least in half without sacrificing anything worthwhile. I can still remember my kindergarten teacher forcing everyone to go over these stupid phonetics exercises that were entirely pointless for those of us who already knew how to read, so I started to read a book. She got very irritated that I was not following along with the rest of the class; and she ordered me to stop reading my book, so I could pretend to learn how to read at the same pace as everyone else. I couldn't articulate it at that age, but I knew right then that the whole thing was bullshit.
Yea, that is sadly pretty commonly descriptive, and really gives the lie to the idea that education is the point, and makes one lead away from "schools teach conformity" I think. As you say, that was probably exactly the point you decided "people in authority don't know shit" and "these rules are for chumps."
I was lucky in elementary school in that most of the teachers were perfectly happy to let me sit quietly and read while they were doing whatever. In high school they were in more of a nit, and fought against me taking upper level classes above my grade. Between that and actually spending time with the teachers, any inkling I had that it was possible, indeed likely, that most authority figures were dumb as a mud fence was forged into steel. Only one or two were worthy of respect, and the system itself certainly wasn't. I can only imagine the trouble I would have gotten into if I didn't grow up 10 miles outside of town, and so spent most of my time well away from all that.
I was lucky to have a group of friends with absurdist senses of humor. Lord knows there was plenty of absurdity, and having people to share the jokes and create funny scenes with helped me get through public schools with at least a little bit of my sanity still intact. The humorless authority figures were like caricatures straight out of a Monty Python sketch. I guess in that way, my education prepared me for the equally absurd authorities in today’s clownworld.
Yea, Monty Python turned out to be a very valuable inoculation of sorts for me, too. It is a shame we got the Ministry of Danger-Hair instead of the Ministry of Silly Walks, when you get right down to it.
You could argue we have ministries with Danger-Hair levels of zealotry that deal with Silly Walk-level subject matter. Makes it all the more aggravating.
Man... no joke, sadly.
With regards to 2. the description by Nick that you quote is actually more similar to the UK system. So you should be able to do some cross-national comparison to tease out more of the truth on the sheep-skin effects. I am sure there are lots of different systems round the world that can make for good tests of that and some of the other things going on with this topic.
Good job of covering the issue. I am generally on Caplan's side and is why I have been trying to change my own courses to include more practical stuff that can actually be useful, rather than just the signal.
I am a little curious about the comparison of UK vs US schools. Caplan is talking about US schools (which Nick should know if he read the book), but it would be interesting to see how the effect plays out in countries with fundamentally different systems. Although most countries have western style, which is to say Prussian style, education system, the fine details might lead to interesting distinctions. I kind of wonder if that hasn't already been done, regarding the sheepskin effect, as Caplan notes that there are piles of research done trying to disprove it, most of which eventually admits defeat. If there are studies looking for it cross country, he probably has it... I remember seeing the literal piles of literature in his office when he was working on the book, two stacks both as high as my thighs, and I am a lot taller than Caplan! :D
I am really glad to hear you are considering carefully what you teach... so many profs in the US just blindly follow the textbook and how they were taught. Do you have any lecture vids floating around? I don't think any of mine are, although I suck at Googling things so there might be a few illicit recordings I don't know about. It always amazes me though how economics professors manage to make economics boring... what do humans like more than studying why humans do things? (Well... ok... I should rephrase that as "what do humans like more than studying why humans do things, that you can do in a classroom without getting in trouble.") What other subject lets you talk about drugs, violence, video games, fashion, medicine, pets, wild animals, cars and the Roman Empire all in one coherent three hour lecture?
Admittedly, coherent might be overstating it a little...
In the UK we typically have three years at university. And we do kick out a reasonable number at the end of the first year, and a few at the end of the second year. At the final year a few will also fail to complete or to get an honours degree. In almost all those cases it is reasonable to say that those students did not engage with the course and did not learn very much. So someone dropping out after two years would not reasonably be said to have 2/3 of the learning of someone who completed the course.
I don't think that changes the substance of arguments very much, but does make picking up the signalling versus human capital effect a bit more difficult (whilst also potentially providing more interesting data that can be used).
One of my (many) things to do is to organise my teaching materials in a separate site. If I ever get that done, you will know!
Does the UK have the proliferation of universities that the US has? Here in the US, I only ever hear about Oxford, Cambridge, and a few others. In the US, you can randomly string any three letters together and you can probably find a community college, online college, for-profit college, private college, private university, or state university that starts with those three letters. They are everywhere. I wonder if the UK has a similar situation or if they have restricted university attendance more than the US has.
Colleges per capita would be an interesting comparison. Our World in Data has some numbers there on enrollment https://ourworldindata.org/tertiary-education , and wikipedia has a list of colleges by country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_universities_and_colleges_by_country
, and according to Statistica there are 265 in the UK, and apparently about 4000 in the US. The UK has about 65 million people, so 1/5 of the US or so. Given that it looks like there are fewer colleges in the UK, and only ~56% of the relevant UK population go to college compared to ~85% of the relevant US pop.
Do 85% of 18-24 year olds really go to college in the USA? That seems high to me, but I suppose I can believe it.
Oh, I see, it is 85%, but ALL students regardless of age compared to the population 18-23. So the number is a bit inflated by "adult learners" as they are called. (Implying 18 year olds aren't adults.)
There's also the problem of creep, where what used to thought of as something like a "teacher's college" gets called "university," and what used to be thought of as "useless" gets called "expensive private college or university." But I suppose my original question assumed that was going on, at least in the US.
We have a lot, and there have been specific reforms to open it up to more people. When my parents went to university it was probably about 10% of 18year olds, now over 50%. So we suffer the same signalling and positional externalities issue you do.
I can't really believe US enrollment is 80%+! I would guess you real figure is close to ours 50-60%, still way too high.
Explains why jobs that used to require high school diplomas now require bachelors or masters degrees. You end up with the same job you would have in 1980, except now you have to wait 4 years to start while the educational-industrial complex takes a hundred grand off you.
I think that is exactly it, too. Same job you would have had, are out a ton of money, a ton of money gets redistributed from the general populace to colleges and universities from the state and federal governments, and a bunch of faculty and worthless admins, not to mention actively deleterious admins, collect a large salary and social status, while at the same time everyone who doesn't have a college degree and actually works doing a blue collar job is shamed and looked down upon as not even good enough to go to college.
Yea, that stat being (#enrolled in a college)/(population 18-23) is likely to over inflate, considering how many people go to grad school (and thus are past the 23 bound) as well as people enrolled in "continuing education" type stuff for work. I would have been in the former group, not starting my PhD till I was in my early 30's. So maybe the real number is something like 60-70%, due to a lot of people getting two year associate's degrees or something, but that is still crazy high.
That is interesting. In both k-12 and college in the US almost no one gets held back a year (required to retake a year of school) or failed. I have heard tell of colleges that punish teachers for failing students in general, and set limits on how many students in a class can be failed. Non-tenured faculty living or dying based partially on student reviews means failing students is asking to be fired. I recall my undergrad advisor explaining that after 300 level classes students just don't fail, period.
A common thing I have heard is that Harvard is hard to get into, but easy to get through. Seems similar.
We aren't quite that bad. We kick out up to a quarter of our students at the end of the first year. Most of whom have barely been to a class and came to university with a pretty poor academic background as is, so just not suited for university, or at least to a somewhat demanding course.
I went to one of the HPY schools. In my non-STEM major and general ed/core curriculum classes, it was a breeze to get a B or C, but one had to try really hard to get an A or a D. Most of what I thought were A efforts yielded an A- or B+. Really poor efforts typically yielded a C+ or higher. (It is my understanding that the STEM majors were more difficult.)
For reference, I'd estimate my IQ/SAT scores put me solidly in the 2nd quartile (25-50%) among my peers there, and I had a below-average work ethic (certainly below the average of my HPY peers) so it's safe to say the professors were giving passing gardes to almost all students.
Could you clarify what you mean by HPY schools? I am not familiar with the acronym, and Duck Duck Ho is failing me.
It is funny though, I had a very similar experience in college. I took a sci-fi literature class for an english requirement, figuring it was right up my alley, I could really apply myself and do well. First exam, C-. After that, went full on "fuck this noise", stopped reading, went to class and played Pokémon Gold, and then on subsequent exams just went Turing Test: Leftist Model.
A+ from then on.
Important lesson for me :D
(I did like two books in the set though: "Stars My Destination," and "Gun, with Occasional Music.")
Harvard (or) Princeton (or) Yale. I went to one of those three. Doc, you can figure out which one it is because you know who I am, but for anonymity's sake, I'll keep it vague for everyone else.
That’s really interesting, what changes have you made to improve the actual teaching component of your courses?
What we are trying to do (we being the rest of the programme team) is put specific effort into teaching skills that will be used on the job. It sounds obvious but so much of education just doesn't do that.
In my field (Economics) that means having more focus on practical data analysis and software skills. We want all our students to have some basics of a programming language, be pretty fluent in excel and the rest of the office suite and know what they are doing with a dataset to some level.
We also work on soft skills. For example putting effort into presentation skills and teamwork.
Hopefully it pays off for them!
That’s awesome. A lot of those things were emphasized in my Econ program and I think I benefited a lot from it. Keep up the great work!
That does seem useful, although I can't help but notice economic concepts seem a little put off there. Does the practical data analysis focus more on cost/benefits, digging into really understanding the relevant trade offs and all that sort of thing?
I certainly try, whether I succeed in instilling these ideas is another matter....
Less flippantly, I think it is almost always possible to teach an important concept in a way that also enhances another skillset. So I think of these as complements not substitutes.
Most typical economics problem set type questions you would do in a seminar are amenable to being done in a spreadsheet or programmed in some way for example.
Agreed, I think that is the most valuable thing from programming especially, that it makes you think VERY carefully about otherwise abstract concepts. Hand math/analysis isn't quite so good for that, as it allows for a lot of handwaving.
On the other hand, I do think there is a danger of only teaching or approaching problems in a way that allows for easy mathematical analysis. We tend to teach supply and demand exactly backwards, for instance, starting with a given set of curves and working out what happens with various changes, as opposed to starting with observed prices/quantities, taking note of changes, and then trying to figure out the curve shapes. I say backwards because of course we cannot observe the curves directly and have to impute what they might be, but we always approach problems the opposite way. I think in many ways, learning how to think about problems and identify what we would even need to know to properly do the math is more valuable and important than how to do the math itself. I see far too often people saying "well, this data is crap, but it is the best we have, so let's do math!" then treating the results as though they mean anything, both in academia and industry.
Agree that maths for the sake of maths is not a good route. Hence in previous posts the point on soft skills and other things that can be useful in later life alongside the data analysis and more technical stuff.
I taught a course on public choice for several years (Caplan's 'Myth of the Rational Voter' was on the reading list'). Of the couple of hundred students I taught in that period how many have made any use or even could remember anything substantive about what I taught them? Very few little/I imagine.
We had a good time anyway, and I hopefully inculcated a healthy scepticism of politicians and government, but as per the original article, the real achievement of the course was just a signal. So if I can get some actual skill development and some useful things for the rest of life along with a few interesting ideas and the signalling part, then this will be a big improvement.
Regarding the sheepskin effect, I would note that in some fields the senior level courses are way harder than the freshman level courses. Also, the senior year tends to be mostly in-field courses vs. things like basic English or electives.
Fields that are math heavy have courses that build on top of each other. Poor retention of early subjects causes a cumulative effect leading to dropping out.