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The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone
Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education
BRYAN CAPLAN
We have got to deal with the wreckage that is the American University, it has to be one of the first things we fix. So many people who have navigated the credentials rat race are stupid as ****....and they dont even know......and we have not only wasted A **** TON MAGNITUDE of money but we have facilitated the rot of minds and spirits at the university....the very failed university.
Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education
BRYAN CAPLAN
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/I have been in school for more than 40 years. First preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, and high school. Then a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a doctoral program at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my first “real” job—as an economics professor at George Mason University.
Thanks to tenure, I have a dream job for life. Personally, I have no reason to lash out at our system of higher education. Yet a lifetime of experience, plus a quarter century of reading and reflection, has convinced me that it is a big waste of time and money. When politicians vow to send more Americans to college, I can’t help gasping, “Why? You want us to waste even more?”
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But signaling plays almost no role in public discourse or policy making. As a society, we continue to push ever larger numbers of students into ever higher levels of education. The main effect is not better jobs or greater skill levels, but a credentialist arms race.
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The conventional view—that education pays because students learn—assumes that the typical student acquires, and retains, a lot of knowledge. She doesn’t.
We have got to deal with the wreckage that is the American University, it has to be one of the first things we fix. So many people who have navigated the credentials rat race are stupid as ****....and they dont even know......and we have not only wasted A **** TON MAGNITUDE of money but we have facilitated the rot of minds and spirits at the university....the very failed university.
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