I recommend this EconDuel between Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, with the latter channeling Bryan Caplan, on whether education is content or signaling.
Tyler argues that students pick up valuable intangible forms of knowledge in college. One might term this cultural learning.
When I showed the debate to my high school students, they were somewhat put off by Tyler saying that students learn to “submit to authority.” I think that a better formulation would be to say that students learn to please authority in ambiguous situations. That is, a skilled worker in today’s economy needs to meet expectations in a setting where instructions are not precise. Your boss does not want to spend time telling you exactly how to do your job. Instead, the boss wants to set some general expectations and have you figure out how best to meet or exceed those expectations. In college, writing a paper or trying to prepare for a test requires similar skills–the ability to anticipate and satisfy what the professor is expecting without being given a precise set of step-by-step instructions.
When I gave job interviews, the crucial point in the interview was when I said, “Tell me what questions you have.” I took the view that someone who was going to do a good job would have the ability to ask relevant, probing questions. Someone who lacked that ability would be too passive and create too many opportunities for communication failures between me and the employee.
In theory, a better educated person would do better in my interview. That person would have a better sense of the right questions to ask in order to be successful as an employee.
On the other hand, the cultural learning aspect of college education might be nothing but an Eliza Doolittle effect. Because you are able to speak with the proper intonation and express the views of a well-educated individual, you ingratiate yourself with people who can hire you into or connect you with well-paying jobs. But someone with more lower-class conversation patterns might actually be as good or better at doing the work.
Ah! We are all “bureaucrats now!
An important trait in adult life is learning to separate people who are insightful from people who are merely good at acting insightful. In college both do equally well but in the real world there are important differences.
Regarding the video, I think Tyler’s big omission is that everything he argued for could feasibly be provided outside of school as well, so it’s not much of a defense of the status quo per se.
In the business we call this “the Straussian reading” 😉
Tabarrok says that a college degree signals IQ and ability. This is true to a point. More importantly, it signals discipline. It signals that this is a person who is willing to work for years to prepare for more difficult work and that they have made many incremental demonstrations of competence along the way. They have seen it through. It shows that a young person has a history of working their way through a series of trials successfully in an attempt to prepare themselves.
Funny that there’s no “Advanced Acculturation and Successfully Navigating Your Path Through Various Roles in the Prevailing Hierarchies While Avoiding Hidden Social Landmines 101” class.
I guess the point is that this can’t be taught directly. Selective evaluators are looking for signals of actual savvy, not mere convincing mimicry of savvy, which is an entirely different skill. Instruction in imitation is the opposite of what they want.
And every class that lacks well-definable expectations (‘math-like’) doubles as a passive kind of ‘AA 101’. The universities only obliquely acknowledge their ‘finishing school’ function, which is necessary when you are working under the pretense that you are merely teaching objective knowledge and not actually ‘finishing’ students to signal conformity with high status attitudes and beliefs.
I think an under-appreciated aspect of higher education these days is as a kind of probationary period during which less socially savvy people are given enough opportunities equivalent to ‘rope to hang themselves’ and then get themselves weeded out of the system. Selective personnel evaluators want to know that their prospective affiliates won’t generate any distracting processes, legal liability, and reputational or good-will costs.
That’s probably more important that competence and productivity, since below the truly elite levels, there are plenty of people to choose from with comparable market-value, but the down-side of them stepping on a social landmine is much, much larger than the upside of positive employee output. From this perspective, employers and admissions / accessions officers want the college experience to be as hazardous as possible in ways aligned with society’s prevailing structure of taboos. “If they made it through all that campus nonsense, then they’ll probably cause no major trouble for us around here.”
I would be very careful about drawing any conclusions from your (or anyone else’s) experience in typical job interviews (on either side). Unless you have used formally structured interviews. But “tell me what questions you have” isn’t indicative of that.
They are pretty much the worst commonly used personnel selection mechanism. The usual paper here is ““The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Finding”.
Now, this paper–http://web.missouri.edu/~segerti/capstone/BeliefInstucturedInterview.pdf–is interesting because they constructed a sham interview condition. While the interview questions where random and unrelated to the target metric, people still _believed_ the interview was useful. Even though including it led to worse predictions than background information alone.
Interesting that the “intangibles” attributed to being taught in college, creativity, please authority in ambiguous situations, are the very things that the K-12 is designed beat out of the child. It has long been shown that kids lose their ability to think outside the box the more schooling they have with a 3rd grader being far more conventional than a kindergartner. Also, for 12 long years, the child is disabused for anything other than following the precise assignment and for asking questions on the periphery of the lesson. The last thing a K-12 teacher wants is a student who reads other sources or who makes judgements to the soundness of the knowledge. It is a disruption and interrupts the lesson plan.
“students learn to “submit to authority.””
My first run at the Cowen-speak is to wonder if he phrases this jarringly to kick-start he students’ brain. It doesn’t really matter if the student believes exactly what the teacher is presenting if they ponder over it for a while and come to their own terms with it.
But students do need to understand in some form that he who pays the piper calls the tune. I want to say it is a feature of capitalism, but it is a feature of life. Capitalism is only unique in that you are allowed to call the tune when you can pay the piper.