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@pettter @lain @karen Assuming attending school gets you education. That's the main gripe, whether it gets you a job is mostly a proxy. I admit the proxy is flawed too.
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@pettter @lain @karen But I don't want to make it seem like I agree with the job being irrelevant. If it's to be a sustainable practice, the societal, including productive, benefit needs to justify the resources that go into it.
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@pettter @lain @karen @herrabre Time to drop http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-202-bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education.html in here.
According to Caplan, the value of higher education, and not only in the US, but also internationally, is 80% signalling, 20% productivity.
Part of how this can be observed is how much individual advantage and how much societal advantage can be shown to result from higher education[0]. That is, individuals compete better in the job market against other individuals when they have better degrees, but nations don't lift themselves as much when the whole population has better degrees. This is an indication that you mostly get selected for because you have shown you can go through school, but that school doesn't actually make you that much more productive.
Another observation is how much the diploma is worth compared to the effort spent. If the diploma assigns a huge monetary value to you, but years of studying without the diploma doesn't, the degree is probably mostly signal. This is of course making the assumption that companies know what the heck they are doing when recruiting, which isn't itself without controversy. But market evolution should give a pretty great advantage to companies that would see through this rather obvious mistake, if it were a mistake.
[0] or I should perhaps say "higher schooling" to resonate with what I said earlier
clacke
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