The case against education

Made by Ben Wilterdink.

unsurprisingly, one of the best ways to develop the soft skills necessary for labor market success comes in the form of entry level employment. A 2015 report from USAID concludes, “Theoretical literature suggests that adolescence and young adulthood are optimal times to develop and reinforce these skills.” Additionally, a growing body of evidence suggests that actually working, or at least being in a workplace environment, is a key indicator of successful soft skill development.

Read the whole thing. One implication is that young people probably would learn more if they spent less time in school and more time working at jobs.

6 thoughts on “The case against education

  1. If you believe this, doesn’t it follow that unpaid internships are a more important cause of inequality of opportunity than you might otherwise think? That is, the slice of people who can afford to work at internships without pay don’t just get social network access that makes it easier to get a job, they get human capital development (socialization in the soft skills particularly important in white-collar jobs) that’s really valuable and hard to get any other way.

    Not saying this means one should support regulation of internship pay– I don’t– but it does raise the more general question of how to broaden access to these high-value opportunities.

    • Just putting an internship (or Congressional staffwork, etc.) on one’s resume isn’t worth very much. It’s about being able to make a good impression to people who can leverage social networks and non-public knowledge on your behalf. And there are just fundamental scarcities involved here.

      There are only so many very important people who can make things happen for interns, and there are only so many opportunities those people can allocate. So that means that even though intern slots are already scarce compared to the labor force, those interns are all competing with each other in a kind of tournament, and in my observation, only 10-20% of them can really capitalize on the experience and leverage it to realize on one of those opportunities. By and large, they are the same kind of ‘upcoming broad elite’ young adults who tend to succeed in general. Most of the rest wash out or just move on to with their lives, which, ironically, often involves going back to school to get more higher education credentials.

      You just can’t spread that kind of thing thinner, and not even close to thin enough to provide “opportunity” to everyone. Real opportunities are usually discrete, not continuous, and for everyone else, there is merely a ‘credential’-like resume-line, which, the most common it is, the less valuable it will be regarded and the less useful it could possibly be for any marginal intern

  2. One implication is that young people probably would learn more if they spent less time in school and more time working at jobs.

    How much less? And why not both at the same time. Have a student go to the middle school for their skills and have them work at the same time. (So I could get into UCLA but decided UCI was easier to graduate and do part time work. I sure there is some sort Ivy League exception but that is 1% of the population.)

    Anyway, the anti-education liberarians are trying to make changes with labor demand from HR of large corporations, so I think best to still pursue education for young people.

    • Sorry, I meant:

      the anti-education liberarians are not focusing changes with labor demand from HR of large corporations

  3. So what are these all so important Soft Skills? In order, the survey found the top five traits employers look for are as follows: attitude, work ethic/integrity, communication, culture fit, critical thinking.

    Maybe to economists that looks like hard science and mathematical rigor. It strikes me as hand waving.

    And I find myself fascinated by the notion in “theoretical literature” that students learn these valuable things in “the workplace environment.” Are we talking about working on the line 8-6 every day at a Ford car plant, or posing for sexcams on the internet, or driving for Uber, or being a graduate student TA. or what? What’s the sort of “typical” job that best teaches these Soft Skills, and are they the skills we see so elegantly displayed by, say, modern day Presidents and their Cabinet appointees?

  4. Duh. Plus, not only soft skills. Most hard skills I learned on-the-job, even the jobs that required college degrees.

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