What do you mean? The quote from your bio is:
I meant that I did not write either of those articles nor his book, "The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money."
amazon.com
I follow a lot of economist blogs. His is among them. I provided links to both of the articles from which I quoted. If you want to take issue with him, his blog accepts comments.
And if you think only 5% of the people can benefit from college, why did you go? Why did he go?
He didn't say that only 5% of people can benefit from college. In fact, he explicitly said:
Would I advise an academically well-prepared 18-year-old to skip college because she won’t learn much of value? Absolutely not. Studying irrelevancies for the next four years will impress future employers and raise her income potential. That quote was in the passages I posted. Did you read what I posted?
Here's a chunk from the Atlantic article that I did not post:
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In 2003, the United States Department of Education gave about 18,000 Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. The ignorance it revealed is mind-numbing. Fewer than a third of college graduates received a composite score of “proficient”—and about a fifth were at the “basic” or “below basic” level. You could blame the difficulty of the questions—until you read them. Plenty of college graduates couldn’t make sense of a table explaining how an employee’s annual health-insurance costs varied with income and family size, or summarize the work-experience requirements in a job ad, or even use a newspaper schedule to find when a television program ended. Tests of college graduates’ knowledge of history, civics, and science have had similarly dismal results.I’m cynical about students. The vast majority are philistines.Of course, college students aren’t supposed to just download facts; they’re supposed to learn how to think in real life. How do they fare on this count? The most focused study of education’s effect on applied reasoning, conducted by Harvard’s David Perkins in the mid-1980s, assessed students’ oral responses to questions designed to measure informal reasoning, such as “Would a proposed law in Massachusetts requiring a five-cent deposit on bottles and cans significantly reduce litter?” The benefit of college seemed to be zero: Fourth-year students did no better than first-year students.
Other evidence is equally discouraging. One researcher tested Arizona State University students’ ability to “apply statistical and methodological concepts to reasoning about everyday-life events.” In the researcher’s words:
Of the several hundred students tested, many of whom had taken more than six years of laboratory science … and advanced mathematics through calculus, almost none demonstrated even a semblance of acceptable methodological reasoning. Those who believe that college is about learning how to learn should expect students who study science to absorb the scientific method, then habitually use it to analyze the world. This scarcely occurs.
College students do hone some kinds of reasoning that are specific to their major. One ambitious study at the University of Michigan tested natural-science, humanities, and psychology and other social-science majors on verbal reasoning, statistical reasoning, and conditional reasoning during the first semester of their first year. When the same students were retested the second semester of their fourth year, each group had sharply improved in precisely one area. Psychology and other social-science majors had become much better at statistical reasoning. Natural-science and humanities majors had become much better at conditional reasoning—analyzing “if … then” and “if and only if” problems. In the remaining areas, however, gains after three and a half years of college were modest or nonexistent. The takeaway: Psychology students use statistics, so they improve in statistics; chemistry students rarely encounter statistics, so they don’t improve in statistics. If all goes well, students learn what they study and practice.
Actually, that’s optimistic. Educational psychologists have discovered that much of our knowledge is “inert.” Students who excel on exams frequently fail to apply their knowledge to the real world. Take physics. As the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner writes,
Students who receive honor grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested.
theatlantic.com
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That chunk of the article more directly challenges your thinking than the part I did post. Had you read and made an effort to understand it, you would have been fussing at me about it, not about the 5% thing.
As for why I went to college, remember that that occurred a along time ago, back before women's lib. The Feminine Mystique was published when I was a junior in college. I did not expect to ever earn a living. I got a liberal arts degree. I added a minor in secretarial studies so I'd have something to fall back on just in case something happened to my husband and sole support. (In those days the employment options for women were as secretaries, nurses, store clerks, or teachers.) I went to college because I was smart enough to get a collection of scholarships totaling full tuition and I wanted to get out of the confines of my small factory town and learn about the world. And to find a better class of husband. I have no recollection of having learned to think in college. I got by on natural talent. I did some time later develop greater analytical skills but that was a function of my job and my nature, not formal education.
As for signaling, I'm its poster child. I happened upon an intern program that included training and was selected most certainly due to having signaled well. I had a degree in an irrelevant subject and I was quite attractive. That's what got me in. No degree was required for the job. Computer programmer positions were considered "administrative" by the federal government, not "professional" as to career track . At that time, colleges generally did not yet have computer science departments. Computer programmers were either upward-mobility selections or, like me, hired from the outside for training programs based on the appearance of aptitude for the job aka signaling. I did a lot of hiring a bit later on and I know what we looked for and all the tells. (Music majors made good programmers.) To foster a move into management I got a masters degree in that subject. Although I did learn some useful things in the program, getting that degree was almost entirely a matter of recognizing the importance of signaling. In a job that did not require any degree, an advanced one was a mega signal. Just about everything I ever accomplished in my career was due to natural aptitude, curiosity and motivation, not what I learned in a classroom.
As for why he went to college, he tells us indirectly.
...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.... I think that an old-school liberal-arts education at a place covered in ivy may still foster some of what you think of as education. I'm glad I had the opportunity to soak that in. It was wonderful personal development. Not so sure about what universities have have come to be. |
