Bryan Caplan | The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

Recorded January 25, 2018
Dubbed the “anti-Tiger Mom,” contrarian economist Bryan Caplan is the author of the “wickedly subversive” (Wall Street Journal) parenting manifesto Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, which argues that parenting has needlessly been turned into a tedious chore; and The Myth of the Rational Voter, which questions fundamental assumptions about why Americans vote as they do. In his latest book, Caplan argues that we need to stop wasting public money on education, explains why graduate degrees are little more than conformity signals, and advocates for major policy changes at levels of the academy. Read Caplan's essay The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone in the current issue of The Atlantic.

[@jaehwan123]

Outside of academia, few people use specialized college skills on the job. This includes engineering, where most engineers change their specialty when they get hired. Most employers have to train their workers. The only area of employment where people use specialized college skills is academia, which is a tiny, tiny portion of the overall job market.

[@marcmeinzer8859]

Thanks to Dr. Caplan for helping me crystallize my thinking vis a vis public education. Owing to the child labor laws something had to be found for adolescents to do and what they came up with was senseless busy work education. This ruinously expensive travesty and burden on the taxpayers needs to be brought to an end at least in terms of mandatory secondary school. Truth in advertising demands that instead we admit that it is really daycare. If kids were honestly permitted to recreate creatively the incessant rebelliousness would come to a swift conclusion in all but the most pathological cases. Leave high school for the nerds who would actually be capable of taking it seriously.

[@thelaw3536]

Good as always

[@brackto8176]

"Once [online education] becomes very common, then there's safety in numbers..." Well it's 2022 and boy have I got some news for you.

[@computer-training-for-seniors]

Who wants to work for someone else? Over 70% of millionaires are self employed.

[@marcmeinzer8859]

For that matter who even wants to work? What people are really thinking when they go to college to “learn” all that useless crap is that they are qualifying to get a sinecure where they can get paid to just hang out at work without doing any actual labor such as digging graves with a backhoe like a cemetery maintenance man.

[@kyleolson9636]

Today likely less than a third of millionaires are self-employed. Your statistic was (almost) true when the book Millionaire Next Door was written, but that was nearly 30 years ago. Now most millionaires obtained most of their wealth from retirement savings accounts funded by wages earned as an employee.