It could be a horror story with no end.
I love this article/podcast, https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-case-for-and-against-education/ for so many reasons.
I have to admit that I kind of like that “the case against education” is on a website started by Will Macaskill, the youngest philosophy professor at Oxford University, ever.
I love that it reminds me of the great story Derek Sivers tells about Kimo Williams (sivers.org/kimo ) who taught him to question going “the standard pace” at college. Because that was for “chumps”.
More than that, I love that it points out that so much of college is about “signalling” than about learning. Otherwise we could all learn stuff for free, rather than pay to get a certificate. Exams would check that you had learned enough to move on to the next stage of learning, not become a badge of honour to carry around with you for the rest of your life.
Which really paints a picture of why colleges get to charge the crazy fees they charge, keeping out not just poor people but also the middle class, or forcing them into a lifetime of “student debt” from which they may never emerge. The charges are about being exclusionary. They’re about keeping people out. Not about the education itself – because that could free.
But maybe more than all of those reasons (except maybe for the Will Macaskill one: I’m a fan-godmother), I think the thing that resonated the most for me is that is why universities and schools don’t care about the relevance of what they teach. Because it’s not about learning, it’s about signalling, the usefulness of the curricula isn’t really considered. It’s all about being clever (or rich) enough to get into a good school, and get good grades, than about having actually learned something useful to you or society.
If the focus shifted, we would have been teaching code in schools for decades. We could teach health properly. We could teach fitness in a way that didn’t make it about bullying weak kids and glorifying the bullies.
And we would have been teaching finance. Nothing complicated, just plain vanilla, basic personal finance. We could all know how money moves around, and how we fit into that system, so we could choose how to maximise our efforts, decide our savings, choose our investments, and become independent of external financial needs, and then choose how we want to make the world a better place.
Instead we have people borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars to do MBAs (or other degrees, but the MBA is the most ironic one), without ever being taught what the real cost of that has been, and how it might hold them back, and has potentially added years to their working life, removed some of their potential to really contribute.
All encouraged by so-called “institutes of learning”.
So, while I love education, and all that it brings, from art to business to civilisation itself (and that is just a, b and c), this is a really timely article, particularly for anyone following a FIREy path to financial independence, that borrowing for college may not be the smartest way to get there, and might just be selling a fairytale fantasy.