What Is Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Education, And What It Means For Parents
Last month, I sat at my kitchen table folding mismatched soccer socks, drinking coffee that had gone cold an hour earlier, after my 16-year-old Jax’s fall parent-teacher conference. The note from his counselor was crumpled beside my plate: “Strong work ethic, would benefit from applying to more four-year programs.” A friend of mine, who knows Jax has been talking about skipping a four-year degree to work full-time in auto body, texted me a link to Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education an hour earlier. She said, “You should read this. It’ll make you stop panicking.” When Jax trundled in an hour later, work boots caked in motor oil from his after-school shift at the local body shop, he glanced at my screen and said, “Finally, a guy who gets it. Why do I need to pay $40k a year to learn stuff I’ll never use?”
I read the book over two weeks, during naptime for my younger daughter, and it hit closer to home than I expected. Caplan’s core argument is that most formal education isn’t actually about building job skills. It’s about signaling: a degree tells employers you can show up on time, follow rules, and finish what you start. Those are valuable traits, but you don’t need four years of college to prove you have them. Caplan argues that billions of dollars and millions of hours are wasted on education that doesn’t actually improve people’s work, just gives them a paper to unlock higher pay.
I thought about my own four-year business degree while I read. The only thing I use for my remote admin job is the 10-week office internship I did the summer after junior year. I haven’t referenced macroeconomics or 19th century British literature once in 12 years of working. I paid $25k for that degree, and most of it was just jumping through hoops to get the paper. Caplan wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t quietly thought myself, just never said out loud.
I brought the book up to Mike, the owner of the body shop where Jax works, when I picked Jax up last Saturday. He laughed and said Caplan is half right. “I had two kids start here three years ago,” he said. “One had a two-year auto tech degree from the community college, the other got his GED after dropping out for a bit, just showed up every day asking for work. The GED kid is twice as fast at matching paint and fixing dents, and he’s better with customers. But when we bill insurance companies, they pay out 15% more per job for work done by a certified tech with a degree. So the kid with the degree makes more an hour, even though he’s worse at the actual work. That’s what you’re talking about, right? The paper is the point.” That’s exactly the signaling Caplan describes.
But that doesn’t mean Caplan is right about everything. He argues for cutting public education spending, which I can’t get behind. For kids who don’t know what they want yet, high school and even college is a safe place to figure it out. My niece didn’t figure out she wanted to be a nurse until she was 21, and if she’d dropped out at 18 to work a dead-end job, she might never have gotten there. The problem isn’t education itself—it’s that we treat one path, four-year college right after high school, as the only acceptable path for every kid. That’s the part of Caplan’s argument that actually matters for parents like me, and it’s changed how I handle day-to-day decisions with Jax.
I’ve made three small, concrete changes that have cut down on stress and helped Jax feel in control of his own future. First, when Jax complains about a required class he doesn’t care about (looking at you, AP Psychology), I don’t give him the tired speech about how “all education is valuable.” Instead, we sit down and block 45 minutes every weeknight to get his assignments done. I tell him it’s just a hoop to jump through to get his high school diploma, which he needs right now, and that it’s okay if he doesn’t love it. It doesn’t have to be a higher priority than the auto body work he’s actually excited about. That simple shift has cut down on our homework fights by 90%.
Second, after reading the book, I confirmed the split we made to our education savings a year back was the right call. Half the money is tagged for any degree or certification he wants, any time in his life. The other half is untagged—he can use it for tools, a down payment on a house, a business startup, whatever he wants. A lot of parents I know save all their education money for tuition, and that puts unspoken pressure on kids to go to college just to use the savings, even if they don’t want to go. It takes 10 minutes to split a savings account at most banks, and it takes a lot of pressure off the whole process.
Third, I tell any parent who asks that if their kid says they don’t want college right after high school, make them do a 6-month trial of the life they want before they decide. Jax started working after school a year ago, so we already knew he likes the work, he’s reliable, and his boss wants him to stay. If your kid says they want to be a freelance graphic designer, have them take on 6 small projects for friends and family in three months, build a website, and see if they can actually make any money before they skip school. It’s easy to romanticize skipping traditional school, but a short trial run shows you if it’s actually something they’ll stick with, not just a phase of hating homework.
I still worry some days. I grew up believing a four-year degree was the only way to have job security, and that old voice in my head still pipes up sometimes, asking if I’m messing Jax up. Right now, Jax plans to get his two-year auto tech certification part-time at the local community college while working full-time at the shop. It’ll cost less than $3,000 total, he’ll get the pay bump the certification guarantees, and he won’t take on any debt. He picked up his first side job last week, fixed a fender for a neighbor, and made $800 in three days.
Caplan’s book isn’t a call to pull your kid out of school tomorrow. It’s a reminder that we don’t have to follow the script that’s been handed to us just because it’s what everyone does. I don’t know what Jax’s life will look like in 10 years. He might decide he wants to go back to school for engineering, or he might open his own body shop. Right now, he’s happy, he’s working hard, and he’s not going into debt for a degree he doesn’t need. That’s enough for me.
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