Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Education: What It Actually Means For Your Kid
Last month, I was wiping crumbs off the kitchen table after dinner while my 17-year-old son Jake folded soccer cleats and scrolled TikTok. He paused, held the phone out to me, and said “Mom, listen to this guy.” The clip was Bryan Caplan, economist and author of The Case Against Education, talking about how most of what we learn in high school and college is forgotten within months of graduation, and the whole system is just one big hoop to jump through for a job stamp. Jake shrugged. “You told me I forgot mitosis two weeks after my AP Bio exam. He’s not wrong.”
I laughed it off at first, but the thought stuck with me. I’d heard Caplan’s name floating around education circles for years, so I ordered a used copy off Amazon for $5, and read it over a rainy weekend while Jake was out of town for a tournament. His core argument isn’t that school is entirely useless, it’s that it’s far less about teaching useful skills and far more about “signaling.” A college degree doesn’t prove you know how to do a specific job, it proves you can show up on time, follow instructions, tolerate boring tasks, and don’t quit when things get tedious. Employers use that degree stamp to sort applicants quickly, not because of any specific content you learned in class. That’s why people with degrees earn so much more than people without, even if the degree content has nothing to do with the job they end up in.
I taught 10th grade English for six years before I had kids, so I’ve seen this play out in real time. I remember a student named Marcus, who’d show up to class with grease under his nails from working on his truck before school. He could rebuild an engine by 16, but he couldn’t be bothered to memorize literary devices or write a five-paragraph essay on To Kill a Mockingbird. He failed my class twice, dropped out before graduation, and I ran into him at the grocery store last year. He owns his own mechanic shop, has three employees, makes more than I ever did teaching, and just bought a house for his wife and two kids. That’s exactly the waste Caplan talks about: our system wrote Marcus off because he couldn’t jump through academic hoops, even though he had a far more valuable, in-demand skill than most of the kids who graduated top of our class.
I agree with more of Caplan’s argument than I expected to, but it’s not all black and white. I loved my college literature classes, I still think about the books I read there, even though I don’t use that content in my daily life. It mattered to me, even if it didn’t get me a better job. And I know plenty of people who went to college for nursing or engineering, who use every bit of what they learned every day. The problem isn’t education itself, it’s that we force every kid down the same four-year-college path, no matter what their interests or skills are, just because that’s what we’re supposed to do.
The real question for parents isn’t whether Caplan is right or wrong, it’s what we do with this information right now, when the system is still set up to value that degree stamp. I’ve made three small, concrete changes with Jake that don’t require upending our whole life, and they’ve made a big difference.
First, we audit every class and activity at the start of each year, and ask one simple question: Is this for Jake, or is this just to look good for college? Last year, his counselor suggested he add AP French to his schedule to “show rigor” on his application. Jake’s never cared about learning French, he already knows what he likes: coding. So we dropped AP French, kept AP Comp Sci A, and he now has an extra period a day to work on personal coding projects. That took 10 minutes to change with the school office, and it cut his daily stress in half.
Second, we started building a portfolio of real work when he was 16, no fancy resources needed. He started building small websites for local coffee shops and dog walkers for $200 a pop, and we keep every one linked to a free public portfolio. If he applies for a coding job after college, he doesn’t just have a degree to show an employer — he has proof he can actually do the work. That’s way more powerful than any transcript. Any kid can do this, no matter what they like: if they bake, take photos of cakes they’ve made and keep a list of happy clients. If they work on cars, get a few testimonials from people you’ve done work for. It’s low effort, and it turns the signaling game Caplan talks about on its head.
Third, we stopped treating a four-year college degree as the only successful end goal. If Jake decided tomorrow he wanted to do an apprenticeship with a local electrician instead of going to college, I’d be fine with that. Apprentices get paid while they learn, leave with no debt, and most start out making more than kids with four-year liberal arts degrees. I grew up thinking college was the only path to a good life, but that’s just not true anymore for most kids.
A week ago, Jake told me he still wants to go to college for computer science, which makes sense for him. We’re still navigating how to do it without taking on a ton of unnecessary debt, and we don’t know if it’ll work out exactly how we plan. Caplan’s book didn’t make me anti-education, it made me anti the pointless hoops. We’ve cut out all the stuff that didn’t matter, and Jake has more time to do the stuff that does. I don’t have all the answers, but that feels like enough for right now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Education: What It Actually Means For Your Kid