What Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Education Means For Your Kid’s School Choices
Last Tuesday, 7 a.m., at my kitchen table with a sticky orange juice stain I hadn’t wiped up yet, my 16-year-old Jax slammed his AP Bio review book shut. A coffee-stained page diagramming chloroplasts peeked out from the spine. “I don’t even want to be a biologist,” he said, tugging his faded Minecraft hoodie over his head. “Why am I memorizing this garbage?” I opened my mouth to give the usual speech about grades and college acceptances, then my husband pushed a dog-eared paperback across the table. It was Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education. He’d just finished it for his work book club. “He says your kid’s right, mostly,” he said.
I read it over the next week, between grading 10th grade English essays and driving Jax to soccer practice. Caplan’s core argument isn’t that school is useless, exactly. It’s that most of what formal education does isn’t actually teach job-relevant skills. It’s “signaling”: you get a degree to prove to employers you can show up on time, follow directions, and slog through boring work you don’t care about. The actual knowledge you pick up along the way is secondary. He says we waste billions of dollars and millions of hours pushing kids into four-year college who will never recoup that time or money, because the degree doesn’t add any value for the work they end up doing.
It hit hard, because I see this dynamic play out in my classroom every week. Last semester, I had a senior named Milo who could rebuild a diesel engine in four hours, but he was one credit short of graduating because he refused to write the five-page literary analysis I required to pass my class. He sat across from me after school one day, scuffed work boots propped on the empty desk next to him, and told me he already had a full apprenticeship at a local truck shop starting the day after graduation. “I’ll make $50k a year starting out,” he said. “Why do I need an essay on To Kill a Mockingbird to get that?” I bent the rules and let him write a one-page reflection instead, but I left that conversation feeling queasy. The system was ready to block his path to a good job just to check a box that didn’t matter for his future. That’s exactly what Caplan is talking about.
Caplan goes too far sometimes, of course. Basic reading, writing, and math matter no matter what job you do – you still need to be able to read a contract or add up a budget for your household or your small business. For fields like medicine, engineering, or law, the degree isn’t just signaling: you actually need the rigorous training to do the work well. But what he gets right that few people talk about is that we’ve turned “four-year college right after high school” into the only acceptable path to success, even when it’s a bad fit for the kid sitting in front of you. My cousin Lila graduated in 2019 with a communications degree and $32,000 in student debt. Now she’s an office manager at a dentist’s office making $42,000 a year. She told me last month she learned everything she needs for the job in her first three months of working there. The degree just got her the first interview.
This isn’t just an abstract argument for economists. It changes how you show up for your kid every day, if you let it. The first concrete shift I’ve made already is ditching the default assumption that Jax has to go to a four-year college right after graduation. When he turns 17 next year, we’re going to sit down with a simple spreadsheet. We’ll add up the full cost of any degree he’s interested in – that means tuition, fees, books, and the four years of wages he’d give up by going to school full time instead of working or doing an apprenticeship. Then we’ll compare that total to the average starting salary for that field. If the total debt is more than that first year’s salary, we’ll start looking at cheaper, shorter paths.
Second, if your kid is interested in a trade, tech, or freelance work, help them test it out for real before you commit to any path. Don’t just take their word for it that they like fixing cars or editing videos. Help them line up a week of shadowing or a part-time weekend job to see what the actual daily work is like. That’s way cheaper and more useful than spending two years in college figuring out you hate the field anyway. Third, don’t force your kid to give up a money-making side hustle just to pad their college transcript with extra AP classes or useless extracurriculars. Jax makes about $200 a month modding gaming PCs for people online, and if he decided next year that he wanted to grow that business instead of going to college full time, I wouldn’t make him quit to take AP Physics just to look better to admissions officers.
Last night, we sat on the porch after dinner and talked about the book. Jax still thinks he wants to do computer science, so a four-year degree might end up making sense for him. But we also talked about starting at the local community college for two years, transferring later, and keeping his modding business going no matter what path he picks. Caplan’s book didn’t give us a clear, neat answer for our family. It just made us stop and think before we send Jax down the same default path everyone else takes. There’s still a lot we don’t know, and we’ll probably get some of it wrong. But it feels better than just going through the motions.
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