What Parents Need To Know About Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Education
It’s 8:30 on a Tuesday, crumbs of pepperoni pizza scattered across our kitchen table, my 17-year-old Lila has just crumpled her third draft of a Common App essay and thrown it in the general direction of the trash can. It hit the side and landed behind the toaster, and no one’s bothered to pick it up. My 24-year-old cousin Jake is crashing on our couch while he looks for full-time work, fresh out of a four-year poli sci program with $78,000 in student loans, and he slides his phone across the sticky table. “You ever heard of this guy Bryan Caplan?” he says. “His book says the whole system is a scam. I’m starting to think he’s right.”
I downloaded the sample that night after everyone went to bed, and ended up reading the whole thing over the weekend while Lila was at a cross country invitational. Caplan’s core argument is straightforward: almost all formal education isn’t about teaching useful, job-relevant skills. It’s about signaling. You go to class, turn in assignments on time, get good grades, earn a degree, all to prove to employers that you’re responsible, can follow directions, and will show up when you’re supposed to. Everything else, he says, is just filler most people forget within a year of graduating. He argues we waste trillions of dollars and millions of hours pushing people through an education system that doesn’t help most of them, and many would be better off skipping or cutting their time short.
As a former high school teacher of 12 years, I couldn’t ignore how much of that rang true. I thought of Marcus, a sophomore in my AP English class who could take apart and rebuild an engine faster than any mechanic in our town. He fixed my beat-up 2002 Civic for me after school one day when it died in the parking lot, and wouldn’t take any money for the work. He told me straight up he didn’t want to go to college; he wanted to open his own repair shop. But his parents insisted he take all the advanced classes and apply to state school anyway, because that’s what you do. He went, dropped out after 18 months, and opened his shop three years later. Last I checked, he makes almost twice what the average high school teacher in our district earns, and works fewer hours. Caplan would point to Marcus as proof the system wastes years of time and thousands of dollars on people who don’t need a traditional degree to build a good life. That default path – high school to four-year college to office job – is so ingrained most parents don’t even stop to question it, no matter what their kid actually wants.
But Caplan’s argument misses a lot that matters to parents and kids, too. I thought of Lila last year, when she signed up for an after-school poetry workshop that didn’t count for AP credit, didn’t move the needle much on her college applications, and took time away from studying for AP Biology – a test she didn’t even need for the career she’s interested in. She came home every week chattering about the poems they read, started writing her own late at night after I thought she’d gone to bed, and that class pushed her to stop treating writing like a hidden hobby and start thinking of it as something she could build a career around. That’s not signaling, that’s not a job skill you can pick up from an apprenticeship straight out of high school, but it changed the course of what she wants out of life. Caplan also brushes past how much college opens doors for people who don’t already have professional connections. Jake is first-gen; his parents worked blue-collar jobs their whole lives and didn’t know anyone who could hand him a full-time position right out of high school. His problem wasn’t going to college – it was that no one walked through different options with him before he picked a major. He picked political science because it sounded impressive, not because he wanted to work in politics or policy.
Caplan didn’t give me a new rule for raising my kid, but he did shake me out of the default mindset I grew up with, where a four-year college right after high school is the only acceptable outcome at any cost. I’ve made a few small, concrete changes that work for our family, that any parent can try. First, I stopped nagging Lila about grades that don’t matter. She hates structured PE, she’s a runner so she’s already in great shape, she just can’t stand her teacher’s arbitrary rules. She’s got a B, and I used to badger her to bring it up to an A. Now I don’t. It doesn’t impact the writing programs she’s looking at, it doesn’t change anything for her future, so what’s the point? Second, we’re testing her interests before we pay for tuition. She wants to write fiction and work in publishing, so she reached out to our local small press, got a part-time internship doing social media and manuscript editing for $15 an hour, 10 hours a week. She gets to see what working in the industry actually feels like, and she’s building a portfolio of her own writing at the same time. If she decides after a year she hates it, we haven’t wasted $20,000 in tuition on a writing major. Third, we’re looking at options outside the default four-year track. She’s applying to our local community college’s two-year general studies program, which is $150 a credit compared to $1,200 a credit at the nearby state university. She can keep working at the press while she goes, build her portfolio, and transfer after two years if she still wants a four-year degree. We ran the numbers: that cuts her potential student loan debt by at least two-thirds, even if she does transfer.
Last week, we drove past Marcus’s auto shop on the way to get groceries, and Lila pointed it out. “He did good for himself, didn’t he?” she said. I agreed. I don’t think Bryan Caplan has all the answers. I still think education does a lot of good that he doesn’t acknowledge. But he’s right that we’ve been treating the same old path like it’s the only right one for everyone, even when it leaves people like Jake with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and no clear way forward, and people like Marcus sitting through years of classes they don’t need. Right now, Lila is still finishing her applications to four-year programs, just to keep her options open. But she’s also got a plan that fits what she wants, not what everyone says she should want. We’ll see how it goes. There’s no perfect answer, but at least we’re asking the right question now.
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