[tokyodude]

Note: I am not agreeing nor disagreeing with the article. I'm only clarifying what it's trying to say

The article is about the fact that school does not show that "developer ... is signaling that he is reliable and comes to work every day"

The whole point of the article is there is zero correlation between people who've graduated from college and people who haven't in term of how well they do on the job.

It sounds counter intuitive. There's like 3 situations

1. College trains you more than non-college

2. College doesn't train you but shows you're willing to stick things out more than people who didn't go

3. College does nothing what-so-ever (no difference in job performance from hiring people who did or didn't go to college)

The author of the article is claiming 100 years of research has shown it's #3. People will let you in the door because you have the paper (diploma) but they are fooling themselves that that paper has any meaning relative to hiring people without that paper

Here's another interview with the same author

http://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-edu...

again, I am not agreeing nor disagreeing with the article. I'm only clarifying what it's trying to say

Let me add though, the author is claiming this is true in aggregate. Not for your personal anecdote.

[barry-cotter]

> The whole point of the article is there is zero correlation between people who've graduated from college and people who haven't in term of how well they do on the job.

... among the population who have been hired to do the job. This is conditioning on the collider. The people without a degree who got in are a highly selected sample compared to all people without degrees. Anyone who used this to argue that a degree wasn’t a strong useful signal Wouk be making the same mistake as those trying to get rid of the GRE in graduate admissions because in the population admitted the GRE doesn’t predict anything. If it did that would show under or overweighting ofbthe signal it sends. Zero correlation shows it has been given appropriate weight.

[hopler]

> Anyone who used this to argue that a degree wasn’t a strong useful signal

Reread the title of the article.

The question is whether an individual would benefit from college even if everyone's college was enrollment/graduation status was kept secret from everyone, even classmates.

[mcguire]

The same question would apply to pre-college education.

[abecedarius]

> The whole point of the article is there is zero correlation between people who've graduated from college and people who haven't in term of how well they do on the job.

This is not what the article says. It's saying employers hire graduates because they're better employees, but college mostly didn't make them better. This is closer to your option 2. (We are talking about the OP, the Caplan editorial, right?)

Caplan is saying college is mostly an expensive arms race. It has to be expensive (in students' time and attrition through boringness/difficulty, if nothing else) to be an effective signal. Subsidies in recent decades have made it even more expensive.