[soberhoff]

As somebody who spent many years in education (as a student and about 1 year as a teacher) I find Caplan's case deeply convincing.

Caplan actually goes through reams of evidence. As an extreme example, in 2008-9 there were 34000 new history graduates in the US. But there are only 3500 historians working in the whole country.

Now, are you trying to argue that history can actually measurably improve productivity in other fields, such as accounting, and it's just the curse of knowledge that prevents us from seeing this?

Also, incompetent homeschooling parents and Scientology schools are hardly the only alternatives to public schooling. One option that Caplan advocates strongly is vocational training. Instead of giving them history classes, let teenagers who chose to do so become apprentice carpenters, there are 900000 of those.

[Hermitian909]

You're straw-manning here, Caplan makes a broad argument against public education at the primary, secondary, and post-secondary levels, I said I disagree with his large scale conclusion and you're asking me to defend the number of history degrees in the US.

The US public school system is in need of wide reforms at all levels, I'm not going to defend it piecemeal because there are many pieces that are not defensible. None of that makes Caplan right though.

[soberhoff]

What are we even arguing over? Is it just over the exact percentage of signaling in education's payoff?

[Hermitian909]

I thought we were arguing over two things:

How much value is created through publicly funded education beyond basic literacy and numeracy, which Caplan cedes.

Whether Caplan's proposed changes to the education system are good ones.

[soberhoff]

Regarding the first point, Caplan personally estimates that about 80% of education is signalling and that 30% is the lowest figure one can plausibly maintain.

As for the second point, I wouldn't bet my life on it. But I think the case is strong enough that experimental measures in that direction are warranted.