[IIAOPSW]

Your assessment that the claim is "post-high-school education doesn't promote future earnings" shows that you have wholly not understood (and perhaps not even tried to understand) what Caplan has actually claimed. With such a foundational mischaracterization, your critique of the appropriateness of his data, assumptions and calculations is without merit. If you don't feel like reading the book, you can read the slide show linked in the blog. You would only need to go as far as page 1 to see he was not disputing future earnings potential. Here's the money quote:

"Key feature of the signaling model: At the margin, signaling raises pay but not productivity, so social return<selfish (“private”) return.

Policy implication: Even selfishly lucrative education may be socially wasteful rent-seeking.

If ignoring signaling is sole flaw in existing return to education literature, true social return roughly equals mainstream social return*(1-signaling share)"

Really he's just saying something we all kind of know. Diploma's are more often than not a ticket to ride in a certain class of society, not an education technology that increases productivity. So why is there government support and subsidy for something that has private, but not much public benefit?

http://www.bcaplan.com/returns.pdf

[librarianscott]

Hacker News is more about having a discussion of, usually, tangentially topics to the link someone has posted. But if you wish to discuss some of Caplan's theories such as "“Conventional education mostly helps students by raising their status,” let's analyze that... (1) the post-secondary education in various countries differs a lot, (2) there are countries where "status" means a full bureaucracy class, other countries where it means ability to get a license such as a veterinary license, other countries where status means certain religious or tribal affiliations, or countries like the U.S. where status means graduating from certain colleges but not others (3) most studies conclude that education increases the macroeconomic productivity of an economy whether or not it raises individual statuses, (4) there are actually advantages to government raising the statuses of more individuals in some countries (such as having a stable middle class that isn't reactionary to politicians), etc.

But, if you read my earlier point, arguing these things through a book and spreadsheets is what think-tanks do, not what scientists do.