Going to College Is Selfish

Let’s stop pretending education is a public good.

- Bryan Caplan

If you've always been a strong student, spending your time and money on education pays well. The evidence is overwhelming. Even after scrupulously correcting for ability bias—the brains, discipline, and other advantages you’d possess with or without school—formal education provides a big career boost. At an individual level, investing in your own education often compares favorably to not just corporate bonds, but long-run stock market returns.

Since individuals’ investment in their own education is personally rewarding, you might infer that government investment in society’s education would be socially rewarding. But this is a classic “fallacy of composition.” If one person stands up at a concert, he sees better; it does not follow that if everyone stands up at a concert, everyone sees better. The same goes for education. Yes, schooling is selfishly lucrative—at least for strong students. On a societal level, however, it is shockingly wasteful for students weak and strong. Federal, state, and local government spends far too much money educating Americans.

The conventional case for government subsidies assumes that all of education’s career gains come from building what economists call “human capital.” A worker gets more education; his productivity and income go up. A nation gets more education; its productivity and income go up. If human capital is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, education is a path to individual and national prosperity: Education makes the pie bigger, so every worker can enjoy a bigger slice.

Unfortunately, human capital is far from the whole story. Most of the personal benefits of education arise not from improving on-the-job productivity, but from convincing employers that your on-the-job productivity is already good. Economists call this “signaling.”