We don’t need no education
In a recent opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, “For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time,” Charles Murray writes:
Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.
The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.
Charles Murray is on the right track when he draws attention to the poor value of most college degrees for predicting performance in the work place. His solution is questionable, however. Certification can become just as meaningless as BA degrees if the prevailing egalitarian mindset in society persists. Furthermore, as a libertarian, Murray must be aware of the artificial barriers certification can raise to competition. One only needs to look at the requirements to obtain Certified Financial Planner (CFP) certification to realize how certification can create formidable obstacles for entering a field of business.
Although there is a place for certification for certain professions, more important than substituting certification for college degrees is to create better mechanisms to recognize and differentiate between the ability to acquire, process, and apply skills and knowledge versus sterile and unimaginative testing of textbook knowledge.
As the economist Bryan Caplan points out, “There’s simply far too much education going on.” Hopefully his upcoming book, tentatively titled “The Case Against Education: A Professional Student Explains Why Our Education System is a Big Waste of Time and Money”, will bring more common sense to this debate.
