No one cared about my spreadsheets

I also don't align with the author ideologically, but I have to protest somewhat. Assuming that the inputs and the model are sound (which I'm not saying they are, going by some other commenters' judgements), the spreadsheets tell us something regardless of whether we subscribe to making policy decisions with pure monetary terms ROI. Mainly that we need a damn good non-monetary arguments to make young people learn something (here I'm thinking of oversaturating the school programs in the country where I reside) and to justify existence of places that say "higher education" and usually charge money but they give their students not much.

I am fully in the "you are a citizen before a homo economicus" camp, but don't actually want to make this an object level discussion about education. Two things:

- A social assertion can be sound and consistent with facts while missing the bigger picture. This means people should tackle it and learn from it, at least on the intellectual discussion level, and not try to bury it.

- Dismissing attempts to get things like formal logic and statistics into politics because it's all "ideologically motivated" is nihilist. Where the methods are sound and applied honestly, they can improve discourse (as a more disciplined kind of argumentation), unless you think you are a genius that perfectly knows how to improve society thanks to casual thinking and social proof.

To be fair, these attempts usually are ruined by ideology, but this is because the attempters ultimately choose ideology and are willing to compromise discipline. To go way back, see the "Specimen demonstrationis politicarum" by the great philosopher G.W. Leibniz, where he promises to mathematically solve the current election of the king of Poland and arrives at the conclusion predictable from knowing who was paying him.

Applying results from social sciences has the problem of weighing costs and benefits (policy X helps with A but hurts B). But how much 'A' do you need to get to outweigh the loss in 'B'?

Business decisions are far simpler: both sides of a decision can be analytically boiled down to the same units (dollars/cents) and compared (more money = better than).

>Isn't the real problem the economisation of education? The desire to express the value of education in monetary terms is really only useful for those running education businesses, like e.g. many of today's universities in the US ans UK.

The monetary value itself is useful to everybody who makes a decision. A student at least invests their own time into that education. Shouldn't they know how valuable that education is to decide if it's worth their time?

The problem is not the evaluation. Students seek graduation instead of education because they need access to that social network of alumni. A monetary value makes that demand visible.

I'm not sure I agree, I think school does an excellent job at instilling subservience/deference to authority that a year of on the job training, while effective, cannot quite replicate. What's learnt easily is often forgotten easiy, and I think that applies to the levels of compliance we need for the modern workforce.

>> I was considering reading the book to see what the calculations are and how they refute those correlations.

> He talks about this stuff too, for example, as education is correlated with health, he also estimates health benefits in his return to education calculations.

> The problem with many correlations that you mention is that they are, indeed, just correlation. There is scant evidence on there being casual relationship, or, for that matter, the direction of causality (eg., couldn’t it be that more prosperity allows people to consume more formal education, rather than formal education bringing about prosperity?).

Actually there is plenty of evidence that there is a causal relationship, again Rosling is a good resource. There are many countries who moved out of poverty by investing heavily in education, Sweden (where Rosling was from is one of them). I think when there is such a significant correlation if you want to dismiss it you need to bring some pretty good arguments.

>> Now from what you're saying, he actually wrote a book with a click-bait title and which is about something very different from what the title implies (I guess "on the financial return of investment of a college education" would not have gotten the attention he wanted). And now he is complaining that education researchers are not engaging?

>Financial return to education is just one chapter of his book. The book is actually really detailed, and covers multitude of aspects. In fact, in the very blog post you are commenting under, Caplan in explicitly says:

> Some critics called me a philistine: “Education isn’t about making money; it’s about becoming a whole person.” Never mind that I wrote a whole chapter against this misinterpretation.

But that part wasn't my point, my point was is it good for society.

> Of course, nobody expects you to actually have read his book before you can express an opinion about topics it concerns, but maybe, before accusing him of clickbait and stirring artificial controversy, or his alleged bitterness that ed researchers are not engaging (he’s not even saying that, by the way), at least read the article you’re commenting under.

Hold up, I've simply based my assessment of what you said:

> The vast majority of post-secondary students say they attend post-secondary education in order to increase their future earnings, so Caplan calculates the financial impact of various degrees, and then figures out how much is attributable to the various factors.

Now you're saying that this isn't the case and accuse me about jumping to conclusions. I actually am interested in the book, now that you said it is not just about personal ROI.