{"id":10865,"date":"2011-08-27T11:38:25","date_gmt":"2011-08-27T15:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=10865"},"modified":"2011-11-27T13:10:23","modified_gmt":"2011-11-27T17:10:23","slug":"the-value-of-education-may-actually-just-be-a-signalling-mechanism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/08\/27\/the-value-of-education-may-actually-just-be-a-signalling-mechanism\/","title":{"rendered":"The value of education may actually just be a signalling mechanism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/econlog.econlib.org\/archives\/2011\/08\/the_picoeconomi.html\" target=\"_blank\">Bryan Caplan<\/a> looks briefly at the micro (to the person) and macro (to the society) benefits of higher education, but comes up with a more interesting view of the real value of education:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>All this is well and good. But there&#8217;s an even deeper level of education to examine: What students actually study, learn and retain. I think of this as the &#8220;picoeconomic approach&#8221;* because it focuses on details too small for the &#8220;microeconomic approach&#8221; to see. The microeconomic approach tells us how much the market rewards education. But in the end, it doesn&#8217;t tell us why. To discover why education matters, we must descend to the picoeconomic level.<\/p>\n<p>Key example: the main reason I&#8217;m think signaling is big deal has nothing to do with either Micro-Mincerian or Macro-Mincerian estimates of the return to education. The main reason I think signaling is a big deal is that (a) students study a ton of material that almost no job uses; (b) the Transfer of Learning literature shows that learning is highly specific &mdash; you don&#8217;t build general purpose mental muscles by learning Latin; (c) students quickly &mdash; and happily &mdash; forget most of what they learn, anyway. And yet employers amply reward education! The signaling model instantly looks like the best way to explain all the key facts.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>* I know that the term &#8220;picoeconomics&#8221; is already used to describe the study of self-control problems, motivation, and so on. But why not think of self-control problems as one picoeconomic topic, and mine as another? We can treat picoeconomics as a blanket term that covers everything too small for microeconomists to notice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bryan Caplan looks briefly at the micro (to the person) and macro (to the society) benefits of higher education, but comes up with a more interesting view of the real value of education: All this is well and good. But there&#8217;s an even deeper level of education to examine: What students actually study, learn and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,79],"tags":[764],"class_list":["post-10865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-education","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2Pf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10865"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12272,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10865\/revisions\/12272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}