If you read his book, like it was already suggested to you a couple of times, you'd know what he says about "care-free student life". This way, you would be able to address his actual positions, instead of arguing against a version of Caplan you've conjured in your mind, based on a single blog post and a few HN comments.
> [S]chool inculcates many attitudes that, regardless of their moral worth, impede on-the-job success. If you’re preparing kids for their adult roles, a year of work experience instills more suitable discipline and socialization than a year of school.
> The imperfect overlap between the school ethic and the work ethic is especially blatant in modern American colleges. Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying.98 Since the early 1960s, effort collapsed across the board. “Full-time” college students average 27 hours of academic work per week—and only 14 hours of studying. (...)
> What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa frostily remark in their Academically Adrift:
>> If we presume that students are sleeping eight hours a night, which is a generous assumption given their tardiness and at times disheveled appearance in early morning classes, that leaves 85 hours a week for other activities. . . . What is this additional time spent on? It seems to be spent mostly on socializing and recreation.
> A week in modern college is a great way to teach students that life is a picnic:
>> A recent study of University of California undergraduates reported that while students spent thirteen hours a week studying, they also spent twelve hours socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies, and three hours on other forms of entertainment.
> Instead of making students conform and submit, college showers students with acceptance. This doesn’t merely fail to prepare students for their future roles; it actively unprepares them. College raises students’ expectations to unrealistic heights, leaving future employers the chore of dragging graduates back down to earth.
His book discusses your other points too, I strongly recommend it.
> > What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression.
If you think this is a bad thing, you are well and truly lost.
> > What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression.
> If you think this is a bad thing, you are well and truly lost.
Well, you were claiming that the book/study did not take this into account so GP posted evidence that the book/study does indeed address your concerns.
Whether it is a bad thing or not is irrelevant to the concern you expressed, to wit - that the socialisation and play is not addressed by the study.
>> Well, you were claiming that the book/study did not take this into account
> No, I did not.
So how exactly is the reader supposed to interpret this statement of yours:
> So what about the partying, making friends for life, and learning to be an adult?
>
> What about care-free student life as a carrot to incentivise young adults to go into careers that might not be good for them personally, but good for society?
When someone looks at a study and says "What about $FOO", they generally mean "Why is $FOO not addressed?", and not "Your conclusions about $FOO are wrong".
> The imperfect overlap between the school ethic and the work ethic is especially blatant in modern American colleges. Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying.98 Since the early 1960s, effort collapsed across the board. “Full-time” college students average 27 hours of academic work per week—and only 14 hours of studying. (...)
? So your sentence does not make logical sense to me? Did you mean before the 1960s people would spend 40h _plus_ studying. Because the way you write it is that fifty years ago college was 40h (in-class and studying), and now it is 27h in class + 14h studying (41h) so nothing changed.
I believe the author meant "old.class + old.study = 40" vs "new.class + new.study = 27" (where new.study = 14). It took me a re-read to come to that conclusion.
Ah ok, I see now how this can be read that way. Anyway I question the math. Fulltime enrolment is 15 credits which typically is considered 45h of work a week (1h in-class + 2h studying). What we also shouldn't forget is that on top of that students typically have a job as well.
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.
There appears to be a bunch of people defending Caplan in this discussion, but most of that defence boils down to "read the entire book!"
No, I'm not going to do that. And if you've read the entire book, and think I'm an idiot at this point, you are free to say so and disengage from this discussion.
But the reason I'm so dismissive of his work is that the conclusion is ridiculous and the premise inherently flawed because education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.
And the reason I'm dismissive of the defenders is that no-one seems to be able to come up with a succinct rebuttal to the criticisms fielded by me and others in this discussion other than "read the entire book!"
I think it's fair to say it's easy to over focus on the quantifiable, but arguably we also fail on even qualifying what exactly we concretely are trying to do. Like, what's the real purpose of school? Does it actually serve the goals that we often talk about - is it readying students to be good, engaged citizens, or particularly good workers? Of course, a simple numeric score would just be the fraction of the goals achieved / every goal, and that'd certainly capture something important about the education system.
> education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.
Any attempt at modeling any phenomena will fail to capture some aspect of that phenomena. So are you suggesting that all attempts at modeling are inherently flawed and must lead to ridiculous conclusions?
- To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph--
The person you were arguing with is saying that it's a compelling reason to not use the model because, I quote, the conclusions of the model are "batshit insane".
