6 Tips When Deciding Whether to Finish College

From the Praxis Blog

A lot of bright young people are unhappy in college.  They hate wasting money.  They hate wasting time.  They hate the fact that what they’re getting in return is of so little value in preparing them for career and life.

Many of these young people are resigned to push themselves through that one final semester, or year, or two years.  Sure, it sucks.  But they’ve come so far, it seems the sensible thing is to soldier through the drudgery and finish before pursuing things they are really passionate about.  At least then they’ll walk away with something, right?

Not so fast.

Here are six things to consider if you don’t love college but think you need to finish anyway.

1. Don’t fall for the sunk cost fallacy.  It’s gone.  It can never be recovered.  You will never get back the money or time you’ve put in.

This fallacy plagues everyone from investors to gamblers to your friend who makes you wait in an hour long line to see a mediocre movie because, “We’ve already waited half an hour and I don’t want that to be for nothing!”

I hate to break it to your friend, but it was for nothing.  Past expenditures that can’t be recovered shouldn’t factor in to decisions about the present and future.  It doesn’t matter that you sunk three and a half years and 50 grand into college.  What matters is whether the next six months and ten grand is better spent on college than all other alternatives.  Remove yourself from your prior experience.  If you had never spent any time or money on college and someone offered to put you through lectures for a year if you paid upwards of five figures, would that be your ideal way to spend those resources?  If not, don’t.

Quitting doesn’t make it all for nothing, it makes it all for whatever it is you’ve gained up to this point. If that wasn’t worth it, why would the next semester or year be?  Looking only ahead and not behind, what gets you closer to the kind of experiences and life you will enjoy?

2. Don’t see college as a single, unified product.  College comes as a bundle of goods; knowledge, a social experience, parties, football games, a signal that you’re a normal person, a degree, etc.  Unbundle it.

What parts do you really value?  If it’s knowledge gained from good lectures and discussions, ask yourself if that component can be had better or cheaper elsewhere.  If it’s the social experience, ask them same.  Do you really need four years and six figures to have a good time and meet new friends?  Can football games only be enjoyed if you have student loans?  Is a degree really the most effective and direct route to a career you love?

Consider the individual units of time, money, and energy you put in and get out.  Perhaps it was valuable for the first few semesters before you really knew yourself.  Rather than assuming you have to either take the whole bundle or leave it, take those valuable units, be thankful for them, and when the value ceases, move on to the next best use of the next unit of time, money, and passion.  Economists call this thinking at the margin.  I call it good sense.

3. Don’t let your past control your future. So you once thought your dream was to be a doctor, argue before the Supreme Court, or walk down the aisle in a cap and gown with an MBA.  Now that you’re in the thick of it, it doesn’t move you.  It bores you.  It tires you.  You don’t see the point in all the monotony.  But you’ve always been known as the gal who’s heart was set on that path.  To change course would make everyone think something was terribly wrong. So what.

It’s hard to be really honest with yourself about what makes you come alive.  It’s painful too, as what you wish you were and what you used to be pass away.  The only thing worse is living your present the way your past self wanted, rather than the way your present self needs.  It sucks to be a slave to anything.  Being a slave to your past personality is one of the worst forms.  Break the chains and do what gets you going today.

4. Don’t assume staying the course is a virtue. If you’re being punked by Ashton Kutcher, it’s best to figure it out and quit whatever embarrassing thing you’re doing.  Persistence is a great virtue; unless you’re persisting to drive in the wrong direction, take the wrong medicine, or cut the wrong sequence of wires while defusing a bomb.

Recognizing a fools errand takes insight.  Dropping out for something better takes courage.  If it ain’t right, don’t keep at it.

5. Don’t be a slave to your resume. It’s not that important anyway.

Sure, a college degree it still carries some psychological weight, but not much in a stack of resumes.  Titles, degrees, letters after your name and other accolades seem very important when you’re young and inexperienced in the professional world.  It’s because you have no other metric for success.  The education you’ve experienced for most of your life is all about gold stars and letter grades and honor rolls and GPA.  The market is nothing like that.  It cares about value.  Do you have it?  Can you prove it?

Resumes matter on occasion, but really only after you’ve got a foot in the door through your network, experience, and reputation as a hard worker.  Is college equipping you with those things?

What your resume lacks in degrees it can more than make up for in content.  It’s really impressive when someone is self-aware enough to know college wasn’t working, and bold enough to head for greener pastures.  It stands out from the crowd and opens the way for you to tell your story.  Plus, you can say, “I took the Mark Zuckerberg/Steve Jobs/Bill Gates/Larry Ellison route.”

An employer who writes off your great reputation, smarts, communication skills, and stellar work ethic, just because you don’t have a degree, is probably not someone you want to work with anyway.

6. Don’t forget opportunity cost.  You need to weigh the costs of finishing college.  You’ve got it.  Ignore sunk costs, think at the margin, and all that other stuff I’ve been saying.  Yeah, yeah.  You get out your calculator to add up the dollars, or if you’re more sophisticated, days and dollars.  But you’re ignoring the biggest cost: you.

You are scarce.  You can only be in one place, doing one thing, at one time.  That means for every choice you make there are countless other things you are unable to choose.  The cost of one decision is more than the money paid; it’s the value of the next best alternative.  Once again to the economists, who call this your opportunity cost.

If you’re considering that final fifteen grand for your senior year, you need to add to that the value of your next best option.  Maybe you could work and earn $20,000.  In that case, the cost of the final year is really $35,000.  Make a difference?  You bet.

It’s not just money prices.  Value is subjective.  Maybe you value experience and mentorship, or travel and new cultures, more than the $20,000 job.  You have to give it up to finish school.  Is it worth the price?

When you consider sacrificing four or more prime years of your youth, and being bound to one geographical location for most of that time, college starts to cost a lot more than tuition.  For half the cost and in half the time, you might be able to visit ten countries, start a business, earn some money, and learn computer programming.  That’s just scratching the surface.

Bottom line: Don’t stay in college just because you’re close to the end.  Look ahead rather than behind, figure out what fans your flame, weigh the costs and benefits of every alternative, and do what’s best for you.  Try Praxis for starters.

Don’t Go to College

Good friend and collaborator T.K. Coleman invited me on his show, “Conversations with FiFi & T.K.” to talk about Praxis and why traditional education doesn’t cut it any more.  We had a great conversation and I got to field some good questions about the Praxis idea.  Made me all the more excited for the start of our first class in February!  Hope you enjoy the interview.

You Were Born an Entrepreneur

Have you ever watched a baby with a goal?  They know what they want, but they don’t know how to get there.  They have limbs they can barely control and a variety of toys, tools, and furniture around them.  They collect information by watching others.  They test and explore, flailing their limbs until they invent their own kind of motion to get from point A to point B.  It’s remarkable when you think about it.  None of the adults around them are crawling, but babies find this solution on their own.  They will not be denied.

It takes years in a conformity-based education system to train that kind of initiative out of us.  In fact, conformity was one of the primary goals of the education system when it was established.  Experts believed that people needed to be molded into uniform widgets, then plugged into an assembly line like spare parts, ready to take orders.  It wasn’t a great model then, and it’s even worse for the world today.

Despite the slower economy, opportunity abounds.  Cloud-computing and other innovations have dramatically reduced the cost of creating, collaborating, and starting a business.  The best businesses are struggling to find people who can come in and add value, out-of-the-box thinking, and innovation.  The market is full of unmet needs, but there aren’t enough entrepreneurs to solve them.

Now is not the time to wait around for more jobs to open up.  Now is not the time to wander aimlessly through a status quo education, or sit in classrooms struggling to stay awake.  Now is the time to rediscover your inner entrepreneur.  Break free.  Pick goals, even if they’re notional, and think clearly about the best way to achieve them.  Test different approaches.  Is the well-worn path really the best option?

A Law Colleges Love

I’ve often wondered why so many people go to college instead of learning on the job by offering to work for free for a company they like.  Turns out, it’s not that easy to work for free.  In most cases, it’s illegal.

Consider the absurdity of this setup.  Young people are supposed to do something to enhance their earning potential.  Without any knowledge or experience, they do not produce enough value to be worth hiring in most promising career areas.  So they’ve got to do something to gain skills.  Since they’re not worth paying, and it’s illegal to have unpaid workers, they can’t get on the job experience.

It’s supposed to be illegal to have unpaid workers because we wouldn’t want poor, unskilled people being taken advantage of.  Instead, they’re directed to college, where not only do they not earn money, they must borrow tens of thousands just for the privilege of not being paid.  They have limited choice as to what skills they learn, as a huge number of courses and credits are required in areas of little interest to them.  It takes at least three or four years to finish.

When they do finish, it’s often the case that they are only a little more valuable to employers than they were before – and much of that is a product of them being four years older and more mature, not any particular knowledge gained.  Most of the needed skills still must be learned on the job.  Most graduates have no idea what kind of job appeals to them or what they excel at, because they spent time in classrooms, not at workplaces trying different things out.

There are, of course, complicated work-arounds.  Non-profits and degree granting institutions can setup legal unpaid internships in some cases, and some businesses can do certain types of apprenticeships, on the condition that they create no value.

Let me repeat that: as long as unpaid apprentices do not help the business in any way – better yet if they destroy value – it’s possible to have one.  You think I’m joking, but read this language, pasted directly from the SBA website where they list the guidelines for a legal, unpaid apprenticeship.  This is number four in a list of six criteria:

“The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded”

We want young people to learn how to create value, but certainly not by actually creating it!  We want businesses to create wealth, but not if trainees do it!

You reap what you sow.

Good Enough for a Dog?

I’m not a dog owner, but everyone else seems to really love their dogs.  So much so, that if I offered the following service, most would consider it beneath them as pet owners to take me up:

Every work day, you’ll wake your dog before it wants to get up, force feed it some breakfast, and tie it to a pole at the corner of your street, then go to work.  A giant vehicle with no safety harnesses will stop by and load your dog, along with fifty or sixty other dogs, and haul them off to a huge dog daycare center.

The dogs will be crammed thirty or forty to a room, and each room will have one person there to look after them, and make them go through a number of drills and activities that dogs hate, sitting still the whole time, not being allowed to do what dogs really want to do – run around.  This supervisor will be unionized and paid based on years of service, with little or no connection to how well your dogs fare under their care.  Some are good people who like dogs, though many found veterinary school too challenging and would struggle to gain employment as private dog trainers, groomers, or sitters.

At noon, hundreds of dogs will funnel into one huge room where they’ll eat stuff of lower quality than what you give them at home.  Then back to the little room where they’ll be forced, once again, through activities with dozens of dogs of radically different sizes, tendencies, breeds, abilities, and behaviors.  Your dog may be a loyal and gentle Lab, paired up for an activity with a few vicious Pit bulls and a Rottweiler   They’ll have to learn to adapt.

If your dog acts up, fails to complete activities, resists commands or any other kind of behavior generally frustrating to the supervisor, the dog will be punished, shamed, confined to a small cage, possibly drugged, and you’ll likely get a stern rebuke.

Just before you get home from work, your dog will be carted back to your street on the bus of rowdy creatures, and left to wander home.  There it will wait for you to return, and when you do, you will have the duty of looking over a stack of papers sent home with your pet.  They detail several hours more of activities you must force your dog to do before it goes to sleep so it can be ready to be awakened while it’s still dark the next day to do it all over.

The whole program will cost upwards of $10,000 for your dog each year, summer excluded.  The good news is, you will be forced to pay this fee for all your neighbors, and they’ll be forced to pay it for you via monthly charges on your property value and earnings.  Even those with no dogs and no desire to have dogs will pay, and those with tons of dogs will pay the same.  Payment won’t be based on the service at all, but on how much money you have.

You’ll send your dog here every day for years, during the most active and formative years of the animal’s life.  You’ll have to have special permits and permission to opt-out, and you’ll be treated like a crazy, neglectful person if you do – even if you quit your job just to stay home to raise, care for, and train your dog yourself.

Just about every dog owner I’ve ever met would consider this an outrageously offensive rip-off that borders on animal abuse.  Most of those same people beam with pride and “spirit” while putting their children through the same basic routine.

Floating Downstream is Not an Accomplishment

“Tell me something you’ve accomplished.”

A friend said he always has trouble getting an answer to this question.  People think and think, and are unable to come up with an accomplishment.  He probes a little.  He asks if they graduated from high school.  Everyone says yes.  He asks why they didn’t mention that.  “I just didn’t really think of it I guess.”  They didn’t think of it because they didn’t accomplish it.

To accomplish something implies a goal, a series of willful actions, and a resulting effect.  It implies a conscious challenge or obstacle, and conscious effort to overcome it and reach the desired end.  High school is nothing like this for almost everyone who stumbles through.

Most people don’t really choose to go to high school.  It’s just sort of the default.  Most people don’t really fight hard to graduate.  It just sort of happens.  In fact, it requires more conscious effort to not go, or not graduate.  Schooling is, for the student, mostly a passive process.  It’s something that happens to them and around them.  They get poked and prodded and punished and rewarded as they’re corralled through the maze.  Many go through the whole experience half-asleep.  If you don’t actively resist, you get spit out with a diploma at the appointed time.

No wonder people don’t think of graduating high school when asked to share something they’ve accomplished.  The ability to alter your world and drive cause and effect is empowering.  It’s hard to forget when you’ve generated something desired.  Children don’t take any special pleasure in things that just happen to them; they delight in things they cause.  Randomly give a baby a toy and they might enjoy it, but there’s no comparison to the beaming pride on their face when they finally reach a hard-to get object after repeated attempts.

For many, the chances to really accomplish something are few until they are released from the pretend world of schooling and into the wider world.  No wonder many struggle with a low sense of self-worth, or high demand for externally provided direction.

Education and Bike Riding

If the goal of education is to prepare young people for living, then an ideal program would look very different from most of what is now called education.

Earlier this week I wrote about the need for children to have a free space within which to grow in tastes, talents, will and ideas before they feel the full weight of a world that will try to mold them. This free space is there that they may grow strong and ready to handle the world, not to keep them from it for life. If education is meant to play a similar role – a partially simulated reality to prepare students for the “real world” – it seems a highly successful education would have two features we almost never see:

1 – It would be incredibly short

2 – It would be very hard to tell when it ended

If the goal is to prepare for life – i.e. to make education unnecessary – the faster the simulation can transition into the real, the better. And if living well is the aim, it would seem odd to spend a lot of time learning how in a simulated world and then abruptly be sent out into the real world without dabbling in it with increasing frequency until it began to replace education.

Imagine if we taught kids how to ride a bike the way we try to teach them how to have a career. We’d start by showing them pictures of a bike when they’re young. We’d teach them to say the word bike, then spell it, then write it neatly. We’d have them draw a picture of a bike. We’d have them measure the perimeter of a picture of a bike. We’d have them write stories about people riding bikes. We’d ask them to share what kind of bike they want when they grow up.

When they reached their teens, every once in a while someone would show them a real bike and describe what riding it is like. They wouldn’t be allowed to touch it, and certainly not to own or ride one. In fact, anyone who let them would be subject to serious legal trouble. Then, after seventeen or eighteen years of this (never more or less), we’d have a big ceremony congratulating them and ourselves at their successful completion of bike riding prep.

They’d be allowed to ride now, but it would be looked down upon. Instead, they’d be encouraged to hone their skills and really learn to ride by paying tens of thousands of dollars to spend the next four years getting drunk and hearing specialized bike-related knowledge. They’d hear the history of bikes, mostly from professors who hate bikes. They’d hear about the ecosystem where the rubber trees grow that go into bike tires, except any connection between that ecosystem and the actual building and riding of bikes would be deemed in poor taste. They’d learn a great many other things and come away with a certificate declaring their level of bike preparedness.

We’d celebrate and buy them something (but not a bike). Then they’d go out and try to obtain a bike in a highly competitive market. If they were able to purchase one, they’d have to learn, for the first time after two decades of studying but never trying, to ride.

If at any point in this decades-long process a child decided they’d learned all they needed, quit, and picked up a bike to start riding, it would be deemed a miserable failure. Even though the stated goal is to get them riding, it’s not their ability to ride that determines the success of the system, only the number of students who complete it. Figuring out how to ride and riding before the appointed time is a sign of trouble and rebellion, and would be discouraged at all costs.

This is obviously a stupid way to teach bike-riding, yet it’s how we train kids for life.

Imagine kids blending learning with working from the time they were ready and willing to work. Imagine kids moving from reading to doing the same way they go from training wheels to two wheels – quickly, and often without a lot of fanfare or even a clear-cut transition. Imagine allowing some skinned knees, some wobbly attempts, some bumping into the neighbors mailbox while trying to figure out how to navigate the world. Think of the sheer joy and freedom kids experience when they can fly through the neighborhood on two wheels, and imagine how much greater when they can create value, exchange, cooperate, buy and sell on their own ability and will.

Instead we force kids into a simulated world for decades, then celebrate their completion of our programs, regardless of whether they’ve actually gained what they need to succeed. Then we let them wander the world for the first time, trying to learn in months what we prohibited them from trying for years.

Why do the social norms about education persist when they are so blunt and detrimental to so many kids?

The Job of a Parent: Create Free Space

Neighbors, ideologies, governments, social norms and other institutions and beliefs work to create a sense of duty and loyalty in individuals from the day they are born.  Even if some of these institutions and ideas turn out to be good, early fealty to them is often based on guilt for who a person is, shame at what they do, fear of retribution, or ignorance of alternatives.  One of the jobs of a parent is to act as a barrier between these pressures and their kids.

When people call a child “sheltered”, it’s usually meant derogatorily.  But a good shelter is what all kids need.  Not walls that keep them in, but walls that keep some of the strongest forces that seek to mold them at bay.  A seedling needs a protected area in which to gain strength and deep roots before it can weather the strongest winds and weeds.

It’s crucial that this safe space we create for our kids be full of windows and doors – opportunities to explore the very forces that we want to provide a buffer for.  Kids are curious, and the more they have access to information and ideas in a context without coercion, fear, ignorance, guilt or shame, the better conclusions they will draw about them, and the more equipped they will be for the world.

It’s harder than it may seem to create this space.  I think of the times when, far from protecting, I act as an amplifier of the forces of the world.  When your child loudly asks a question considered embarrassing by the mores of the day, it’s very easy to shut them down or project your own embarrassment on them.  It’s not easy to take all the social heat yourself, shield it from your kid, and respond generously.  When kids naively explore the world, we should let them, rather than cajole them into the conventional conclusions and behaviors.

Kids will run into the norms of the world, no doubt about it, but at least parents can ensure they don’t get smacked with it in the sanctuary of their own homes.  Don’t let the walls of your house be those coming in on them, before they have strength to resist.  Let your kids be expansive and boundless!  That’s how they’ll gain strength and identity and an ability to respond to the world around them with ease and freedom.

Process vs. Content

I spent the weekend at a conference discussing education, and what kind of program or curriculum is ideal for young students.  It struck me how easy it is to overestimate the role of the content of an educational program and underestimate the role of process.

One professor said he’s noticed that teachers who teach courses on comic books are no less likely to get students thinking about important concepts than those who teach philosophy.  The key is the quality of the teaching.  A good teacher can help students discover truths using a wide variety of curricular materials, where a poor teacher can’t wring enlightenment out of the best.

The process also matters in other ways.  Who owns the education of the individual?  If it’s the individuals own responsibility, and they primarily bear the costs and benefits, you get something much different than when students are a third party to a transaction between others.  Some self-selection, a level of interest on the part of the student, the freedom to direct their own inquiry – these are process related and are probably more important than the content of the education.

Process also maters to the method of how the individual educational processes are determined.  Do a small number of students or educators or bureaucrats determine what kind of system everyone will go through, or are myriad competing methods allowed to emerge?

It’s easy as a parent to worry too much about what books my kids are reading, what lessons their learning, and other content concerns.  I need to be reminded from time to time that kids are curious and eager to learn just abut anything if the process is conducive.

Commerce is Better Than Education

I’ve recently read several essays on education by some of the American Founders.  These writings have in common a belief that good education will promote civility, manners, advances in agriculture, manufacturing, and morality.  It seems to me effect is confused with cause.

It’s not education – at least not formal education or schooling – that produces industriousness and social cooperation, but social cooperation and industriousness that increases knowledge and education.  Commerce is the great civilizing force in the world.  The greater and freer the extent of trade, the more scope individuals have to exercise and explore their abilities and the greater the incentive to obtain knowledge of value to them.

When people are free to reap the rewards or pay the costs of their endeavors, they have every incentive to improve.  This incentive leads to advances in industry, arts, and even culture and values.  Peaceful, mutually beneficial transactions bring the greatest returns, and these require knowledge and respect for other cultures, proficiency with products and processes, and constant adaptation and learning.

When commerce happens, the incentive exists to become educated.  No one need impose an educational plan on their neighbor, and no one has the ability to know what kinds of knowledge their neighbor needs.  We over-estimate the role that education plays in determining the kind of world we live in.  In reality, markets do most of the heavy lifting, and education follows and fills in the well-worn paths etched by exchange.  You could expend all the energy in the world trying to ensure more young people learn your favorite subject.  But if the market signals excellent returns in a different field, people will flock their despite what they’ve been trained in.

We needn’t fret so much about what kind of educational systems exist around us.  We do need to do everything we can to ensure free exchange is unhampered, and myriad educational opportunities will flower as a result.

College: A One Sided Sorting Mechanism

I recently listened to an excellent EconTalk podcast with Arnold Kling discussing technological changes in higher education.  Kling pointed out the main role universities play is sorting, not forming.

There is a somewhat romantic idea among the populace that education molds and shapes young lumps of clay into the men and women they ought to be.  In this view, what school you attend is very important, because they have the power to mold you for better or worse.  Kling combats this notion by reference to studies that have tracked students accepted to Ivy League schools: They achieve the same level of success whether they attend the Ivy League school or choose instead to go to a lower ranked college.  In other words, it’s the type of student that goes to Harvard, not the type of student Harvard creates, that makes for success.

For employers, this sorting mechanism significantly reduces their hiring cost.  Kling described the process as a coin sorting machine, where you dump in a pile of loose change and is sorts all the quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies.  An employer looking for a certain skill level would be at great pains to sort all the applicants, but the type of institution from which they have a degree does a lot of the work for them.  What a student majors in also play a part in the sorting process.

Though this works reasonably well for many employers, it’s pretty inefficient.  Does it have to take four years and a few hundred thousand dollars to sort out who excels at what and who’s worth interviewing for which roles?  The signal sent by many degrees is getting weaker as more and more students flood into schools.  With the exception of the top schools, many middle of the road universities have turned into massive degree mills.  The printing of more degrees makes those already in circulation worth less to employers.

But there seems to me a worse problem.  Even if college serves as an effective sorting mechanism for employers, it is seriously deficient as a sorting mechanism for employees.  After all, a career is a two sided affair.  It’s not a matter of businesses finding out what you’re good at and allocating you there; it’s primarily about you finding what you love and what helps you get the most of what you want for the least of what you don’t.  The student needs a sorting mechanism to discover what industries, what kinds of work, and what companies they like.  College doesn’t have a lot to offer here.

Most degrees do not entail any kind of on the ground experience in the business world.  In fact, most classes don’t even talk about what different kinds of work are like.  You may enjoy learning philosophy, but that fact alone doesn’t do a lot to tell you which career paths are your quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies.  Students spend tens of thousands and a good chunk of their time tumbling through a system that gives employers some valuable info about who they are, but it provides the student with little info about who these employers are.  It’s like a dating service where only one side gets to view the profile.  It’s not uncommon for graduates to spend the first five or ten years of their career discovering what kind of career they want to have.

There are a lot of things students can do to remedy this problem.  They can seek knowledge, ask people with experience, take a wide range of courses, and explore different majors.  But at the end of the day, nothing beats genuine experience in the world of commerce.  As it is, most students are expected to cram that in an internship for a semester or two.  That’s a lot of time and money to burn if you don’t walk away with a good idea of what makes you come alive.

Separation of School and State

While reading Peter Boettke’s wonderful new book “Living Economics,” I was reminded by Boettke of an interesting disagreement between Scottish Enlightenment figures Adam Smith and David Hume. Both Smith and Hume used economic thinking to understand a puzzling phenomenon of their day: Countries with publicly supported religion were less religiously devoted than those in which the church relied on private funds.

Boettke uses this example to illustrate the “value free” nature of economic analysis. Since Hume was a religious skeptic and preferred a less influential church, he argued in support of publicly funded religion. He understood that this would result in a less religious populace and welcomed that result. Smith used the same economic logic but did not share Hume’s negative feelings toward the church, and thus he opposed public support for religion. As Boettke points out, good economic thinking does not tell us what we “ought” to do, it only reveals cause and effect relationships and shows us what the outcome of various policies will be.

Despite their differences of opinion on the preferred outcome, the logic of economics was the same for both men: When the church is publicly supported it becomes less responsive to parishioners and less creative in gaining and retaining new members. When churches had to rely solely on voluntary support, they innovated. Sermons became more interesting to the listeners, facilities were built to meet the needs of attendees, and church leaders more aggressively and creatively looked for ways to show the applicability and value of religion to everyday life. This marketing, innovation and energy resulted in greater “consumption” of religious “goods” than in countries where the state supported the church.

This conclusion was counterintuitive. It was strongly believed by many at the time that religion was unlike other goods and services. It was a “public good” of sorts. Left unaided by tax dollars, short-sighted citizens would underfund religion in pursuit of more temporary gains at the cost of their moral character and eternal souls. Perhaps bricks and blankets and bread could be left to the market, but religion was too important. Religious ideas and values needed to be firmly in the heart of every citizen, and as such it was the duty of the state to ensure that the church did not wane.

Smith and Hume smashed this logic with clear economic analysis. The analysis itself did not choose sides. It neither supported nor opposed religion. It did not care for the pure or impure motives of the advocates or opponents of state funded religion. It only revealed that, contrary to the intent of its advocates (with the exception of people like Hume), governments who supported churches with tax dollars got a less religious populace.

It’s relatively easy to accept this analysis dispassionately in the United States today. The separation of church and state, at least in terms of direct funding, has been so firmly entrenched, and our experience of the wide variety of flourishing denominations and churches so extensive, that we have no trouble agreeing with Smith and Hume’s conclusion. It’s silly to suggest that religion cannot exist without state support, and even more absurd to suggest that the federal government could improve upon religion. Yet the vast majority of Americans fail to see the same cause and effect relationship between state funding of education and the level of education among the public.

If you like the idea of a population that is competent in math, science, reading, writing, physics, philosophy, biology, history, economics and every other field of knowledge, you should oppose state support for education. Without resorting to complicated debates about curricula, teachers unions and budgets, the same economic analysis Smith and Hume used to understand the relationship between church and state can be used to understand the relationship between school and state. State support for education results in a less educated populace.

As radical as that may sound today, it may not have sounded so radical to the early advocates of public schooling. Their main goal was not to increase the overall level of education or to educate where education was previously absent, but to reduce variety in education. They did not want to increase supply, but rather decrease the number of choices for parents and children so as to produce a more uniform set of beliefs and create a more civically minded and compliant citizen. They wanted graduates able to step in to the regimented Scientific Management of factory life and fit neatly into a centrally planned economy, which they saw as the future of mankind. Whether or not you agree with their intentions, their economic logic was correct: State funded and operated education would reduce the wide range of educational goods being consumed.

If we want a more educated populace, full of energy and a variety of methods and ideas, much like the innumerable churches and denominations on the American religious scene, the removal of state sponsorship is a must. Absent the secure fallback of the state’s coffers, educational institutions would be forced to innovate, listen to consumers, market their services and find new ways of making their offerings beneficial in the day-to-day life of their students. A thriving market for schooling and education (not necessarily the same thing) would produce a more educated populace with greater enthusiasm for knowledge, just as Smith and Hume found with religion.

Perhaps separation of school and state is the first step to a flowering of education.

Originally posted here.

Why Don’t Universities Try Something Crazy?

What if a university decided to try something crazy: What if they hired professors based entirely on the quality of their research and/or teaching?

Imagine if the hiring committee dropped all other criteria.  They ignored where the applicant got their degree, or even if they had one.  They ignored who they studied under.  They ignored which journals they were published in, or where they presented papers.  They examined in depth the quality of the research; the ideas, the writing, the breadth and implications of the work, the ability to draw on multiple thinkers to make a serious and credible case.  They tested, in front of real classrooms, the teaching skills and took seriously student feedback in person and things like ratemyprofessor.com.

If they wanted top researchers, they focused only on that.  If they wanted great teachers, they focused only on that.  If they wanted someone who was good at both, they focused on both.

This would seem common-sense in any other business, but it sounds radical in academia.  Of course there is value in the filtering mechanisms of degrees granted by prestigious programs, of publications that make it into the top journals.  There is value to the university in hiring people with prestigious repuations.  School ranking, the protective journal publication process, and all the credential hierarchies exist for a reason and they provide valuable signals.  They make the hiring committees job easier, as they have to do less serious digging themselves, and can rely on the stamp of approval given by others.

All that is well and good, but still I wonder what would happen if a pioneering university just scrapped it all. Would they suffer?  In what way?  If a university made very public that they no longer cared about anything but excellent teaching, excellent knowledge of subject matter, and excellent research, wouldn’t it attract some excellent job applicants, some of whom may not have PhD’s at all?  Wouldn’t it attract some interesting and excited students?

I understand the basic incentives in the university system, but it still seems to me there would have been by now some entrepreneurial president who would have tried to break free from the institutional norms and tried something like this.  Maybe the time is near.