Wednesday, February 26, 2003 :::
My brother on education. Even for jobs where no other special training is required — as opposed to plumbing and the like — I'm curious as to how much of one's education these days is actually useful for most jobs and how much is at best some form of information discovery. There's a desire these days to hire BAs because 1) one can and 2) they're probably better candidates for the job than those without BAs, not because of anything that they picked up during college, but just because they started out that way. The BA is a marker, and those who can acquire it do so at high cost to make it clear who they are.
Making sure everyone gets a BA — or, less so these days, a high school diploma — devalues it as a marker. If you're not discovering information, and the education per se isn't useful, then you're pretty much left with rent-seeking, i.e. education is a simple waste of resources. I plan to run for political office on that platform. Just for fun, you know.
Alright, so when I say "education per se isn't useful", that premise holds, on a societal level, only if we believe not only that it's useless in terms of one's job, but also in terms of one's activity as a citizen and a member of society. I spent enough years being indoctrinated in liberal arts schools not to be willing to make the latter part of that assumption quite so quickly.
::: posted by dWj at 11:16 AM
