I read quite a radical and revealing book The case against education by Bryan Caplan. Here are the main points and my thoughts.
The book reveals that education does not teach useful skills. It just certifies your abilities.
University graduates earn a 70% higher salary than high school dropouts (and high school graduates 30%). Generally, a year of education increases your salary by about 10%.
The school claims to teach marketable skills. It might be reasonable to think that a person goes to school, learns something valuable, and his value in the job market raises. There is another point of view.
Imagine there are two types of people, hippies, and normies. Normies are a bit better workers on average. You, as an employer, see two potential candidates. With their experiences being equal, you are better off hiring a normie.
After hippies realize what is happening, they wash and wear clothes for an interview. It starts a competition between hippie spotting and hippie hiding. But to fake normality is easy. What if the qualification was more complicated to pretend?
Just a side note, the book doesn't deal with that, but this is one trap of racism. Your race signals a lot of things, and you cannot change it.
Bryan describes how something similar to normalizing hippies might have happened with education. More educated people work better on average, so education pays. Not everyone can graduate. The skills correlate with productivity, so the education stays useful.
School teaches you something. It's usually useless, but what do you need to succeed in school?
To finish school, you need intelligence. You have to work hard and respect authority.
All these traits make a good worker. Passing school, learning aside, certifies that a person has a reasonable amount of these vital skills. Moreover, these skills are not easy to test at an interview (except IQ). Everyone can for some time or appear conformist or hardworking.
Medicine and engineering are the only options where you can be sure to work in the field. Other than that, in the US, every year, 94,000 students get their bachelor's in psychology. There are only 174,000 practicing psychologists. With communications, it's even worse.
Maybe, you learn to learn in school. The question is: How well can you translate your knowledge? Unfortunately, not very much. Only 10% of physicists successfully translated their knowledge to algebra. (As opposed to 72% of mathematicians) The translation is possible from more abstract to concrete, not another way around.
In a significant part of the book, Bryan calculates the return on education. Education has a cost: you pay tuition, and cannot work meanwhile. In turn, university promises you to earn more in the future.
The author builds his argument carefully. It's not possible to compare high-school and university graduates. Some high-school graduates would not be able to finish college.
He advises everyone to finish high school, but university is not a good deal for everyone. If you want to maximize your wealth, your decision should depend on how good a student you are. College is a good choice for good students (75 percentile). It gives about an 8% return. Then, the usefulness goes down. For bad students, the return is negative.
How he computed the data? He estimated the cost of college (very crudely and minimally) and compared it to how much you earn otherwise. If you invest all the money you earn, would you have more with school or work? What is the return on investment that leaves you with the same amount of money in both scenarios?
Adam and Bob have the same abilities, but Adam finished high school, and Bob got a bachelor's degree. When Bob starts working, Adam already has money and experience. Adam will earn a higher salary for some time. Later, Bob will outearn Adam. But at that point, Adam has enough money such that interests from investments erase the difference.
The university is a bad deal, especially for stupid (bad) students. They might not finish it or take longer, so they will waste the money for only a tiny increase.
Interestingly, education benefits women more than men. Educated women will earn more and find a wealthier husband. So, education helps their household twofold. For women that do not intend to marry, education is worse.
We learn essential skills in school, like reading, writing, and counting. Other things might be a waste of time.
There is another interesting effect that supports the certification hypothesis.
If school is about transferring abilities, then every year in school should increase your salary similarly. But in the real world, your salary increases by a lot after getting a degree. You get half the bonus just for finishing. The other half distributes by the proportion of degree you passed. (Dropping out in half gives you a premium of only 25%, not 50%)
You can also ask yourself a question: Would you rather get a good diploma or know everything needed to obtain that diploma? The answer is not clear (at least what would help you).
Education is a good deal for you (if you are a good enough student), but your reasons to study are selfish. It's like a person standing up in a cinema to see better. It's reasonable to do for anyone, but if everyone does it, the effect disappears.
The author evaluates the different impacts of education. There are small benefits. Educated people are healthier and want to work more. Education significantly impacts criminality. Young uneducated men commit the most crimes. By convincing them to stay at school, we can decrease their crime rate.
There are many more impacts that are not significant. College makes people more religious, more economically right-wing, and more socially left-wing. But these effects balance across society because people conform to their peers.
What also education does is lower fertility. Hard to tell if it's an intention.
Subsidized education helps the poor to earn more. With credential inflation, a good worker who did not attend (had to work, difficult home situation) gets the penalty.
How different is the work (forbidden) for kids from school (compulsory)? Some jobs would be preferable to high school.
Education convinces you to get married and not divorce (by a small margin).
Bryan proposes to cut back on education and find a better way to certify the abilities. The school should teach basic skills and then end. Also, everything should be more difficult. If only 20% of students get admitted to a university, the waste will not be so large, and the penalty for not going to school will be lower.
He argues for different schoolings, mainly vocational. It might have all positive effects as education, and it also teaches skills. Instead of flustrating weaker students with school, they can do something useful and earn money. He suggests apprenticeships.
He even argues for zero state support for education. The proposal would require an enormous change in the way how we think about the labor market. (For instance, the minimum wage does not make sense, child labor too)
I didn't like high school for many reasons. The book explained why. It proved high school useless (as much you can call that proof).
The author introduces the world without subsidized education. Before, it would be an outrageous idea. Now, I want to see the experiment of that.