Libertarian Professors Oppose College Education


syrakusos

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On OrgTheory, Fabio Rojas has been arguing that arts and humanities education produce no job skills and thus are a waste of money. On EconLog this week, Bryan Caplan has been claiming that foreign language education is a waste of money. Ayn Rand warned us about hiring a plumber who denies the validity of plumbing.

Certainly, it is true that public education has been the Soviet Agriculture of learning. So, questioning it at the level of basic principles is valid. (It would be valid to question the principles, even if education were not communized. "If it's not broke, break it before your competitor does.") But these are professors of economics and sociology. As I point out a couple of times on my blog, sociology and economics are useless. Consider that you can have an associate's degree in electronics and find work. You can get a Ph.D. in it if you want and work for even more money. But no one hires people with associate's degrees in sociology and economics. The jobs only exist in universities for Ph.D.s., granted that they still might be valid pursuits on that basis.

Myself, I believe that I benefited from my college and university education, though not in ways that always were directly marketable. (Some were: classes in accounting, Japanese, electronics...) I think that the value in education is ineffable, like "entrepreneurship."

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