QQ: Would you rather have a Yale diploma without a Yale education, or a Yale education without a Yale diploma?
Editor’s Note 2: Reminiscences are due February 1st!
Another in our series of “Quick Questions”
Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University calls this credential inflation, where the level of education required to find a job increases.
Caplan offers the following thought experiment: “Would you rather have a Yale diploma without a Yale education, or a Yale education without a Yale diploma? If you pause to answer, you must think signaling is pretty important.” In pursuit of signaling value, students flocked to universities. To be sure, actual tuition hasn’t increased as much as posted tuition fees. But the effects are still dire. Over 44 million Americans collectively owe $1.5 trillion in student debt, a 457% increase since 2003.
That’s insane.