College - actual learning or just credentialing?

Student Lounge College Life
1

A [google search](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=human+capital+vs+signaling) of the human capital vs. signaling theories of university returns a lot of papers that question whether college actually teaches you applicable skills. I’m kind of skeptical myself. There are a few more vocational subjects such as engineering or computer science (although even those contain lots of questionably useful things), but a lot of other coursework doesn’t seem to give you lots of useful skills.

The typical rebuttal to this is some declaration that the liberal arts “teach you how to think critically”. I’m not saying that this doesn’t happen, but I’d be a lot more convinced if there was substantial evidence that this actually happens, especially given the rather low standards you often have to meet to pass these classes.

People who go to college tend to be more successful in life, but people who go to college were probably already going to be more successful anyway.

If university courses really were so important to your work ability, you’d expect GPA to correlate more strongly with job performance. In reality, it does so only weakly, and that probably goes away when you control for SAT scores and conscientiousness.

If universities just exist as a signal for intelligence, why don’t employers just screen directly via SAT scores? They’re probably more useful as screens of work ethic, but it still seems like a really expensive way for the economy to sort people. Maybe there are a few other reasons why it could be helpful:

  1. Most 18 year olds aren't mature enough to be really productive employees.
  2. You get the opportunity to meet an unusually diverse array of people (this is probably the most important).
  3. You get time to think about your future, and learn new ideas (this is probably the second most important).
  4. Academic coursework is probably more important for those who want to go into academia, and society can't accurately determine who wants to go into academia based on their high school records, yet lots of the material is really cumulative, so you teach some to everyone and see who ends up through the net.
  5. Other methods of screening like IQ tests are less socially acceptable.
2

Four years of academic coursework would be way more indicative of work ethic than a test you took junior year of high school (one, two, or three times). I don’t understand that suggestion at all.

3

@bodangles Sorry, I meant that a degree is probably a more efficient proxy for work ethic than intelligence, because the latter more closely correlates with SAT scores anyway. The exception may be for really difficult subjects like physics, but even then you could just design tests with higher ceilings.

I suppose, then, that a degree signals some combination of intelligence and work ethic, but it still seems like that alone would not be a very efficient system given that it costs like 150,000 dollars to do. But there’s a collective action problem that would prevent lots of people from trying to forgo the credential.

I do think college is a good idea in general, just throwing some doubts out there.

4

Work ethic is likely signaled more by success in high school and/or college courses. There are plenty of “high SAT/ACT, low GPA” posters who are told that colleges tend to look at that profile as “smart but lazy”.

5

Both. It depends on your own investment in the process.