PURPOSE OF SCHOOLING

 

Beyond what education contributes to one’s knowledge and skills, it also provides credentials that attest to that experience, signaling to potential employers that a job candidate might possess certain qualities they seek. Most of us see this function as education’s primary role.

Some people, including a large share of economists, are unaware of this certifying role of education. Such benighted individuals see education’s sole purpose as increasing human skills. They are called “human capital purists,” who regard schools as being single-mindedly devoted to skill development, and who believe that labour markets will readily identify the level of performance to be expected from any job candidate. From this perspective, auditing the courses that make up a university degree programme would serve you as well as actually getting the degree.

About 30 percent of education’s function is signaling and sorting. Some economists would probably put that number at about 20 to 25 percent with most of education’s purpose being human capital building.

Whether obvious or subtle, educational signaling matters. It emphasizes how difficult it is to get reliable information about what prospective workers know and are willing and able to do, and it reminds us that students have reason to exaggerate their talents. The arguments here are often clever and instructive; it is regrettable that so much of the presentation is organized around arguing with the nonexistent human capital purist.

Some researchers' main policy conclusion is that most education beyond the mastery of basic literacy and arithmetic is a waste of time and money, and therefore governments should sharply cut back on subsidies for education and actively discourage its pursuit. They base this conclusion on two claims—first, that most education is pure sorting and produces little valuable learning. The second claim is that even investing in education for its sorting-and-signaling value is wasteful because it goes too far. All the useful sorting could be done by, say, the end of high school; everything beyond that is an expensive scramble for relative advantage. This is a puzzling claim because it is not clear why employers would pay more for college-educated employees when they could more cheaply hire high school graduates, evaluating them on their academic records.

Whatever the merit of these two claims, they do have a testable implication: namely, that investing more in general education, at least beyond the three Rs ( reading, writing and arithmetic ), does not make workers more productive and therefore does not promote economic growth.

There are actually four distinct purposes for schooling. They are:-

Individual Possibility - classic “education”: shaping the learning and development of individual students.

Social Possibility - socialization processes: shaping collective culture and social norms at the micro and macro - i.e. at the community, national and global levels.

Social Efficiency - classic human capital perspective: sustain current social, economic, and political institutions. 

Individual Efficiency - to serve an individual’s own ability to navigate the education or socio-economic systems (this is often called “social mobility” in a capitalist system). 

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