Another factor in employment is managers gaining armour to defend a potentially bad outcome by opting for the recognised standard. If you hire someone with a degree and they turn out badly, anyone looking at your actions can see someone who did their job.
Something you notice about smaller companies is that they are much less concerned about degrees. I've worked in companies that hired programmers who had been working on open source projects, or someone still at school who had built an app in his summer holiday.
This also fits into another aspect, that with the increase in degrees, the incentives for universities to get students, a lot of degrees aren't particularly good. And when the reliability of the recognised standard slips, or there are better standards, the first people to adopt it are always smaller businesses.
I very nearly included that in my comment. It also doesn't just apply to IT. There are all sorts of products, services, qualifications that get recognised that are not a great idea.
(IBM kit wasn't bad, but there were better options).
When you say education is mostly signaling, you mean as you get farther in education signaling dominates other things. This is true, but it's not convincing because not everyone realizes what you are saying. Unless you go to a fancy manhattan kindergarten signaling is not important that stage. Learning is important during the early years as well.
The way to make it convincing is to make it more obvious. You are not saying this stuff is wrong. Make a graph in which the time starts at day care year 1, and ends at grad school. On the graph show the jobs that school does it should always add up to 100%. The jobs are 1) child care 2) Learning skills/facts 3) Signaling. You could add a 4th factor like demonstrating and practicing conformity, which I don't think is a negative. One needs practice doing boring things.
In this chart, Watch my kids dominates the early years, obviously. Then Learning peaks 1-4th grade, Watch my kids goes to Zero at some-point. Signaling starts to show at second half of high-school, dominating all other factors by the end of the chart.
I think this is a simplification, but then you can ask people how they would draw this chart, and what factors they would include and how much would they give them.
It's more that the education itself has no intrinsic value. Like reading and writing and doing some math is essential. Most trigonomentry has little value. 90+% of people studying art history are not going to be working as museum creators, and perhaps just buying some books would be a better idea.
The signal is that you could achieve a degree in art history over someone who couldn't. But the truth is that you can measure high achievers far earlier.
I suspect there is alot less opposition to the claim that education has a strong signalling component than you seem to assume. Rather, I think that there are some people inclined to loudly disagree and most people who agree have an incentive to just shut up.
I suspect they -- like me -- don't necessarily agree with the conclusions you draw from the fact that education is mostly signalling [1]. And this differential willingness to keep quiet depending on whether you agree with the ultimate impact of a particular claim is one of the great problems with our modern academic system. For all I disagree that it means we have better options it's a problem that differential silence can effectively disguise the truth.
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1: For instance, that is likely going to be true for any alternative system and they may feel that there are lots of political and practical constraints on what an alternative could look like which limit the ability to achieve a more efficient system. Not to mention simple concern that one could break something unexpected with a truly major change here.
Another factor in employment is managers gaining armour to defend a potentially bad outcome by opting for the recognised standard. If you hire someone with a degree and they turn out badly, anyone looking at your actions can see someone who did their job.
Something you notice about smaller companies is that they are much less concerned about degrees. I've worked in companies that hired programmers who had been working on open source projects, or someone still at school who had built an app in his summer holiday.
This also fits into another aspect, that with the increase in degrees, the incentives for universities to get students, a lot of degrees aren't particularly good. And when the reliability of the recognised standard slips, or there are better standards, the first people to adopt it are always smaller businesses.
Axiom of IT procurement: NO ONE ever got fired for choosing IBM.
Remember that one?
I very nearly included that in my comment. It also doesn't just apply to IT. There are all sorts of products, services, qualifications that get recognised that are not a great idea.
(IBM kit wasn't bad, but there were better options).
When you say education is mostly signaling, you mean as you get farther in education signaling dominates other things. This is true, but it's not convincing because not everyone realizes what you are saying. Unless you go to a fancy manhattan kindergarten signaling is not important that stage. Learning is important during the early years as well.
The way to make it convincing is to make it more obvious. You are not saying this stuff is wrong. Make a graph in which the time starts at day care year 1, and ends at grad school. On the graph show the jobs that school does it should always add up to 100%. The jobs are 1) child care 2) Learning skills/facts 3) Signaling. You could add a 4th factor like demonstrating and practicing conformity, which I don't think is a negative. One needs practice doing boring things.
In this chart, Watch my kids dominates the early years, obviously. Then Learning peaks 1-4th grade, Watch my kids goes to Zero at some-point. Signaling starts to show at second half of high-school, dominating all other factors by the end of the chart.
I think this is a simplification, but then you can ask people how they would draw this chart, and what factors they would include and how much would they give them.
I find this is
It's more that the education itself has no intrinsic value. Like reading and writing and doing some math is essential. Most trigonomentry has little value. 90+% of people studying art history are not going to be working as museum creators, and perhaps just buying some books would be a better idea.
The signal is that you could achieve a degree in art history over someone who couldn't. But the truth is that you can measure high achievers far earlier.
I suspect there is alot less opposition to the claim that education has a strong signalling component than you seem to assume. Rather, I think that there are some people inclined to loudly disagree and most people who agree have an incentive to just shut up.
I suspect they -- like me -- don't necessarily agree with the conclusions you draw from the fact that education is mostly signalling [1]. And this differential willingness to keep quiet depending on whether you agree with the ultimate impact of a particular claim is one of the great problems with our modern academic system. For all I disagree that it means we have better options it's a problem that differential silence can effectively disguise the truth.
---
1: For instance, that is likely going to be true for any alternative system and they may feel that there are lots of political and practical constraints on what an alternative could look like which limit the ability to achieve a more efficient system. Not to mention simple concern that one could break something unexpected with a truly major change here.