Economist Bryan Caplan on 80,000 Hours: Thinking Through Your Real Reasons for Going to College

Caplan is an economist most famous for advancing the theory (held by many) that education in its current instantiation in the US is more about sigaling (in particular, credentialing) than learning. But that's not what I'm including in the large excerpt below - this is more advice for young people who are sacrificing their happiness worrying about/trying to get into college. 

I don't endorse his specific conclusions, but I strongly endorse his way of thinking about it, which broadly comes down to: ask yourself what you actually want out of life, look at the empirical reality of what your choices might get you, and don't just go along with the crowd. The full interview is here. (Previous posts on this here and here.)

Robert Wiblin: Yeah I’m thinking, so now we’re talking to the listeners, and we’re hoping to give them some advice on how they could actually do better in their lives.

Bryan Caplan: Right, right. But selfishly speaking?

Robert Wiblin: Selfishly speaking, yeah-

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So right, I mean honestly where I always start is gaming the system. I don’t start with learning, because the system doesn’t seem very interested in learning. I would just start with … Right, so what do you want to do and how can you do that with the least suffering to yourself. Basically sort of going through the inventory and finding out which things you can cut corners on and which things you can’t cut corners on. Some obvious things are, if it’s way outside your nature, if you’re just doing it for requirement than just find the easiest person. Most Americans will never use foreign language on the job, so find the easiest foreign language teachers that are around, go and do that.

Like for college actually for most people my advice is just be an econ major. Because I often tell my students economics is the highest paid of all the easy majors. And there’s a lot … Like these aren’t easy. Like come on people it’s not computer science, it’s not engineering. You know you can do really well in econ major and still have a great social life in college. It doesn’t mean that you’ll be like vitamin D deprived, like you would be if you were a CS major.

Economics is not the highest paid major, but it’s not that far from the winner. So winners are usually electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, finance, then econ. But it’s not that big of a difference. A lot of it, as I say, major in econ because it is the highest paid of all the easy majors, so do that. I say, whatever else you’re interested in you can do that to, but the econ major will just get you a better job and open more doors for you. So I advise people to do that.

In terms of other numbers. General result, this I not primarily me, I’m just reporting what the researchers find. Your majors more important than the selectivity of your school. Better to go to a state school and be an engineering major than go to Harvard and be a literature major. For most purposes, at least for your career purposes, maybe not for dating purposes, or for marriage purposes. But in least of terms of your career it seems like a hard major at a low cheap state school better deal than going to a private school.

Then I’ve also got stuff on is it worth going to an expensive private school. Like the marriage … Like improving your marital options, that seems like the best argument for. In terms of your career, what I’m saying is unless they’re giving you a lot of scholarship money, probably don’t go. Or, the only other reason I would consider going to a top school is if you have a special career that is even snobbier than other careers. Like say professor. If your career goal is to be a professor, then I encourage you to go to a top school because graduate schools are super snobby. And then schools hire professors who are super snobby. So even though it may not affect your earnings, it may affect whether you’re allowed to enter in to your desired occupation at all. So I think about that.

And the other big thing to think about, this probably won’t matter very much for your listeners specifically, but maybe for their kids, you should think about whether it’s worth going to college at all. I say there, the main underappreciated variable is just completion probability. There were got this classic saying of the best predictor of future performance is past performance. Best predictor of whether you’re gonna graduate college is whether you did well in high school. If you struggle to get through high school, or if you know someone who is struggling to get through high school. Those are the people it is not at all clear that it’s a good idea for them to go to college even selfishly speaking. Because they’re so unlikely to get that big bag of gold over the finish line.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. The reason this issue of people who are unlikely to finish, it seems like the very most low hanging fruit here is to convince people who are losing out personally because they go to college for a year or two and spend a bunch of money and time, but are very unlikely to ever actually graduate. Just to convince them to stop going to university, I mean that’s something you can maybe even get the government on. You don’t have to tell anyone to sacrifice for the greater good, you just have to tell them “Well you’re gonna lose yourself.”

Bryan Caplan: Yes, I mean, funny thing, the government used to have a whole program to go do this. It was called guidance counselors. So back in the old days, the guidance counselor would bring you in, and they’d say “You are or you are not college material.” This was hard to hear … And of course sometimes they made mistakes. Sometimes there’s someone who is really good and they told them they’re not college material and they’re late bloomers. But you know better than to put too much weight on that scenario. There’s also a lot of people who were told not to go, they would fail, and so they didn’t go, so they didn’t fail.

There’s been a big change in the United States towards the college role model. Now I think one of the best ways to get fired as a high school guidance counselor is start using, throwing around that phrase “You’re not college material” and I think that will get big complaints from parents. Like, “Do you know what your guidance counselor told my kid, said he’s not college material.” So the government used to do this, now there’s more of, whether you tell them to go to community college or four-year college. It’s sort of the main division right now. And you say well of course college is for everyone, everyone’s college material but you should probably go to community college to get your grades up and then that kind of thing.

Then go and tell about how great community college is for those who do well in it. Without ever giving them any idea if they’re ever statistically likely to do well. But yeah, in terms of what I’m trying to I do actually try to give this advice. Honestly I don’t think the kids that are struggling in high school are going to be listening anything I say. So I do try to direct this to the parents. Who I think are the … They’re sort of the last line of defense of people who won’t get fired as parents if they level with their kid.

It’s really hard, especially parent’s pride is at stake. This is where my best appeal is look, what’s more important your kid’s future or your friend’s pity? Like “Oh my god, your kid isn’t going to college that’s so terrible. Oh my god.” Right, and I mean know parents, I think their pride is so strong they’d rather send their kid on this academic suicide mission rather than endure the pity of their friends, but I think there’s a lot of parents who have mixed motives, and I just like go and give them some moral support for advice to kids to go and try something else. I mean, I try to frame it more positively as can we find something else your kid likes and is good at, other than academics.

Like can you do that, have you tried? Why not try? You know if your kid just really doesn’t like school, why keep assuming they’re gonna turn over a new leaf and blossom in college rather than say here’s ten jobs that give you a good life and don’t require college.

Robert Wiblin: So as you say, most listeners on the show aren’t trying to decide whether to try to do an undergraduate degree or not. But many of them are trying to decide whether to go to grad school. So what do you have for advice for students who did well in undergrad and they’re considering doing an economics PhD or some other PhD? Who should do it and who shouldn’t and what courses should they consider and what courses shouldn’t they consider?

Bryan Caplan: Yeah that’s a great question. Just to preface data on graduate education is much mushier than data on high school or college. So here I’m just building on a much shakier ground, and I just think everyone should know that I’m doing that. The main thing to know is that grad school completion is even lower than regular college graduation. Remember that people go to grad to school are generally well above average for college, for undergraduate. So when you’re thinking about whether to go, again, the best predictor is how good were you as an undergraduate.

So if you were doing very well as an undergraduate, then probably you would be about average for grad school, and remember average doesn’t do that well. So were you stellar for an undergraduate, those are the people where they’re likely to actually gain from graduate education. Furthermore, you have to consider what you’re majoring in. I’m not sure that I found a single paper that measured the payoff for graduate programs as a function of major. It certainly seems that the pattern for undergraduate holds up for graduate as well with CS and engineering and economics paying well. History and philosophy and fine arts paying poorly.

So you gotta factor that in, and again as usual if you know what occupation you’re training for than just see what does the job market for that occupation actually look like. There are many graduate programs where almost the only thing you do with is to become a professor of that subject. Or you just don’t use it. So in that case, well you wanna be an English professor, well look at the jobs prospects for the people who are currently coming out with English PhDs and see how they’re doing.

Don’t ask yourself are you as good as those people. Ask what someone who didn’t know you, only knew what you were like on paper, would think whether you’re better than those people. Because the world doesn’t tell you … We don’t even need to go and get into overconfidence and self-centered bias. Let’s just say the world’s not fair and even if you’re awesome the world rewards being awesome on paper, not intrinsic awesomeness. Just accept this as a flaw in the world, and then consider that when you’re deciding whether or not you wanna try what you’re gonna do.

Another sort of general piece of advice that I offer people is if you wanna do almost anything in social science, and a lot of humanities, and you are dismayed but the crummy job prospects of people that major in the subjects. Then, my question … Can you do math? If so, why not just go and get an econ PhD and call what you’re doing economics X. I’m not even being flippant here. So I am baffled by people who like history and can do math, who do a history PhD. Why not just do econ and become a economic historian?

It is literally true that you will probably have tenure as an economist, before you would have your first assistant professor job as a historian. That’s how the world works. And then, once you have that tenure, you can work on anything you want. You never get another raise in your whole career, you probably have a better income stream than a historian would. So this is of course selfishly speaking. This is the kind of strategy that if everybody did it, it wouldn’t work anymore. But everybody’s not gonna do it are they Rob. So why don’t you go and do it?

Robert Wiblin: Well we’ve got the special tricks for you there. Just not too many of you do it-

Bryan Caplan: Economic philosophy of course. You can either go and try to become a philosophy PhD and try to be a philosophy professor, or you can go in economics and then do economic philosophy. Probably get tenure before you get your first job as a philosophy prof. And then, yes you’ll have to go and do some stuff you don’t like to get tenure probably, but then afterwards it’s clear sailing. So why not?

Robert Wiblin: It’s a shame that the evidence on postgraduate courses isn’t better. I recall one thing you said was that Master’s degrees don’t tend to do very well. Is that right?

Bryan Caplan: Yes. So we … Of course they still do have higher earnings, but basically when you combine the low completion probability with the modest gain and the high opportunity cost, because you know … The opportunity costs of high school is really low. Basically it’s like a high school dropouts wage. The further along you go, the bigger your opportunity cost is. And also, you’re starting to cut off some of your peak earning years too. And this it what winds up giving the bad result. But I’m not gonna say the master’s degree data is any good either, it’s very sparse.

In a way, the good news is the people are studying are putting more into studying decisions that more people face. So I suppose that’s good. But at the same time, given the sheer volume, you think there would be 20 good papers on it, and it’s very hard to find anything that I really thought was compelling

Reflections from Fire Country: Scale Inversely Correlates with Actionability (the SICA Doctrine)

 

England no longer existed. He’d got that—somehow he’d got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out.

- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department.

- Ernest Rutherford

I've noticed, recently with some urgency, that the more local the media content*, the more actionable and concrete it is.

For the last week I've been hiding from the smoke in my house in Sonoma County California, deciding hour-to-hour whether it's time to go. (I got my things ready weeks back instead of waiting for this year's fire.)

Rather than just waiting for an emergency alert to come through from an agency, I scroll through Twitter. Those agencies are on there, along with people on the ground, linking to the agencies and to recently updated maps (within hours.)

The #LNULightningcomplex is now about 500 square miles. A fire that big (#LNULightningComplex) has multiple parts (like the #WalbridgeFire and #HennesseyFire.) What I care about is how the fire closest to my house (the #Walbridgefire) is acting, where the local winds are pushing it, whether there is air support available to try to hold them back. I recognize now more than ever that, regarding (for example) the parts of the fire south and east of Lake Berryessa which have all merged with the #HennesseyFire, my interest is an idle one. There is no immediate life-and-property decision I have to make based on that information.

So it was with interest that I noticed that when I searched on the #Walbridgefire, the mix of Tweets included more actionable, concrete (though often dry) facts-and-figures - as opposed to the gigantic #LNULightningComplex in its totality, which has a much higher proportion of news stations (both national and local), people making political statements or otherwise connecting the existence of the fire to their own interest, or people making emotional statements (granted, often supportive ones.)

But more than that, it shows that the more concrete, immediate, and specific something is, the more likely statements about it are going to be useful ones, that we can actually employ to help us make decisions. Likewise, the broader, the more general, the more abstract something is, the more likely statements about it will be vague, not actionable, more about the nervous system that's making the statements, than about the external world the nervous system is trying to model. In fact this is something of a tautology, since the more abstract something is, the more it exists in the nervous system rather than as an external empirical entity.

To boil it down, Scale Inversely Correlates with Actionability, or SICA (pronounced "seek-uh"). Here, "scale" doesn't just mean physical dimension as with the fires, but rather broadness of definition. And actionability doesn't mean whether you are able to do it right now; it means whether you can come up with a clear plan of action afterward. As an example: "they should fix the houses in my state so they can withstand an earthquake." As opposed to, "my brother should fix his house so it can withstand an earthquake." One of those is more obviously broad, and less clearly actionable. In fact, in this sense, "actionable" implies that a claim is both falsifiable and meaningful

SICA is quite closely related to the old saw in American local politics, that "there is only one way to pave a road, not a Republican way or a Democratic way." A country is an abstract enough place that you can spend a lot of time arguing about "things" which seem to be important, but in a city, at some point someone has to move dirt, in a specific way, from one place to another to build something. This is why it's a good idea to, as much as possible, keep discussions on the object- vs meta-level. Human skills and problem-solving are not nearly as generalizeable as we would like to think. (This is why for example I stopped trying to improve at chess.)

It's also related to the idea of operationalizing definitions. You don't need to operationalize concrete entities that can be simultaneously directly experienced on the scale of one meter and one second. The more abstract, the more rigorous the definition must be. Our built-in sense of "folk physics" is good enough to meaningfully make predictions about the behavior of fist-sized rocks. But E=mc^2 is one of the most general statements ever made, and in order to be actionable, it must be in a rigorous formalism. Because "broader" entities do trend away from actionability, it's exactly these statements about broad entities ("matter", "energy") that need to be formalized and defined operationally the most. Otherwise, when we talk about such things we're probably just barking at each other.

more concrete	more abstract, broader
actionable	idle speculation
specific	general
clear	vague
true or false	"not even wrong"
falsifiable	not testable
meaningful	pointless
effortlessly rule-bound (event itself follows obvious logic)	Must be grounded in rigid formalism to have a chance of being meaningful

*As a side observation, news organizations are in the business of keeping you watching so you see commercials, than public service agencies and individuals motivated by their missions. It's probably for this reason that I c an't think of a single instance of media reporting that I have used for decision-making during this time. I make this observation even as someone not particularly predisposed to dislike media institutions.

**The astute reader will note that I've made a big jump from concrete to abstract right here, starting from the very humble "news about my fire is more actionable the more local it is" to a conclusion about the nature of belief statements and psychology in general. All non-imitative learning involves generalization; the key is knowing when you're more likely to be doing it to try to scrutinize it better.