
The central thesis of my The Case Against Education is that actually-existing education is a terrible waste of taxpayer money. Since signaling, not building human capital, is the main function of education, the main effect of government subsidies is credential inflation. In economic jargon, my claim is that education has a low (indeed, negative) social return.
Along the way, however, I also show that the private (or, as I prefer to call it, the “selfish”) return to education heavily depends on pre-existing student ability. Despite misleading statements by mainstream education economists, college attendance in particular is not a good career investment for most of the population.
In January, Chris Rufo got a lot of pushback for highlighting the high salaries of the managers of Panda Express and Chipotle restaurants. One eloquent example of such pushback (though don’t miss this pushback to the pushback):
In a debate over whether the problems facing young men are really that bad, Christopher Rufo argued that things are actually pretty good and suggested that there are great jobs at Panda Express and Chipotle. It’s one thing to tell kids to go to trade school; it’s quite another to start celebrating demeaning service sector jobs. Of course, people need to work at places like Chipotle. But telling smart white men to settle for them is tone deaf beyond belief.
Rufo may have only been highlighting the “decent” pay at these jobs to demonstrate “full employment.” But the implications of posts like this and others in the current debate demand that young white men need to accept declining status. Their parents had respectable, white-collar jobs that provided for a family. Now the sons (never the daughters — they’re told to follow their dreams and go to college) have to settle for a dead-end job.
What does my number-crunching in The Case Against Education say about all this? First and foremost: know thyself.
Don’t base your life choices on what your immediate social circle finds “demeaning.” As Dirty Jobs repeatedly proves, people routinely get used to jobs that initially disgust them.
Don’t base your life choices on whether parents and teachers constantly tell you that you’re “smart.” They’re not trustworthy assessors of your intelligence.
Don’t rule out options because they require “declining status.” If your family’s initial status is above average, declining status is the mathematical norm. That’s what “regression to the mean” means.
What should you do instead? First and foremost: Get objective evidence on your own intelligence.
If your SAT score is at 1200 or greater, your odds of successfully finishing a “real” major are quite good.
If your SAT is in the 1100-1200 range, it’s a toss-up.
If you’re in the 1000-1100 range, only try college if your peers consider you an annoyingly hard worker.
Below 1000? Don’t go.
Supplement this with a candid assessment of your work ethic. If you got markedly better grades than peers with similar SAT scores, count that as a 50-100 SAT point buff. If you got markedly worse grades than peers with similar SAT scores, count that as a 50-100 SAT point hit.
What will go wrong if you ignore my advice? The most likely scenario is that you spend years worth of time and tuition, then fail to finish your degree. Maybe you’ll keep failing crucial classes. Maybe you’ll keep switching majors. Maybe you’ll die of boredom. The precise mechanism makes little difference: Since about 70% of the college payoff comes from completion, non-completion implies a terrible return on investment.
The second most-likely scenario is that you find a really easy major that allows you to graduate even though you just aren’t much of a student. This, in turn, puts you at high risk (probably >50% chance) of permanent “malemployment,” where you simply can’t find a college-type job despite the B.A. in your possession. Again, this implies a terrible return on investment.
Clever readers will be tempted to protest: “But Bryan, what about your advice to ‘Do Ten Times as Much’?!” Instead of telling people with poor SAT scores and low grades to skip college, shouldn’t I tell them to finally apply themselves?
Answer: If you are sincerely willing to multiply your academic effort by a factor of 10, then give yourself an extra 200 SAT points. But almost everyone who claims to be willing to do so is either lying to self-deceiving.
Furthermore, if you’re really willing to try that hard, why not devote yourself to success in a non-academic endeavor where raw intelligence matters less? A non-academic endeavor such as… rising up the hierarchy at Panda Express or Chipotle.
P.S. Contrary to many, Panda Express tastes better than Cowen-anointed “authentic” Chinese food like Mama Chang’s…
I went to college on a National Merit Scholarship. MY SAT scores were much higher than your cutoff (and this was before the changes to scoring in 1994) My high school grades were not valedictorian level, but something like a 3.8 at one of the best public schools in the state. And I almost flunked out of my mid-tier state school in the first year.
Know thyself is good advice, but the problem is that 1) who you are at 18 is not a very predictable guide to who you will be at 48 and 2) looking at external sources to do self-assessment like SAT scores is great on average, but you are not an average, you're just you.
Should I have gone to university? By your measure, absolutely. But, I would probably have been better off if I had taken a gap year or two to work or travel and come back better. As it was, it took me almost 10 years to get my degree from when I first started. I eventually got into a career path that needed that degree, but I was almost 30 by then.
The national average for a Panda Express Manager is 55k. It pays so well at the one near Rufo because it's in a posh Seattle suburb with a median home price of $800k. In other words, they have to pay more to attract talent but all the extra income going straight back into the cost of living, leaving you no better off.
If you run the math the $100k manager job will never afford a home anywhere near it.
So basically Rufo can't do math and his sentiment is pure resentment.
If I were to be generous to Rufo, I would say he's in the same blind spot that everyone who owned a home before 2022 has. They don't understand that housing doubled in price or more since 2020 (prices + rates) and that this completely changes what is and isn't a living wage. There really are two Americas based on home ownership, and young men don't own homes.