I am always dismayed at anti-intellectual perspectives and approaches to education.
My view is perhaps a bit of a "no true Scotsman", but I think if we're not measuring positive outcomes from more education, we're either not educating effectively, or we're not measuring the right outcomes.
It's also admittedly true that it will almost certainly never be possible to "properly educate" everyone, but I do think we'd do a heck of a lot better if society valued "education for the sake of education" as much as it valued the Superbowl, or the Kardashians, or whatever mindless vacuous thing is hot on TikTok these days.
What the heck happened to being curious about the magical wonders of the world? Why do people not care about science, maths and technology? It boggles and frustrates my mind!
My theory is that people who are parroting anti-intellectualist sentiments are really just reacting to socioeconomic inequality and academic elitism, but I fully agree with you that it’s an unfortunate, far more self-destructive response.
I personally think your perspective is a "sour grapes" about adult daycare. Why does the world need gatekeepers of the world's curiosities? How can they justify their six figure pricetag when the numbers skew so heavily towards "bad investment"? Framing it as "either you get a degree or you're a Superbowl Kardashian pleb" is the most midwit redditor take you could possibly have.
There was a lot of anti-intellectualism in the US at the time. You know, doing well on a test and other students would say "nerd alert nerd alert". The nerd in the movies always had his glasses taped together and was always asked to "say that again in English" and of course they didn't win the girl. But people like me simply did not care.
I remember instances of finally understanding something, and the feeling that somebody had suddenly turned the lights on.
The benefits of higher education appear to depend more upon the student than the curriculum or quality of instructors. I know that must sound elitist but like everything else in life it’s measurable and exceedingly predictable against intelligence, interest, and personality metrics. This is compounded given that below a given threshold a student is incapable of appreciating the difference between education and trade school.
Some people just aren’t capable of learning advanced concepts. It is obvious that this is so but saying this in higher education circles is akin to burning a Koran in Mecca.
"Other people have it better than me, I want that too, if I accept innate differences being the cause then it means I'll never get there which is unbearable. If all humans are born the same then I can declare the others malicious oppressors - which is a powerful moral weapon - and work from there. At least I'll have a chance to get some of what the others have".
I always knew I'd never be a pro ball player nor an Air Force pilot, due to the innate configuration of my body. It wasn't unbearable. Everybody has different strengths and weaknesses. I find what I am suited for and exploit that.
In the U.S. a lot of emotions surrounding this topic come from racist policies/perceptions of the past. It’s hard to have an open conversation about this topic without someone resorting to name calling.
> Some people just aren’t capable of learning advanced concepts.
...with current educational methods, that basically expect all students to "teach themselves on their own". Modern-day educators aren't even trying to meaningfully engage students who respond well to more direct forms of instruction, because that would involve actual, verifiable effort and "demean" their role.
If that were the case then either we wouldn't have such an advanced and we'll educated society today or that previous generations and societies were just as capable with less formal education.
When I hear people like you I always wonder how the human race is supposed to be doomed by a lack of intelligent people, yet somehow throughout history no such constraints are observable.
In the past people had lots of preconceptions of what black people couldn't do, you're doing the same and believing it is socially acceptable. The human brain is amazing, just because someone's brain scores worse than another in some motivation and culture test doesn't mean they are incapable of absurdly broad and vague things like "advanced concepts".
Can a severely intellectually disabled person learn calculus? It’s clear that not everyone has the same cognitive capabilities or potential. This is obvious. Your response is what I alluded to with my remark comparing talking about this topic to burning a Koran in Mecca. People get too emotional and throw out reason and logic.
I disagree. I think anyone can learn anything, though it may take an unreasonable amount of time and effort for some. Learning a new concept can be complicated, especially for things introduced in high school and university. All those concepts rely on others, so those lemmas have to be learned first. I do believe some people are generally quicker learners than others. But it's a continuous scale, not a yes/no thing. And interest in the subject plays a big role.
For a metaphor of education, I'd say people are like Turing machines. (A) If there is one person who can learn a concept, then any of them can; (B) some are faster than others; and, (C) the "optimal in practice" state is usually limited by need and not capability (i.e., using modern laptops too just check emails and browse the web).
>but saying this in higher education circles is akin to burning a Koran in Mecca.
I'm not a fan of preemptive impersonations of Copernicus. I'd rather read what people said and judge that.
> I disagree. I think anyone can learn anything, though it may take an unreasonable amount of time and effort for some. Learning a new concept can be complicated, especially for things introduced in high school and university. All those concepts rely on others, so those lemmas have to be learned first. I do believe some people are generally quicker learners than others.
Anyone can learn anything. But to what depth and degree within the time they have on Earth? What can they accomplish with their present knowhow or lack there of? These questions have measurable outputs. It's not enough to rely on potential. At some point, one should know his bearings and limitations.
> But it's a continuous scale, not a yes/no thing. And interest in the subject plays a big role.
Ability itself may follow a continuum, however sufficiency is digital.
Can an intellectually disabled person learn calculus? Some people are so intellectually disabled they can’t even learn to use a bathroom properly. It is clear that not everyone can learn any topic.
I've been doing civil, mechanical and electrical engineering for 20 years at this point. I don't know your experience, but from what I've seen while building huge infrastructure projects, your performance as a teenager in university amounts for very little. Its basically a measurement of how good at memorizimg problem sets you are. So, not elitist, just not universal and kind of rudimentary.
If your college education was memorizing problem sets, of course you didn't learn any engineering.
Caltech's engineering program had tests that were open book open note. Memorization would not work. You had to actually understand it.
Posts like yours make me appreciate Caltech.
P.S. My first job was designing the 757 stabilizer jackscrew assembly. I was flying on a 757 just the other day, 40 years later. How marvelous! It's a great airplane.
P.P.S. We had a few "formula memorizers" and "formula pluggers" at Boeing. I was often assigned to go over their work and fix it. Nobody trusted them.
How much can you be certain that your Boeing job was not the reason for your high performance, and that you are not just projecting your current self and state on mind onto your past? You are nothing like yoursef 40 year ago, to say something useless your atoms have changed 5 times over, and to say something useful you have definitely rewired your brain in many more ways. Anecdotal stories like yours are valuable, but only to you, that's why people do studies as you are of course very well aware. It could well be that the number one predictor for success is "intelligence" whatever that means, I offer the definition "to be able to absorb new information quickly and retain it and connect it to existing information to form new insights" so maybe Caltech was just a place where all such people went to and the teachers were like that so it felt "smart" and the format of the exam (open book) basically didmt really help but only enabled i.e did
not actively stop the flourisment of intelligence
in the students? Caltech might be good but there are many good places (Oxford, Cambridge, MIT e.g) so my untested theory could explain all of their successes. And then you went to Boeing and actually did things and that showed you how to be an enginner who made planes and your high intelligence allowed you to absorb that info quicker again and your are just projecting this future expert on a college intelligent but not expert self?
Just my 2 cents
> How much can you be certain that your Boeing job was not the reason for your high performance, and that you are not just projecting your current self and state on mind onto your past?
Because I started there as a newbie along with the formula pluggers. I could see what I could do vs what they could do. For example, one task required coming up with the spinning moment of inertia of the jackscrew assembly. A plugger sat a couple rows away, and looked at it, and asked "what book did you get that formula out of?" I said it wasn't in a book, so I used calculus. He just stared at me. He was a nice enough fellow, but didn't seem real interested in engineering, and would try to get by doing as little as possible.
I discovered that an undergraduate degree at Caltech conferred math skills that other universities put off until masters. Because I'd fix the math work of some of them, too. Over time, I was trusted more and more with more advanced work. The pluggers weren't.
I was an average student at Caltech.
I have little idea how Caltech compares today. But I've run into the formula pluggers in diverse engineering areas ever since. They would have all flunked out of Caltech.
I'm not sure why you question the notion that being able to understand where formulas come from is far more valuable than just memorizing them.
I'm sure there are other great universities that educate engineers that actually understand what they're doing rather than plugging in a formula. But I have no personal experience with them.
That is how our teaching institutions work, they teach by forcing you to learn or quit. You can't teach someone who doesn't want to learn it, so the first step is to give them an incentive to learn, and flunking those who don't want to learn is the way we do that. Any institution that doesn't flunk those who refuse to learn wont be very good at teaching.
My point in posting this here is not to brag, but to point out that a college education doesn't have to consist of memorizing formulas. If a particular college program requires that, there are better choices.
What is relevant is if one's engineering class consists of memorizing formulas, find a better class that emphasizes the how and the why. Math is a big part of that.
To clarify a bit, formula-plugging enables one to solve a certain set of engineering problems. Being unable to derive the formula can also lead one to mis-apply the formulas. (I've seen this happen multiple times.)
Being able to derive the formulas means one knows their limitations. It also means that one can derive a needed formula when it is not in the book. This means that one can solve a significantly larger set of engineering problems.
In aircraft design, this leads to lighter and less expensive parts without sacrificing strength or utility. It's an objectively better design.
Making one who can do this objectively a better engineer.
Well at least it doesn’t sound more elitist than it sounds like having Dunning-Kruger. You’re uncritically accepting your own assumption as truth.
In reality, even the best universities have more than a few horrible professors, and a student that’s struggling in class may actually just be going through a rough patch.
Because it is elitist. As someone who did both I have no irrational disdain for trade school because the curriculum of the trade school is almost entirely job relevant with very little signalling. Only elites appreciate the difference between signalling and not signalling.
A current piece of legislation in the U.S. is "The Inflation Reduction Act". Whether or not the real-world result of the policy would achieve even a modicum the stated intent has little impact on the package's likelihood of passage into law.
I'm from UK, so it's the first I've heard of this. It seems that their solution to curbing inflation is by spending money. Hmmm.
The concept that you can battle inflation by passing laws strikes my as deluded in the extreme. Battling inflation comes from sound economic principles (that you learn from your mother, not some economist). You simply can't will away inflation.
If you really want to battle inflation, just follow Warren Buffett's suggestion: you're no longer eligible for re-election if inflation exceeded 5% during your tenancy.
People working in epigenetics would probably disagree, moreover while some genes are highly predictive their predictive power is usually not as high as people think.
Er, because we behave the same way as we did thousands of years ago? It's the fact that so much of our behaviour is cultural that's made humans such a success. An obvious corollary is the importance of education.
I don't have access to the full article itself, but isn't it testing the difference between compulsory schooling and a bit more compulsory schooling, rather than some school or none? To be sure, education is wider than school, but I find it difficult to believe that schooling doesn't make a profound difference, even if slightly more schooling shows diminishing returns.
It is. My point was that “compulsory schooling versus a bit more compulsory schooling” is what they are measuring and not “less educated vs more educated”.
I too would expect a difference in outcomes between more and less compulsory schooling. But I would expect it from the non-education related impacts of it (I.e. de-facto childcare and keeping the kids/teens from engaging in as much long-term harmful activities)
It really is not. Genetics account for much of behaviour, sure, but not a majority: environment and conditioning account for most behaviour. (biochemist)
> Plomin’s argument is that, in a society with universal education, the greatest part of the variation in learning abilities is accounted for by genetics, not home environment or quality of school – these factors, he says, do have an effect but it’s much smaller than is popularly believed.
It's important to recognize that in this model, the hypothetical control group is also treated with a very high quality[1], universal, education.
> He finds that genetic heritability accounts for 50% of the psychological differences between us, from personality to mental abilities. But that leaves 50% that should be accounted for by the environment. However, Plomin argues, research shows that most of that 50% is not attributable to the type of environmental influences that can be planned for or readily affected – ie it’s made up of unpredictable events. And of the environmental influences that can be moderated, much of it, he argues, is really an expression of genetics.
I'm not sure where that 50% figure comes from, it seems rather generous. Nonetheless, I'll accept it for argument's sake. It's not unreasonable to split nature and nurture roughly 50-50 as a sort of rough bayesian prior.
Nonetheless, this touches on genetics as a confounding factor for environmental factors. More on this here: [2]
---
I could go fishing for papers that contradict yours, but I think it's perhaps more helpful to switch perspectives a bit. Think of this as extra information, not a rebuttal. At the international scale, access to education's impact on vertical mobility is huge, and this difference overshadows the influence of genetics.[3][4] IMO the macro perspective on education helps!
---
Edit/addendum. I did go on a little fishing expedition, and found this very helpful: [5]
Selected extracts:
> When environments are homogeneous for all, all individual differences become heritable. [...] Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches.
> The discovery that all behavior is partially heritable transformed psychology, but, ironically, it also transformed behavior genetics. Once we accept that basically everything—not only schizophrenia and intelligence, but also marital status and television watching—is heritable, it becomes clear that specific estimates of heritability are not very important. The omnipresence of genetic influences does not demonstrate that behavior is “less psychological” or “more biologically determined” than had originally been thought; rather it shows that behavior arises from factors intrinsic as well as extrinsic to the individual. The real implications of heritability lie not in questions of relative biological determinism but in revealing the need to understand both the mechanisms through which the individual, whether consciously or not, directs his or her own life course and his or her power to do so.
Also outcomes. Even under perfect settings/conditions in which everyone has equally access and opportunity, huge disparities in learning ability and achievement will remain.
I am growing more disturbed in recent years by how true this statement is in our current society. While not all behavior is hereditary, genetics plays a massive role. I wish it were not taboo to talk about this more openly. While I have found few, at least there are some people attempting to give this subject more consideration: https://youtu.be/-4VCISnwE-k
Everyone becomes a geneticist when they have biological children. Even in the small talk and banter among strangers when they observe parents and children.
I really don’t think there is evidence of that. Really we seem to be a lot of raw hardware with few factory programmed behaviors. Our culture and environment is the software.
It’s not any less disturbing. We like to think of ourselves as individuals with free will, but between genetics and environment, we are at best steering the car, not building the roads.
If that were actually the case there would be far less inequality.
The reality is that money and land are used as weapons to distort any concept of letting genes express themselves in a non distorted environment. Humanity has never suffered from a lack of "good genetics", the entire point of "genetics" is to ensure compatibility with the surrounding environment.
Poverty by far exceeds what is explainable by genes.
Lots of data about this in The Case Against Education. [1] The basic argument is that much of education is signaling. It would be a better use of resources to let people signal more cheaply instead of getting degrees in subjects that do not teach them skills that are useful for jobs or life more generally.
I disagreed with some of the harsher recommendations but found the data compelling.
My understanding of the argument of The Case Against Education is different. "Signaling cheaply" is a difficult problem because cost is part of signal. Consider: can people signal more cheaply instead of buying expensive wedding rings?
Rather, the argument is that while wedding rings would always be somewhat expensive, currently it is too expensive because purchase of wedding rings is subsidized by public tax. So public subsidy of wedding rings should stop. Then it would be as expensive as needed to signal, instead of being crazy expensive, and public money won't be wasted.
Cost is an intrinsic part of the signal for diamond rings because the signal is "I care about you so much I will spend lots of money to prove it". But for job-readiness, the signal does not have to be costly. It could be accomplished with tests. That would prove ability. It would be harder to prove grit or endurance. But compensation packages could be adjusted to filter out people who are less likely to stick around.
It surely matters some. We have a nearly 100% literate society. All people can work with the basic of numbers. All people have the basics of nationalistic myth making, which is a critical part of having a stable nation. People have lots of practice in following orders for small rewards. Not all that much is taught up through high school, but the things that are are important for raising the baseline, even just a little.
As for College, it is a lot of signaling, but it also gives practice taking in lots of new information when the expectations of performance are much higher and much closer to that of a typical professional job. It takes that low bar of high school and adds onto it significantly, and the hope is that even if the information was not useful, the ability to assimilate a few books worth of information within in a few weeks of starting a new job will not be a new experience.
I'm not sure where you're from, but in the US, literacy rates are definitely not near 100%. In the report below 8.2% we're functionally illiterate and unable to participate in the survey.
Sort of proving my point since that page you linked states that non-us born people were more likely to be functionally illiterate in English. Makes sense since they would not have gone through 18 years of US schooling in English, but may be literate in their native language.
Many countries have literacy rates near 100%. The European country I am in now has a 99% literacy rate.
This study is specifically about extending compulsory schooling to age 14, 15, and 16. People are literate and can work with numbers by 13.
If the benefit of high school is "raising the baseline just a little", we should ask ourselves whether "just a little" benefit justifies the cost. Education is not free, so it needs to move the needle.
One way to measure the benefit is to look at outcomes of interest after long time has passed, so this study did that. There was no effect, casting doubt to earlier studies that found large effects. One strength of this study is that they work with complete data, unlike previous studies which mostly worked with sampled panels. This suggests sampling bias as a mechanism to explain previous studies.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadI am always dismayed at anti-intellectual perspectives and approaches to education.
My view is perhaps a bit of a "no true Scotsman", but I think if we're not measuring positive outcomes from more education, we're either not educating effectively, or we're not measuring the right outcomes.
It's also admittedly true that it will almost certainly never be possible to "properly educate" everyone, but I do think we'd do a heck of a lot better if society valued "education for the sake of education" as much as it valued the Superbowl, or the Kardashians, or whatever mindless vacuous thing is hot on TikTok these days.
What the heck happened to being curious about the magical wonders of the world? Why do people not care about science, maths and technology? It boggles and frustrates my mind!
I remember instances of finally understanding something, and the feeling that somebody had suddenly turned the lights on.
...with current educational methods, that basically expect all students to "teach themselves on their own". Modern-day educators aren't even trying to meaningfully engage students who respond well to more direct forms of instruction, because that would involve actual, verifiable effort and "demean" their role.
When I hear people like you I always wonder how the human race is supposed to be doomed by a lack of intelligent people, yet somehow throughout history no such constraints are observable.
In the past people had lots of preconceptions of what black people couldn't do, you're doing the same and believing it is socially acceptable. The human brain is amazing, just because someone's brain scores worse than another in some motivation and culture test doesn't mean they are incapable of absurdly broad and vague things like "advanced concepts".
For a metaphor of education, I'd say people are like Turing machines. (A) If there is one person who can learn a concept, then any of them can; (B) some are faster than others; and, (C) the "optimal in practice" state is usually limited by need and not capability (i.e., using modern laptops too just check emails and browse the web).
>but saying this in higher education circles is akin to burning a Koran in Mecca.
I'm not a fan of preemptive impersonations of Copernicus. I'd rather read what people said and judge that.
Anyone can learn anything. But to what depth and degree within the time they have on Earth? What can they accomplish with their present knowhow or lack there of? These questions have measurable outputs. It's not enough to rely on potential. At some point, one should know his bearings and limitations.
> But it's a continuous scale, not a yes/no thing. And interest in the subject plays a big role.
Ability itself may follow a continuum, however sufficiency is digital.
Caltech's engineering program had tests that were open book open note. Memorization would not work. You had to actually understand it.
Posts like yours make me appreciate Caltech.
P.S. My first job was designing the 757 stabilizer jackscrew assembly. I was flying on a 757 just the other day, 40 years later. How marvelous! It's a great airplane.
P.P.S. We had a few "formula memorizers" and "formula pluggers" at Boeing. I was often assigned to go over their work and fix it. Nobody trusted them.
Because I started there as a newbie along with the formula pluggers. I could see what I could do vs what they could do. For example, one task required coming up with the spinning moment of inertia of the jackscrew assembly. A plugger sat a couple rows away, and looked at it, and asked "what book did you get that formula out of?" I said it wasn't in a book, so I used calculus. He just stared at me. He was a nice enough fellow, but didn't seem real interested in engineering, and would try to get by doing as little as possible.
I discovered that an undergraduate degree at Caltech conferred math skills that other universities put off until masters. Because I'd fix the math work of some of them, too. Over time, I was trusted more and more with more advanced work. The pluggers weren't.
I was an average student at Caltech.
I have little idea how Caltech compares today. But I've run into the formula pluggers in diverse engineering areas ever since. They would have all flunked out of Caltech.
I'm not sure why you question the notion that being able to understand where formulas come from is far more valuable than just memorizing them.
I'm sure there are other great universities that educate engineers that actually understand what they're doing rather than plugging in a formula. But I have no personal experience with them.
Wasn't your point that Caltech would have taught them not to be formula-pluggers?
It was just a school, man, relax, you're not actually better than other people.
My point in posting this here is not to brag, but to point out that a college education doesn't have to consist of memorizing formulas. If a particular college program requires that, there are better choices.
What is relevant is if one's engineering class consists of memorizing formulas, find a better class that emphasizes the how and the why. Math is a big part of that.
Being able to derive the formulas means one knows their limitations. It also means that one can derive a needed formula when it is not in the book. This means that one can solve a significantly larger set of engineering problems.
In aircraft design, this leads to lighter and less expensive parts without sacrificing strength or utility. It's an objectively better design.
Making one who can do this objectively a better engineer.
In reality, even the best universities have more than a few horrible professors, and a student that’s struggling in class may actually just be going through a rough patch.
The concept that you can battle inflation by passing laws strikes my as deluded in the extreme. Battling inflation comes from sound economic principles (that you learn from your mother, not some economist). You simply can't will away inflation.
If you really want to battle inflation, just follow Warren Buffett's suggestion: you're no longer eligible for re-election if inflation exceeded 5% during your tenancy.
The linked study essentially does so in it’s very title.
I too would expect a difference in outcomes between more and less compulsory schooling. But I would expect it from the non-education related impacts of it (I.e. de-facto childcare and keeping the kids/teens from engaging in as much long-term harmful activities)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/29/so-is-it-nat...
> Plomin’s argument is that, in a society with universal education, the greatest part of the variation in learning abilities is accounted for by genetics, not home environment or quality of school – these factors, he says, do have an effect but it’s much smaller than is popularly believed.
It's important to recognize that in this model, the hypothetical control group is also treated with a very high quality[1], universal, education.
> He finds that genetic heritability accounts for 50% of the psychological differences between us, from personality to mental abilities. But that leaves 50% that should be accounted for by the environment. However, Plomin argues, research shows that most of that 50% is not attributable to the type of environmental influences that can be planned for or readily affected – ie it’s made up of unpredictable events. And of the environmental influences that can be moderated, much of it, he argues, is really an expression of genetics.
I'm not sure where that 50% figure comes from, it seems rather generous. Nonetheless, I'll accept it for argument's sake. It's not unreasonable to split nature and nurture roughly 50-50 as a sort of rough bayesian prior.
Nonetheless, this touches on genetics as a confounding factor for environmental factors. More on this here: [2]
---
I could go fishing for papers that contradict yours, but I think it's perhaps more helpful to switch perspectives a bit. Think of this as extra information, not a rebuttal. At the international scale, access to education's impact on vertical mobility is huge, and this difference overshadows the influence of genetics.[3][4] IMO the macro perspective on education helps!
---
Edit/addendum. I did go on a little fishing expedition, and found this very helpful: [5]
Selected extracts:
> When environments are homogeneous for all, all individual differences become heritable. [...] Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches.
> The discovery that all behavior is partially heritable transformed psychology, but, ironically, it also transformed behavior genetics. Once we accept that basically everything—not only schizophrenia and intelligence, but also marital status and television watching—is heritable, it becomes clear that specific estimates of heritability are not very important. The omnipresence of genetic influences does not demonstrate that behavior is “less psychological” or “more biologically determined” than had originally been thought; rather it shows that behavior arises from factors intrinsic as well as extrinsic to the individual. The real implications of heritability lie not in questions of relative biological determinism but in revealing the need to understand both the mechanisms through which the individual, whether consciously or not, directs his or her own life course and his or her power to do so.
---
[1] from a historical perspective
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-020-00079-z
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/better-learning
[4] https://ourworldindata.org/global-education
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2899491/
https://youtu.be/62jZENi1ed8
It’s not any less disturbing. We like to think of ourselves as individuals with free will, but between genetics and environment, we are at best steering the car, not building the roads.
The reality is that money and land are used as weapons to distort any concept of letting genes express themselves in a non distorted environment. Humanity has never suffered from a lack of "good genetics", the entire point of "genetics" is to ensure compatibility with the surrounding environment.
Poverty by far exceeds what is explainable by genes.
I disagreed with some of the harsher recommendations but found the data compelling.
https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...
Rather, the argument is that while wedding rings would always be somewhat expensive, currently it is too expensive because purchase of wedding rings is subsidized by public tax. So public subsidy of wedding rings should stop. Then it would be as expensive as needed to signal, instead of being crazy expensive, and public money won't be wasted.
As for College, it is a lot of signaling, but it also gives practice taking in lots of new information when the expectations of performance are much higher and much closer to that of a typical professional job. It takes that low bar of high school and adds onto it significantly, and the hope is that even if the information was not useful, the ability to assimilate a few books worth of information within in a few weeks of starting a new job will not be a new experience.
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
Many countries have literacy rates near 100%. The European country I am in now has a 99% literacy rate.
If the benefit of high school is "raising the baseline just a little", we should ask ourselves whether "just a little" benefit justifies the cost. Education is not free, so it needs to move the needle.
One way to measure the benefit is to look at outcomes of interest after long time has passed, so this study did that. There was no effect, casting doubt to earlier studies that found large effects. One strength of this study is that they work with complete data, unlike previous studies which mostly worked with sampled panels. This suggests sampling bias as a mechanism to explain previous studies.