Bryan Caplan: recommendation

Transcript context

…In your education book, you don’t devote a lot of attention to the networks, the social networks that form in schools. Yet my interactions with Bryan Caplan suggest that he finds them important. Your advice is for students to go talk to speakers, to faculty, to other students, and so on. So I was wondering if you could elaborate on how you see these networks interact with your story of signaling. Do they impact career outcomes? If they do, is it just a form of signaling, or do they actually create value by spreading beliefs and habits, connecting individuals with different characteristics, and so on? Great question. I do have one section on who you know. This is a subject where I spent a lot of time reading sociology to find out . . . they actually empirically study this quite a bit more than economists, at least, for labor markets. So definitely true that social networks are hugely important for the labor market. A pretty commonly cited factoid is that about half the people got their job because they knew somebody. But this does not mean that the social networks that people are getting in school are very helpful because there’s a couple of other key qualifiers, namely the kinds of social networks, the kinds of social ties that are very helpful. Either it’s people who totally love you, like close relatives, or it’s people who are in your exact field. For a graduate student, then, I would say that social network is hugely important because, especially if you want to be a professor, then your professors have the job you want, and they know other people who have that job. Those are the kinds of social networks that are great. Similarly, like CS at Stanford — great social network because there you are studying with a bunch of people that you are very likely to be working with or for or be the vendor for, or they’re going to know such people. Those are the really valuable social networks. However, the problem is that most college majors are so loosely tied to any occupation, that it is phenomenally unlikely you will ever work again with someone that is a fellow student or the professor. If you’re an English major, the odds that you will ever get a job from a fellow student — very low; that you will do a startup with a fellow student — low; that you will hire someone else; that your professor can get you a job. Unless, of course, you want to be an English professor, in which case, that’s great. I would say is that social networks in general are very important. Academic ones are grossly overrated. The people who usually ask this question are Silicon Valley people, and they are seeing a narrow subset of labor market where they’re right. But if you step back and just realize how nonvocational most majors are and how vast the economy is, it’s too unlikely. Then there’s other exceptions. There are certain fraternities that are good at getting their brothers jobs in finance. That’s where they funnel them. But these are very close ties. Remember a fraternity — it’s a brotherhood. This is what really counts. Like the Granovetter strength of weak ties stuff — this was one of the most cited papers in all of social science. When I started reading, I was like, “Wow. Essentially, no one believes the paper, but it’s got 39 citations.” That’s the main story you might tell from why educational social networks are good, and this is wrong. Next question. Robin?…

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