Bryan Caplan: belief

Transcript context

…If there’s overinvestment in education, you talk about changing or getting rid of some subsidies. Could you imagine there being a role for government in making the signal more continuous or more convexified? For instance, you could allow federal funds for certificates rather than just degree programs. You could imagine governmental nudges to give people a three-year option, a two-year option. There are a lot of one-year alternatives to colleges popping up the way two-year community college could be treated. There seems to be a lot we could do but maybe aren’t doing to create or produce signaling options that waste fewer resources. What should we do there? What I would say is definitely worth some experiments. When you’re spending an enormous amount of money, you can take off 2 percent of it, and then use standard social science random assignment to really learn something. It’s been pointed out that a high percentage of government spending on healthcare is for medical research, but only a very small amount of education spending is for education research. The main disappointment there is, despite all the education research, it seems like it’s not very often actually used for any education policy. Medical research, you might have a similar pessimism, but I don’t think it’s as bad as that at least. It’s not as bad as there being a big literature saying that highlighting is totally ineffective for improving student learning. Yet almost every kid in America still has a highlighter. It’s actually on the list of mandatory school supplies for Fairfax County: “You must have a highlighter.” This is an item that science says you don’t need. Yet everyone must have one to be at school. Are you up for a round of overrated versus underrated?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.