Bryan Caplan — What’s a University Degree Worth?

As the university school year begins to wrap up, we're bringing back a classic episode of the Curious Task! Alex Aragona speaks with Bryan Caplan about the value of a formal education, and compares the alleged benefits against the reality. References from The Curious Task Special Episode 15 with Bryan Caplan You can purchase Bryan Caplan’s New York Times best-seller, The Myth of the Rational Voter from Amazon Canada at this link. His other publications include Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (book), The Case Against Education (the book upon which this episode was based), and Open Borders (graphic novel).  This is an outline of Bryan’s upcoming work on Poverty: Who to Blame. You can refer to a breakdown of Bryan’s study of the Economic Models of Education, where he operationalizes his definition of “human capital purism” here. Bryan builds off of Michael Spence’s work on signaling. One of Michael’s publications, Signaling in Retrospect and the Informational Structure of Markets, can be accessed with an active JSTOR account. Bryan briefly uses the term Catch-22 that was coined by Joseph Heller’s novel of the same name, which can be purchased through Amazon Canada. There is a reference to the Indian caste system when Bryan was comparing the inclinations of degree-bearers to marry those who have a degree at a similar level. A thorough study of the sociopolitics of identity and status under the Indian caste system may be read here.  While discussing how to discipline thinking about the intelligent life in the universe, Bryan references the Drake Equation whose analysis by Leonor Sierra (University of Rochester) can be reviewed on NASA’s website. The Corporate Finance Institute published a rundown on the meaning of “austerity,” which can be read here. You can watch The Pianist, which Bryan references while forecasting relevancies in employer consideration, on Amazon Prime.