How Schooling is Like Garbage Collection

Brilliant. Make sure to note this in your (hopefully) upcoming book on education.

While I certainly agree that nerds underestimate the boredom most people endure in high school, I believe many drop outs lie about their trues reasons for not finishing school. Many of them were probably too dumb to handle the material and would rather claim boredom rather than stupidity as the culprit.

I just happen to be reading this part of James Buchanan today and thought that it applied to your “Social Desirability Bias” :

“As and example, the individual may cast a ballot-box vote for the enforcement of prohibition at the same time that he visits his bootlegger, without feeling that he is acting inconsistently.” – p. 366, Buchanan, 1954 – Individual Choice in Voting and the Market. J.P.E.

merely noted for general consumption.

This is true not only for college, but also for high and middle school as well. In fact, this is something I’ve been talking about for a while, which is that middle and high schools are no longer designed to properly educate the majority of students, who have no desire to go to college. If middle and high schools would prepare students for auto repair, plumbing, electronics, etc. — which is to say, things that students actually see value in and aren’t bored by — they would stay in school. I have a Ph.D in the humanities and a M.A. in English, and I taught English/Literature in middle and high school and I was asked all the time how reading some great work of literature was going to benefit them. I could have given the standard pat answers, but I chose to be honest with them and tell them that it wouldn’t benefit them at all, since most of them weren’t going to pay any attention and wouldn’t ever pick up a book again after they graduated — but that it could benefit them if they wanted it to, by showing them more of the world and more about people than they could experience otherwise. It could benefit them, but most likely it would not. Certainly I never benefited from anything I found boring — and it often wasn’t the teachers’ faults I was bored. I dropped out of a M.S. degree in molecular biology because I was bored to tears, so I can relate. I learned a lot when I wasn’t bored, and nothing once I was. Turns out I needed something more complex than the hard sciences, for which literature and the humanities fit the bill — especially my interdisciplinary approach to them. So when I’m asked if I regret having dropped out of my MS program, I say “absolutely not.” Of course, I do have the advantage of having a Ph.D. now, so there’s no social stigma attached, either.

Extra schooling also doesn’t guarantee you extra money. I have a Ph.D., and I don’t have any extra money at all. Seriously underemployed is more like it.

I was bored in HS. Fear kept me from dropping out. Went to college because I noticed that people who didn’t tended to work the hardest and be least compensated. By getting my college degree, I get to be lazy and paid well.

I was valedictorian in my high school, and was just absurdly bored. I compensated by reading my own books during class, and telling my teachers that whined about it to talk to me when I wasn’t leading the class. If I had been second or third in the class, this tactic wouldn’t have worked. If I were going to a public school, it probably wouldn’t have worked.

I blame the way school is taught. I knew what was best for me in that situation, but save for my enormous brain I would’ve been forced to stop getting smarter and pay attention to a lesson I didn’t need.

I’m young enough (25) to remember how prominent this problem was with my friends, and how irritated they were that my appeal-to-winnitude worked with the teachers.

Data from the BLS on wages of garbage collectors.

Percentile 10% 25% 50% 75% 90%
Hourly Wage $8.21 $10.59 $14.15 $18.48 $24.19
Annual Wage $17,070 $22,030 $29,420 $38,440 $50,320

Compared to all occupations
10 25 median 75 90
16060 20920 31410 49640 75910

So the median for garbage collectors is 29 thousand. That is less than the median for all occupations. How big is the compensating differential?

I dropped out of high school, and it was among the best decisions I ever made.

I dropped out because I was completely and utterly bored to tears, and it was consuming time I could have been putting to a productive use (please note, ‘a productive use’ not ‘a more productive use’, the useful product of high school was *zero*). So I dropped out, and spent the time more wisely. I home schooled myself, worked a bit, started a computer consulting firm, home schooled my younger brother, etc, etc, etc… lots of cool stuff, learned a *hell* of a lot (certainly more than I’d learned in the previous 4-5 years of compulsory incarceration^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H education).

Of course wandering off to college a year later (at 17) and getting degrees in mathematics and physics probably helped… 🙂

Dropping out of school is easy to regret, because if you’d stuck it out it would be safely behind you now anyway. But if you’d become a garbageman you’d still be a garbageman today.

Skeptikos,

if you were bored, then you should have tried to get into a harder major. That’s what I did. (yes, when done properly, the humanities is much, much harder than the hard sciences, due to the formers’ complexity)

Well said. there are lots of dropouts simply because they are not smart/hardworking enough.

Ekonomix
http://turkeconomy.blogspot.com/

I understand your analogy and I get your point. However, I disagree with your last statement that people who drop out of school say that they regret dropping out of school because society tells them that this is something they should regret. I think about the type of person I was at the age of 16 when I could have dropped out of school. I am completely different now at the age of 23. I can’t say that the decisions that I made at the age of 16 were good decisions because I had no real life experience. People who drop out of school at 16 have no real life experience. Then, 10, 15 years down the road, they realize that life would have been easier had they finished school.

The number one cause for divorce in America is financial problems. Most people who drop out of school have financial problems. This means that they are more likely to get divorced. Divorces and debt are very hard on a person. If the person had stayed in school for one or two more years, this would possibly be two things that they might avoid, making their lives easier. So, once again, I don’t think that people say they regret dropping out of school because society wants them to say that, but really because they realize that life could be easier had they stayed in school.