I guess that's the paper you were looking for
The education shibboleth
The Economist | 6/6/02
One of the bravest, most interesting and most valuable books about
economic policy to have appeared of late has just been publishedand it
was written by a non-economist. Alison Wolf is a professor of education
at the University of London. Few academics with a position such as that
would choose to write a book questioning what is today probably the most
cherished myth of economic policymakers all over the world: the idea
that more education is the key to economic success. Yet this is the
daring mission which Does Education Matter? takes on*. The book is
chiefly concerned with Britain, whose prime minister, Tony Blair, declared
his three highest priorities in government to be education, education,
education. The arguments and the findings are of much wider relevance,
and of pressing importance too.
So far as individuals are concerned, the evidence reviewed in the book
shows, as you would expect, that educationhaving the right
qualifications, in the right subjects, from the right
institutionsmatters. Indeed, it matters more than ever before. Those
who leave school early or without qualifications are tagged, as it were,
for low incomes, with a probability that is high and rising.
Increasingly, those who fail to get a degree, or in some cases a degree
from a good university, are sorted in a similarly brutal way. In other
words, the private returns to education are high. But another question
also needs to be answered, especially in countries with education
systems (up to and including the universities) that are financed by the
state: namely, what are the returns for society as a whole?
The book shows that they can be a lot lower than you might think. In
particular, more education does not necessarily mean more growth, as
most politicians (and economists) unthinkingly suppose.
The doubts do not arise so much over primary and secondary education.
Modern societies depend on high levels of literacy and basic skills in
mathematics. If students leave primary and secondary schools without
them, that is a public burden as well as a private one. At the top,
modern societies also need excellent universities producing substantial
but not vast numbers of graduates equipped to be researchers and
practitioners in medicine, engineering and the sciences. More generally,
education does (or can) contribute to an individual's human capital,
which makes people more productive. And if a society's individuals are
more productive, you might suppose, the society itself is more
productive.
So what is the problem? If all this is true, how can more education fail
to make a country more prosperous? A first crucial point is that
education is a positional good: that is, getting yourself tagged for
high wages is not just about being educated, it is also about being
better educated than the next man. To some extent, education is a race:
if everybody runs faster, that may be good in itself, but it does not
mean that more people can finish in the top 10%. In that sense, much of
the extra effort may be wasted. In weighing the social benefits of
higher spending on education against the cost, this needs to be borne in
mind.
Where the book excels is not in making this somewhat familiar point,
important though it may be, but in drawing attention to other dangers in
the present obsession with education and growth. One is that expanding
education thoughtlessly may actually weaken the link with growth, such
as it is. Another is that the preoccupation with economic growth narrows
and distorts society's idea of what education should be.
In Britain, as in many other countries, the economic emphasis has
produced a fixation with quantitative targets: the government wants ever
more people to go to university, and has tailored its financing policies
to that end. The increase in numbers appears to have reduced the average
quality of a university education. That is one cost. Any gains to be
expected from pushing out more graduates are then further reduced by the
positional-good effect. In addition, expanded recruitment of teachers at
the tertiary level drains the best recruits from teaching posts in
secondary schools. Worst of all, maybe, from an economic point of view,
the best universities are being starved of resources. As a result, they
are no longer able to do as good a job of preparing the very brightest
students for their role at the cutting-edge of science and technology.
Equally impoverished
Why should this draining of resources from elite universities happen?
You may think it unlikely, especially if the government is convinced
that education spurs growth. Experience proves otherwise, as the book
shows. Great efforts to expand the number of graduates have gone
hand-in-hand with budgetary stringency across the system, to make the
overall strategy affordable. Also, in a regime that is moving towards
very wide access to university edu
