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One of the
bravest, most interesting and most valuable books about economic policy to have
appeared of late has just been published-and 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 allover
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 education - "having
the right qualifications, in the right subjects, from the right
institutions" - matters. 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 education-for the most part, at taxpayers' expense-it becomes
politically difficult to discriminate in favour of the top universities. That
would undercut the egalitarian thrust of the whole enterprise. Thus the best
universities find themselves squeezed, and one of the main links between
education and economic growth gets hammered. Measured against its own bean-counting goals,
"education, education, education" leaves a lot to be desired. But in
any case, the book insists, education is about more than economics. (This
column's prejudices, you see, are not spared.) Insisting on ramming more people
through a degraded university system is not just sure, for all the reasons
mentioned, to disappoint economically. It is also bound, through its
self-defeating preoccupation with economic growth, to sideline aspects that do
not claim to serve that purpose. "Our recent forebears", the author
concludes, "living in significantly poorer times, were occupied with the
cultural, moral and intellectual purposes of education, We impoverish ourselves
by neglecting these." "Does Education Matter? Myths about Education and Economic Growth", by Alison Wolf. Penguin Books. Reprinted from The Economist. June 2002
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