I'd recommend reading Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education. He argues that getting a high quality education is a good investment on average, but mostly no

I'd recommend reading Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education. He argues that getting a high quality education is a good investment on average, but mostly not because it actually makes you better at anything, rather explicitly because it acts as a socioeconomic filter and subsequent signal. Evidence for this: - In college you learn things roughly linearly, taking in roughly the same amount of information each semester. There is a large effect on average income if you get a degree. If you go for seven semesters and then leave without a degree, there's no significant effect on earnings over having never gone at all. Surely you must have learned something while you were there, and if that information was valuable, it should have affected your earnings somehow. - If you test people on the information they learned in school they don't test much better on it than people that never took it, indicating both that they don't use it and don't have that skill anymore, despite still cashing in on the degree somehow in the way of earnings. - In scenarios where an education system has all at once added or subtracted a year from a degree program for everyone, the subsequent effect on degree holders was an order of magnitude smaller on the percent change in earnings of the degree receivers than it was on the percent change on time learning. (~2% change in earnings / 25% change in time in school) Basically, it seems that the labor market has to filter down resumes per application to a high-demand job somehow, and that we have very few actual high quality signals to do so, so we lean on signals for academic pedigree. This results in people with academic pedigree being disproportionately successful, which reinforces the impression that academic pedigree is a signal for someone who will be successful, and is further reinforced by biases towards hiring people like them. It might actually be that scaling our existing education system isn't very useful, and would just force the labor market to pick another, maybe even less meritocratic, signal to filter candidates on. If that's true, we might be better off targeting the problem of finding better signals for the labor market to filter on. It definitely has an ideological bent, but if you get past that the arguments are actually pretty compelling, and at least to me (as someone who works with the education system) look like the strongest arguments for the role education plays in our economic system.