he doesn’t really see any value in systems that are there purely to signal.
This seems like a mischaracterization of his view. I’m pretty sure he thinks its wrong to subsidize such signaling mechanisms.
First off signaling is relative, so if (say) everyone goes to high school and only the very best go to college, from a signaling perspective, this is just as useful a signal as everyone going to college and only the very best go to grad school. Therefore we should not spend public dollars getting more people to go to college.
Second, in the signaling framework, there are no externalities to schooling kids, so there is no market failing to correct with (say) the government subsidizing the debts of college students.
Third, due to the first point, if any major market failure is present its the tendency to get into signaling spirals, where the positive signal of (say) a high school education degrades over time, making everyone spend more years and dollars in college getting what was once the same signal as a high school diploma. More years of schooling here is a cost, which everyone would prefer to pay less of. So insofar as there’s any case for government involvement it ought to be a tax, not a subsidy.
This seems like a mischaracterization of his view. I’m pretty sure he thinks its wrong to subsidize such signaling mechanisms.
First off signaling is relative, so if (say) everyone goes to high school and only the very best go to college, from a signaling perspective, this is just as useful a signal as everyone going to college and only the very best go to grad school. Therefore we should not spend public dollars getting more people to go to college.
Second, in the signaling framework, there are no externalities to schooling kids, so there is no market failing to correct with (say) the government subsidizing the debts of college students.
Third, due to the first point, if any major market failure is present its the tendency to get into signaling spirals, where the positive signal of (say) a high school education degrades over time, making everyone spend more years and dollars in college getting what was once the same signal as a high school diploma. More years of schooling here is a cost, which everyone would prefer to pay less of. So insofar as there’s any case for government involvement it ought to be a tax, not a subsidy.