Why the Government Isn’t Educating Productivity

President Trump recently classified a certain group of graduate degrees as non-professional degrees. This decision lowered the limit for Federal student loans for these programs. Whether one perceives this as a helpful reduction of spending or a political slight against social sciences, this example shows the government rationale regarding education. Education’s value is often evaluated by its ability to create useful career skills, under the assumption that many citizens with professional skills will create a flourishing economy. However, the government view of education is woefully inadequate to count the realities of productivity or the inherent uncertainty of the economy into the future. The government educational model runs off of the assumption that citizens with career skills are an input that will increase the nation’s economy and thus also increase welfare. At the state and federal level, education departments try to push all forms of education towards teaching more “applied” or “career relevant” skills rather than understanding education’s role in human formation.

The first problem with this paradigm of education is that it fails to understand the real source of productivity. A combination of risk-taking, insight, an original blend of skills, and luck are the real drivers of the most successful entrepreneurs. Great entrepreneurs are not often those who thrive in traditional careers. Often, having a clear career path can serve as a disincentive to continue a risky entrepreneurial journey. The ideas behind most of America’s most highly valued companies were started by people who were able to think of something others had not or do something others had done but in a better way. The success of these businesses is often enabled by a great number of workers with specific professional skills, but those professional skills are useless without the visionary disruptive idea behind them. Economic growth would not miraculously increase if the white and blue collar population were to double. Without the deeply situational risk-taking of the entrepreneur, skilled workers would have no place to apply their gifts.

The second problem with the profitable skill-seeking philosophy of education is that it is almost impossible to predict which skills will be profitable in the future. Skills that made careers for people born in 1950 are now fully obsolete. When Obama told youths to learn how to code in the early 2010s, he could not have possibly predicted that AI would make many coding jobs go the way of the pinsetter and the human computer. Telling young people to devote their lives to a skill that may not even let them earn a living a few years into the future is simply cruel. In addition to many profitable skills becoming obsolete, many skills are needed by modern employers that did not even exist a few years before now. For example, proficiency in AI use could have never been predicted or taught in 2015. Employers are constantly looking for people with unique blends of skills, depending on whatever their product or situation is, and this is inherently impossible to predict. All time spent learning a skill is a gamble, and the government should recognize this rather than meddling with people’s incentives.

The government focus on profitability harms the ability of students to be both full humans and resilient to the potential changes of the future. Minimizing the humanities in favor of specific technical skills may pay off for some, but for most students, adjusting for salary increase, it greatly damages their quality of life. A poor education in the humanities damages the ability of students to process the events of their time or their own personal life in the future. Before being good workers, people must be good humans to serve as good citizens. Many people find our current economic and societal structures to be uninspired and overly bureaucratic. This is because they were created by people with most of their humanity underdeveloped. The professional class that determines the most important decisions within our society are often those who have sacrificed much of their humanity to reap the financial benefits of specialization. While the damages of specializing as a human being are great, specialization even has harm to long-term financial gain for many. While some specialists at the cutting edge of their fields are necessary, many lower level specialists would benefit from a wider range of career aptitudes. The government’s strong push towards specialization should be softened by the understanding that those who are versatile and can bridge different fields may often be more useful to the businesses of the future than those who are stuck in strictly one box. Even if an individual does not end up using all of the skills developed by pursuing different academic fields, they will still develop a mind capable of processing and learning in a way better suited to the inherently interdisciplinary world of business and innovation.