What does Contemporary Education Really Signal?

Do you have enough information about the title picture to make an educated opinion? Have you already made some sort of opinion or have had a feeling about it? Is it even possible to not draw conclusions from the "signals" that we receive from what we see and hear?

This week's theme is to rethink why we value education. And the person who arguably started this rethink is the Nobel Prize winner Dr. Michael Spence, who is pictured above.

I purposely chose the one "silly" picture I could find of him, because I am hoping you will have some cognitive dissonance between you initial impression of the picture, and the fact that as a Nobel prize winner, he is among a select group of some of the most respected economists in the world.

Yet, both the silly picture and the Nobel prize are just "signals". You probably don't have much other information about him, compared to the information that I have about him as the author of this article (and I clearly know less about him, than he knows about himself) . In economics, this would be called having "asymmetric information". And every economic decision we make is in some way or other made on asymmetric information, because we won't ever know everything about anything we trade money for.

Professor Spence looked at this asymmetry of information when it comes to hiring someone for a job, and not having much information about how good they will do at that job. Specifically, he theorized that education attainment is one of the key "signals" that an employer looks at to determine the likeliness that a potential employee will be worth their pay, and better than other employees.

On the surface, there are good reasons why this is a reasonable belief. It is probably one that you have in some shape or form. I know I still have this assumption a lot of times. But, is it something that requires a rethink? Is the signal of education attainment no longer a sufficient indicator of the probability of an employee's competence? Many employers, including Google, and other's at the forefront of our future, are rethinking this, and coming to the conclusion that education attainment, even accredited attainment, is NOT a very good indicator. So this week, we will look a bit at why this is.

So why did I choose this week to focus on this? When Ukraine is arguably the most important topic to address? Well, it happens that Professor Spence has a webinar this week as part of the Weston Talks series (a bit like TED Talks, but as of yet, little known) that was planned way in advance1, being hosted by Weston High School, and there is no cost for this webinar. You can sign up at: https://westonorg.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QB3u35WiSA-8NoCPEaR_ZA

And, as I will share more next week, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, shows how CRITICAL it is to rethink education and then reinvent it, if we don't want Nuclear Armageddon.

1 - It was actually planned to be way in advance, but due to factors outside reasonable control, it is now this week.