Stuart_Armstrong comments on Separating university education from grading - Less Wrong
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Even under human capital theory, do we have a good measure of the added value of good teaching versus poor teaching?
I don't know, unfortunately. It seems to me it would be hard to measure. The relative importance of human capital effects and signalling effects are also very hard to measure. On this, I would recommend reading this article on how a recent British government report completely disregards the signalling theory and without argument assumes that the human capital theory is right:
Further down:
As if zero signalling effect is not arbitrary... This is quite outrageous actually and should have received more attention.
Possibly we shouldd have another discussion of human capital vs signalling in higher education, and what to do to minimize costly side-effects of signalling.
There is a third factor that both BIS and THE ignore: tournament theory. If there is a set amount of productivity possible in a field, and the people in the field are selected according some ranking, then improving a person's ranking will increase their productivity, but it doesn't follow that the productivity of society as a whole is improved.
For instance, if you look at how much coaching a high school baseball player gets, and whether they get into MLB, you'll probably find a correlation. So giving a student coaching increases their productivity. But that doesn't mean that society benefits from the student getting coaching. There is a finite number of players in MLB, and a finite amount of benefit that society receives from it, and coaching a particular student just means that the benefits move from some other student who would have become a professional baseball player.
Not necessarily. Besides the (unlikely, but cannot be dismissed a priori) hypothesis that women inherently less productivity, if there is prejudice against women, then that can cause women to be less productive. For instance, if judges are less likely to rule in favor a female lawyer, then women make less productive lawyers. "Productivity" isn't merely a property of a person's inherent abilities, it's also influenced by the society they live.