Isaac Morehouse argues that college is a waste of time and bad investment for most people.

What is college for?

If it’s a four year social experience, it seems really overpriced.  If it’s to gain knowledge, why not learn from better teachers and do it free online, and at coffee shops with friends?  If it’s to prepare you for a successful career, it’s the most absurd format imaginable: You are supposed to learn how to be successful in the marketplace through a system mostly sheltered from the marketplace, from people who mostly hate the marketplace and have chosen a career that protects them from it.

If we taught bike riding like we prep for careers, you’d spend twenty years reading about bikes without riding, until you graduate, at which point you’d be dropped off in the middle of the highway and be told, “Good luck!”

Morehouse’s article is, in part, a commercial for his new company, Praxis:

Drop out.  Don’t get a degree, get an education.  Do something different with your life.  You were born an entrepreneur; a creative problem solver who overcomes through trial and error.  That’s been smothered by years of schooling.  What would happen if you broke free?

That’s why I launched Praxis.  I want to awaken your inner entrepreneur.  I want you to get out of the classroom and into the world.  I want you to learn by doing.  I want you to change the world.

I have some sympathy for Morehouse’s complaints, if not his advice.

Regarding his complaints: College is too expensive. Many students get very little direct value from the experience. Academically Adrift and other studies, such as work in educational psychology, indicate that students tend to learn little and develop little. There’s reason to think that the entire premise of liberal arts education–We teach you how to think, etc–assumes a mistaken theory of learning. Most people don’t transfer learning from one domain to another. Most people don’t apply skills from one domain to another. Most people don’t see connections among ideas unless told to do so. And so on.

So what is college for? For the sake of argument, let’s be really cynical. The purpose of college is to signal to others, including potential employers, that you are a smart and perseverant conformist. It can also indicate that you’ve been socialized to be the “right kind of person”. The strength of this signal depends upon your college and your major. So, what does it mean if you don’t finish college? That signals to people, including potential employers, that at least one of the following is true: You are not smart. You are not perseverant. You are a non-conformist. You haven’t been socialized properly.

I teach a first year seminar in the fall semester in which we spend 1 1/2 weeks asking “If you want to be an entrepreneur, should you drop out of college and instead invest the tuition money in your business?” I ask Bryan Caplan to guest lecture on The Case against Education. My students are interested in entrepreneurship–otherwise they wouldn’t take my class. Still, most of them rightly conclude that dropping out of college is a huge risk, given the social meaning of the undergraduate degree. Their undergraduate degrees signal the right things to others, and so open all sorts of doors for them. For most of them, dropping out will close those doors but is unlikely to open more or better doors.

We’ve had students come through here that, as sophomores, are developing companies that can sell smart phones for $100 or less in Africa. If you’re that kind of person, you probably should drop out and pursue your business. And if you think you have the potential to be that kind of person, maybe Praxis will help you. But for the modal student I’ve encountered at Arizona, Brown, or Georgetown, my best advice is “Stick with it, but pick a harder major.”

UPDATE: Keep in mind, that if the signaling model is only partly true, and if instead college actual does develop people’s skills and human capital, then Morehouse’s case is even weaker.