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.…