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I'm resolving NO because eugenics is a better way to improve people.

The fact is that school is a system of diminishing returns. Humans, fundamentally, are still monkeys at our core. While we grow up, society needs to gradually build up barriers between other people and our monkey cores. In early schooling, kids learn how to socialize, how to think, and how not to beat someone up because they took your toy train. These underlying frameworks of societal integration are what further learning is built upon, and therefore everything past this is simply extra. For example, if you look at children who were found raised in the wild, you will see how people cope without the early stages of parenting and schooling.

@bingeworthy Just to check I'm reading this right: you're stating "NO" because previous levels of schooling and parenting are more important, and this is the only relevant justification (at least the only one you mentioned thus far)?

"Best" is a really high bar. There are plenty of other candidates for things that might be better.

Basic education for example - basic literacy could easily be argued to be more important and have larger impacts than anything people learn at Uni, for example because it is what facillitates lots of other kinds of learning in the first place, including any learning at universities. What point is a university if there are no literate people to attend it?

Hands on experience at whatever people want to improve at is also often much more important than what is learned at universities. There are many, many skills that are learned by doing rather than by taking courses in university. Practice makes perfect, and universities are rarely the place where the practice is happening. Consider for example that a doctor is still considered to be in-training even after graduating uni, and are only truly and legally qualified to practice once they have completed residency, which is where they actually learn how to do the things doctors do.

Many other professions and jobs are the same, where people are either not expected to be able to do what is required of them straight out of uni and they must first be trained, or, what they are expected to be able to do are not things that they were taught at uni.

Of the important and interesting and societally-valuable ways in which people "improve", very few of them have anything to do with university. It is an uphill climb to say that universities are even a particularly good way to improve people from the perspective of society as a whole, forget the "best" way.

@Tripping Yeah. Asking "is X the best way to do Y" is an easy way to elicit "no's".

Here's a question for everyone: If education is mostly about signaling conscientiousness, how else could someone's conscientiousness be measured? Caplan mentions the example of the difference between the student who almost completed their degree but is missing one course to a student who completed it, and their employability being much higher in the latter case.

@ZZZZZZ Information from previous employers

@Boklam - amplifies the problem of "to get a job, you need experience, to get experience, you need a job" tenfold.

@ZZZZZZ requesting information on how they worked on any previous things. Doesn't matter how generally useful those things are for the employer - if someone is diligent and careful on, say, Star Wars Wikia (guilty) this is a good measure of conscientiousness, too.

@b575 What about for people who lack creativity?

@ZZZZZZ you didn't ask about creativity, you asked about conscientiousness - in effect, responsibility and diligence. To not have any task to have put the two qualities in in, say, twenty years in one's life shows a stronger problem than lack of creativity.

@b575 Yes, I agree and it would look different for different people. The only issue is the signaling is more effective if it's boring because if people find it easier to put effort things that they find interesting, that could be an unattractive quality to certain employers.

There's an argument that higher education (at least in the US) is largely about indoctrination in a certain set of values, rather than critical thinking...

@Boklam At least, the grades are higher the more you conform so I think it may be an inverse correlation but that is the preeminent argument I hear for education.

@Boklam Unfortunately, teaching critical thinking is also indoctrination in a certain set of values.

@ZZZZZZ Wait, what? "Indoctrination" is the preeminent argument you hear for education?

I'm starting to feel like there has been a miscommunication somewhere?

@Boklam no I mean critical thinking.

@ForrestTaylor Is it? Since people compartmentalize, it is possible to teach the skill but not instill the value of actually using it - and some say it happens most times when people attempt to teach it explicitly.

@ForrestTaylor Critical thinking is not indoctrination in a certain set of values. In theory, you could critically think your way into not thinking critically but moreover it helps to reverse any other indoctrination.

@b575 Yes, I think that school teaches the value of critical thinking even if it only gets people in the habit of using it in certain situations. That said, it is a general purpose tool you can use in any situation.

@ZZZZZZ Yes. Not a negation of what I said though?

@b575 No, I am not negating what you said. I think it is definitely a real issue but the question is about improving people and giving them the skill of how to critically think is valuable even without teaching the habit or even teaching the opposite habit.

@b575 Well, sure, but that's more like teaching to the test- ie, universities teach people to repeat university values, but not internalize them, in the same way a critical thinking teacher could teach how to identify fallacies, but not how to notice and avoid them.
You can learn a whole lot of Zen Koans and not reach Enlightenment.

@ForrestTaylor How would you teach those habits then?

@ZZZZZZ I have no idea- I'm a logistician and a rifleman, not a... pedagogeologist? If I knew how to do it, I'd be doing it.

@ForrestTaylor I personally tend to think habits are either something you teach to yourself or you learn by copying others but it's hard to see how to cause either of those things to happen. Teaching people knowledge is easy though and helps them later to acquire good habits so I think it is the best approach.