Starting in the mid ’60s, the notion that you needed to go to college in order to be a success slowly became “conventional wisdom” in the U.S. Politicians such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton said that there were huge personal and national benefits to college education; Obama even made it a national goal to have the world’s highest percentage of workers with college credentials.
That hasn’t worked out for millions who have dubious degrees and big debts they’re struggling to repay.
Can smart and ambitious people bypass college? Yes, argues Michael Gibson in his book Paper Belt on Fire, which I review here for the Martin Center.
Gibson was on the brink of an academic career when he decided it wouldn’t be his best option. He wound up working for Peter Thiel’s project of supporting bright young people who didn’t go to college, but after doing that for several years, he went out on his own with a similar venture. He calls his the 1517 Fund, named for the year when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Just as Luther found the Church’s sale of indulgences to be corrupting, so does Gibson see the higher education establishment’s sale of degrees.
The book is partly a memoir of Gibson’s journey from almost academician to an apostate who has been denounced by the education establishment and partly a manifesto against the idea that college does a lot to develop an individual’s human capital. On the latter point, he sides with GMU economics professor Bryan Caplan, author of The Case Against Education.
Gibson’s book is wonderfully iconoclastic, and I strongly recommend it.