There have been some media reports about Bryce Harper, a 16-year old prodigy who will leave high school early to pursue his vocation at the college - and ultimately, professional - level. This wouldn't be terribly controversial except for the fact that Harper is a baseball prodigy, so naturally there's a lot of hand-wringing from the nation's sports commentariat. One writer said Harper's decision to forego two years of high school eligibility to play junior college baseball "makes a mockery of our educational system."
A pillar of the schooling religion is the notion that without at least 13-17 years of state-directed instruction, a person will never live a "meaningful" life. We've all seen the government-massaged statistics about the alleged higher "earning power" of four-year college graduates. Curiously, this rule doesn't apply to aspiring baseball players like Harper. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal recently noted, "Shockingly, while many current major leaguers had college experience, we found only 26 (including managers), who have earned degrees." That's less then one player or manager per team. Yet the lack of sociology and political science degrees haven't reduced earning power - the average MLB salary this year is $3.26 million, a 4% increase from 2008.
Now, obviously, not every industry is Major League Baseball. And there are a number of interventions and distortions in the market for baseball players. Still, this market is a good example of how there is no general correlation between receiving a college degree and economic productivity. Nor is education in a particular vocation synonymous with state schooling.
As Karen De Coster noted in her own discussion of the Bryce Harper story,
The public education system, which is a disastrous, wealth-destroying, failed endeavor, is held up as the standard by which we must all live. You go where they tell you to go, stay at the educational level they put you at, advance when they tell you to advance, slog through what they put in front of you, believe what they tell you to believe, and finish your "education" at a chronological age that somebody somewhere determined should be the age when you should be set free to live out your life. Your innate ability, your desire, your interests, your foundational knowledge - none of that matters because public education is set up to equalize and collectivize children so that they are all on the same pre-determined schedule. Still, people are surprised each time they hear about a 15-year-old attending college or an 18-year-old graduating from college. They were taught that children should all advance together through the education system based on chronological age and do exactly what every other kid their age is doing. The masses never question the irrationality of such nonsense. And you wonder why the American educational system is producing mostly professional consumers, couch potatoes, and TV-watching, amusement-demanding, non-reading robots.
A sports radio host I frequently listen to has been railing about Harper for days, maintaining it's an example of "excessive individualism" in sports. One can only hope. There are few arsenals of individualism left in our present society, excessive or otherwise. Even if Harper ultimately proves to be unsuccessful at the professional level, he still provides a useful example to others who feel constrained by the state's schooling monopoly.
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The ranks of college dropouts include Bill Gates and Paul Allen, founders of Microsoft, and Evan Williams who started Blogger, sold it to Google, and then started Twitter.
Ray Charles, was one of the top five most influential music writers, arrangers and performers of the 20th century. His public school education ended at age 12 when he was blinded.
On the other hand, Bernie Madoff has a degree in political science!
And isn't Geithner an Ivy Leaguer?