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Despite being immensely popular - and immensely lucrative - education is grossly overrated. In this explosive book, Bryan Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students´ skill but to certify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity- in other words, to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As and casually forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for the average worker but instead in runaway credential inflation, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely if ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy.

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"Bryan Caplan has written what is sure to be one of the most intriguing and provocative books on education published this year. His boldly contrarian conclusion--that much schooling and public support for education is astonishingly wasteful, if not counterproductive--is compelling enough that it should be cause for serious reflection on the part of parents, students, educators, advocates, and policymakers."--Frederick Hess, American Enterprise Institute

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Bryan Caplan is professor of economics at George Mason University and a blogger at EconLog. He is the author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun than You Think and The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton). He lives in Oakton, Virginia.

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