Education Links, 2/18/2026
rethinking high school and college; William Henson wants to measure return on investment; Jerry Muller questions metrics; Austin Scholar on finding a creative niche
Imagine a world where every high school junior has walked a factory floor, sat in a boardroom, taken college courses, and earned credentials valued by employers before graduation. Even before they’re legal adults, these students will have cracked open the door to a career by blurring the lines between school and work. While this might seem like a provocative thought experiment, it’s already happening in innovative school districts across the U.S. Jobs for the Future (JFF) first called for this “Big Blur” in 2021, arguing for the erasure of outdated boundaries between school, college, and career so that every young person has access to meaningful work experience and further education.
Specific policy ideas at the link.
To produce one college graduate within six years of high school graduation from a pool of low-income students, Cristo Rey Brooklyn and Catholic elementary schools spent only $167,000, while the NYC traditional public school system spent $1.47 million ($2.2 million, 2025$) (Figure 14). … i.e., for the same investment, the Cristo Rey model yielded approximately nine graduates versus NYC public schools’ one graduate.
He is arguing that we can use metrics to evaluate education.
Did the college courses I’ve mentioned about film, art, and music affect my monetary income? Not in the least. But they’ve enriched my life for almost half a century.
…No such non-pecuniary utilities are included in the standard metrics of “return on investment.”
But they are no less real for being unmeasurable in monetary terms.
When a kid combines two or more interests into something new, they’re practicing creative and innovative thinking at its most fundamental level. Creativity, at its core, is about making unexpected connections between existing concepts, and that’s exactly what a Skill Stack forces you to do.
substacks referenced above: @
@
I am very happy that Jerry Muller learned to appreciate classic films. I would be overjoyed if he did it on his own dime. However, in FY2025 the federal government ran a $1.8 trillion deficit with federal outlays for higher education of $141.86 billion and tax expenditures (per CBO) of another $30 billion. On top of that, states spent something like another $130 billion in support. Not sure that "I learned to appreciate the arts" is sufficient justification for these outlays especially now that there are numerous high quality free online courses available: https://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses#Film
The points that Muller makes could be refined by reference to Josef Pieper's theories of leisure and education. This is something that politicians and their minions often underrate because they want to steal more money from more people; so they want those people to work more and relax less.
I don't think though that the problem with current universities is that they are focused too much on teaching the joys of underwater basket weaving and not enough on teaching students to code dashboards to provide actionable insights to executives. Rather they purport to do both things, but do them both badly. They are institutions that create the equivalent of the dysfunctional toys from the 1970s Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas special. They produce squirt guns that only shoot jelly and trains with square wheels. This should not be surprising because the Soviets did similar things using similar policies with similar efforts to override markets, with not dissimilar results.
State action that overrides the market coordination process will always produce these square wheel effects. Planning cannot successfully determine how much of education should be cultivation for leisure and morality and how much of it should be vocational. Arguing about the proportions can never surpass the effectiveness of the market process.