Y Combinator, Not Lambda School, Is Unbundling Education

Quick, name a growing, well-hyped company that’s trying to Disrupt the Education Industry!

Lambda School is the obvious answer. I’ve written about them before, and I think they’re on to something big. Lambda is changing education as it’s popularly understood: you go to class to learn skills, then you use those skills in a job you couldn’t otherwise do. The popular narrative is that that’s what our education system is, and that that’s why we spend $1.1 trillion dollars per year on it.

But there are cynics who believe it’s something else entirely. In The Case Against Education, Bryan Caplan argues that the real value of education, for the people who get it, is signaling, not skills — memorably, he argues that a college is not so much a sculptor as an appraiser.

There’s good evidence for this, both quantitative and anecdotal. For example:

• The “Sheepskin effect,” where the single semester that accounts for the biggest share of the college earnings premium is the last one. Do schools save all their most valuable knowledge for the last few months, or do employers check a box that says “college graduate”?
• The relationship between income and years of education is much stronger for individuals than for countries; a college graduate is richer than a high school dropout, on average, but to a much greater degree than countries full of high school graduates are richer than countries where most people leave school earlier. This…