While the GP used the word "purpose", thus prompting your is-ought comment, knowing Caplan, I suspect it was inaccurate. Economics is largely about an emergent phenomenon, thus falling squarely on the "is" side of things.

Emergence is a relatively recent concept in the linguistic timeline. For most of human history, everything seemed to be either of human action and human intention (turning on a light), or neither of human action nor of human intention (the weather). As such, languages did not emerge (ha!) that easily expressed emergent behaviors, things that were of human action but not of human intention (traffic jams).

Similarly, one can see this with the subject of biological evolution (another emergent phenomenon). It's been nearly two centuries since Darwin got that ball rolling, and still almost any discussion about evolution is rife with inaccurately implied intention.

One other consequence of this linguistic difficulty is that it leads people to propose solutions to perceived problems as if they were just about human action/human intention...

In the same terms, one could say that higher education has emerged to produce empty signaling as a widespread outcome, while allowing itself to be hackable enough to produce other desired outcomes as well. Empty signaling is the prevailing hack, but not the only hack.

To be clear, that's distinct from actively attempting to broadly change what emerges, e.g., trying to "fix" the education system to no longer be structured for "signaling". To do that requires affecting the trillions of choices made by billions of people, and one way or another, that often requires violence or threats thereof.

The problem is that your grades (the signal) depend on your success at the stretch-goal courses, not the signaling courses, meaning that the best strategy is to not take anything hard. If only the base classes counted to your grades you'd be free to stretch your mind without risking your expensive credential.

> and in any event, employers know the difference between the bird courses and the ones with real meat on the bones.

Some interviewers do, but I feel companies hire more blindly based on your GPA than that HR people actually dive in and weight your courses against other candidates.

> being taught higher math and physics for the same price as what my friends were paying for sociology and religion courses seemed like the ultimate cheat

Good attitude.

I’ve never been asked my GPA or what courses I took. Most of my interviews have been focused on my professional experience (internships, full time work, programming projects, etc.)

I've heard that Epic Systems has a hard GPA threshold for their programming jobs.

I find "freedom" to be a very wrong term to describe our education system, the only thing I seem free to do is spend money and accrue debt, everything else is pure marketing speak and information assymetry.