If you don't put much effort into school, don't blame school that you got little out of it.
That part of my comment was addressing the idea that school prepares 18-22-year-olds for the real world. I think the real world prepares them a lot faster.
School is one of the few times when it's okay to just learn without also producing something of value. What I chose to learn was computer science and some math and physics. In grad school, I've learned a lot about high performance systems. While this knowledge and related skills are highly valued in the real world, very few real work entities would be willing to pay me to acquire it.
It's tough to learn this stuff on the side. You really need to devote years to learning to be useful. During that time, you're not producing much of value to the outside world. My PhD dissertation will not represent six years of effort; more like one or two. But it took four years of learning to be in the position that I could do that level of work in a year or two.
If you take a CS undergrad, some company somewhere can probably get use of them at their current skill level. But that company will have little interest in paying them to continue learning.
Regarding what you put out versus what you put in, that's true of everything.
That is so weird to me. When I was in school, I spent about eight hours a day, five days a week learning stuff that had little practical application. And now that I work, I spend, oh, six hours a day seven days a week learning stuff with little practical application. Bizarrely, the fact that I'm neither paid nor graded for learning has not stopped me.
Maybe school is good for people who are unable to learn without those incentives, but I'm not sure how much of the population shares that problem. After all, for schools to have something useless to teach, they needed someone to get the ball rolling by learning that stuff before schools existed. So it's been possible in the past.
School is the only time we're allowed to learn without also producing something. You can learn on the job, but there's an expectation that you will produce something as well. They're not paying you to learn for your sake, they're paying you to learn so you can produce something for them. This does not exist in school; everything you produce is only for pedagogical purposes.
I don't know why you brought up incentives; my point has nothing to do with them. My point has to do with time and money. Since you produce nothing of value in school, no one will pay you for it. So you're deferring income so that you can devote all of your time to learning - school is an investment.
If you somehow have a job where you are allowed to do anything you want and produce nothing, then I'd like to know who you work for.
Murray considers himself a libertarian; Ehrenreich is a socialist. Neither is strictly 'right-wing'.
And which errors from The Bell Curve are repeated in his column? I didn't spot any glaring mistakes, but perhaps I did not read as carefully as you did.
Given The Bell Curve, none of his number-crunching statements are believable, without close scrutiny. I do know who Barbara Ehrenreich is, and I agree much more with her than with Murray, but calling her a socialist is typical political name-calling.
Edit: changed "right-wing" in the last sentence to "political" as being more accurate and less political.
but calling her a socialist is typical political name-calling.
Apparently you don't 'know who Barbara Ehrenreich is':
http://www.dsausa.org/about/structure.html
She is a a member of the Democratic Socialist party. Her Wikipedia page mentions that she's a socialist before it mentions that she's a writer! Calling her a socialist is like calling Obama a Democrat -- a radical redefinition of name-calling, though it does please me that merely identifying someone as a member of a leftist party is considered grievously insulting.
It's funny, but I got a whole lot more of that stuff after dropping out. Am I really going to learn more from a place where I don't pay the rent, buy stuff with a meal card, work fifteen hours per week but don't necessarily have to show up, and am surrounded by proto-alcoholics? If you can deduce the modern college experience from any sane set of first principles, I'd like to hear about it -- but it seems to me that Murray is right. If we didn't have college, and you tried to invent it, you'd be rightly denounced as a loon.
And he puts too much faith in certification tests as "classless", in my opinion. I used to do test prep, and like most things, the people who have the money and the time to train for the certifications have an advantage.
Murray has crunched the numbers rather than counting the anecdotes; studying for the SAT can raise scores a lot at first, but if you studied two hours per day for 150 days, your expected score increase would be seventy points. Murray cites this (http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetai...), which I haven't read. It would be a good plan to introduce your convictions to some data, so you can back up your assertion with something besides "I used to do test prep, and envy rich people too much to wonder what I can learn from them."
Perhaps none of that is worth the lost time, but when I see it in the WSJ, my initial reaction is that it's another right wing wacko who sees college as just too many liberals with too much influence.
You also might be happier if 1) you didn't assume that the newspaper that recently published a Barbara Ehrenreich piece (http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121380066376984...) was irredeemably right-wing, and 2) if you considered the possibility that since college professors are overwhelmingly liberal (http://cellasreview.blogspot.com/2002_08_25_cellasreview_arc...) and nearly impossible to fire, they would consist of a greater than average number of liberals who do, indeed, have too much influence.