The economics of education is the study of economic issues related to education, including the demand for, financing, and provision of education. Since the earliest work on the relationship between education and lobar market outcomes, the field of economics of education has grown rapidly to cover virtually all areas related to education.
The economics of education is probably one of the newer educational sciences. Although it is always possible to find distant antecedents, it was not until the late 1950s that it was established as an autonomous discipline, with solid theoretical support and with the development of many research teams that have duplicated scientific production in this field several times. The initial theoretical support was the theory of human capital, which accentuates the "investment" aspect of education expenditures, which were previously considered rather as both private and public consumption.
As a consequence,
Two types of work were developed: on the one hand, on the microeconomics level, that is, from the point of view of individuals, research on the rates of return at different levels of education were carried out in many countries. On the other hand, on the macroeconomic level, it was sought to measure the contribution of education to economic growth. In both cases, the verification of the hypotheses issued have shown a high level of economic profitability of education expenditures.
In a second period, the economics of education has questioned certain initial hypotheses, taking into account the contributions of the sociology of education. This, in effect, had shown that individual decisions regarding education in general were not determined by a cost-benefit rationale: the pursuit of studies was due to numerous factors, the most important of which is, according to this approach, the social class to which individuals belong and not their free will as equal individuals making the optimal choice according to their own points of view. Always according to this approach, educational systems act in such a way that they "organise" social reproduction, that is, they simplify the hereditary transmission of positions of socioeconomic power. Numerous empirical studies have confirmed that indeed, the rates of return for a given level of education differed according to social origin, but that individuals from modest classes were able, thanks to education, to access age-earnings profiles much higher than those they would have. arrived without education.
The theory of human capital was thus able to reintegrate in its model the fundamental critique of the sociological theory of reproduction, replacing it with a sociological theory of "discrimination" not limited to social membership, but also extended to ethnic, sexual or other characteristics. of individuals. Discrimination are social demands, which are imposed on economic agents, even if they are not legitimate (eventually the law will make the corresponding correction) and individuals, in accordance with the expanded theory of human capital, optimise it under pressure.
Comments