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WANG | Learning to Work

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It’s not every day your business professor manages to temporarily unscrew your footing in the real world and leave you stumbling. But that’s exactly what happened when one of my professors offhandedly mentioned during one of his lectures a buzzy new concept: the signaling model of education and its application in the job market. The signaling model is based on the relatively radical (or maybe not that radical, if you think about it) idea that human productivity is innate, and that our education does not change or improve that. Instead, our education signals to employers what our abilities are. If we go to a good school, that credential signals to our would-be employer that we did well in secondary school; therefore, we must be productive, intelligent and hard working.