In defence of diplomas

✍ Scribed by Gareth Williams

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1978
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 663 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0018-1560
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00139531

✦ Synopsis

London: Unwin, 214 pp.

Ronald Dore (1976). "Human capital theory, the diversity of societies and the problems of quality in education," Higher Education, 5 (1): 79-102.

The economics of education in the 1960s was dominated by the belief that in many respects expenditure on education, and particularly higher education, was, to use the title of Theodore Schulz's 1960 Presidential Lecture to the American Economic Association, an "Investment in Man." In essence the idea that money spent on education is an investment in human capital was not new, but it was only in the 1960s that the concept was systematically integrated into the general corpus of mainstream economic thinking. For this the main credit must go to the small group of economists around Gary Becker, whose book Human Capital (1964) is generally considered to be the magnum opus on the subject.