Education as social capital is commonly invoked as a justification for advocating more education for all. According to this prevailing model, growth in educational attainment creates -human capital,+ which adds aggregate social value to society. At the same time, however, it has been recognized that education has an important role as the central mechanism behind social stratification. Here, education acts primarily as the chief agent of -social competition,+ in which there is no added social value to more education, but rather, education acts as an allocator, where increases in educational attainment simply lead to a continuous resorting into ranks. These two models of the causal effect of education generate highly divergent predictive consequences of the value and price of education for society. This research tests these competing models and unpacks the effects of formal education and the importance of individual performance, curriculum, and methods of learning on distinctive types of social outcomes.
