The economics education is probably newer one of the sciences of education. While it is always possible to find distant history, it is only in the late fifties that were established as an autonomous discipline with a strong theoretical support, and the development of many research teams have been doubled several times in the scientific production field. The theoretical support was the initial human capital theory, which accentuates the “investment” in education costs, which were previously considered more as a consumer to both private and public.
As a result they developed two types of work: firstly on the micro level, i.e. from the standpoint of individuals, were carried out research in many countries rates of return for different levels of education. Moreover, on the macro level we sought to measure the contribution of education to economic growth.
In both cases, the checks issued assumptions have revealed a high level of economic efficiency of education spending. Get your bachelor degree online here.
In a second time, the economics of education has challenged certain assumptions made, especially taking into account the contributions of sociology of education. This, in effect, showed that individual decisions in education in general were not determined by a rational cost-benefit type: continuation of the studies was due to many factors, of which the most important, under this approach , social class they belong to individuals, not free will as individuals as well as making the optimal choice according to their own views. Again according to this approach, education systems acting in a manner that “organize” social reproduction, i.e., simplify the inheritance of socioeconomic positions of power.
Numerous empirical studies have confirmed that indeed the rates of return on a given level of education differed by social origin, but that individuals from modest classes could, through education, access to age-earnings profiles well above those that would come without education.
Human capital theory was able to reintegrate in their model the fundamental critique of the sociological theory of reproduction replacing it with a sociological theory of “discrimination” is not limited to social belonging, but also extended to the ethnic, sexual, or other of individuals. Discrimination are social demands that are imposed on operators, even if they are not legitimate (eventually the law will make the correction as appropriate), and individuals in accordance with the expanded human capital theory, the optimized under pressure.