In what I take to be a new magazine (a copy just showed up in my office), there is an article by two Stanford researchers entitled “Does Education Really Make You Smarter?”
The answer appears to be no — at least, verbal ability has not increased as the U.S. has greatly increased the average level of formal education over the last century. The authors write, “We expected that the huge increase in educational attainment in the U.S. across the decades would be accompanied by substantial improvement in verbal abilities. To our initial amazement, we found no evidence for such improvement.”
This finding leads the authors to suggest that formal education may be much less useful in building “human capital” than is widely thought, and also that the argument that formal education (especially at higher levels) acts largely as a sorting device rather than a creator of skills and knowledge has a lot of validity.