{"id":197803,"date":"2026-05-13T11:01:55","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T09:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=197803"},"modified":"2026-05-13T11:01:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T09:01:56","slug":"onderwijs-is-meer-dan-geld-op-de-bank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2026\/05\/13\/onderwijs-is-meer-dan-geld-op-de-bank\/","title":{"rendered":"Education is more than money in the bank"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Professor of Philosophy Ronald van Raak is a little saddened by the CPB\u2019s narrow model thinking. Do the people working there really not understand that intellectual development is about so much more than money in the bank?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n\t\n\n<\/svg>\n<\/span>\n\tImage by:<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGeisje van der Linden<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Do you want to become rich? Then above all, do not study. After all, you lock yourself away in a university for years, while you could have been doing business during all that time \u2013 or you could have been speculating: the fastest way to make money is, after all, with money. All that reading and all those lectures; those exams and that stress. I can assure you, it is not worth all that effort just for the money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You may think: that Van Raak is being rather outspoken, but I am nowhere near as radical as the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB): until recently it claimed that education brings no financial benefit to society at all. The CPB calculates the programmes of political parties. There has been much criticism of this, because the models used are very limited. For example, the bureau viewed investments in education and research solely as costs, because it simply could not calculate their returns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our country, political parties are expected to have their plans assessed by the CPB. Parties have been doing this since 1986. This is a typically Dutch phenomenon \u2013 in other countries it is far less common. We have a tradition of planning bureaus, partly due to the work of Jan Tinbergen, the great economist of the Netherlands School of Economics, a predecessor of Erasmus University \u2013 and also the namesake of the Tinbergen Building. In 1945 he was one of the founders of the CPB, but he would certainly have criticised the bureau\u2019s current models. For Tinbergen, science had a social duty and education had the task of developing people \u2013 something that simply cannot be captured in models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t

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Een lijst met artikelen<\/h2>\n\t\t\n\t\t
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