2) This becomes significantly less meaningful in the US if you ever relocate. I spent the first decade of my professional life on the east coast, in Boston. Now I live in Colorado and my east coast contacts are fairly worthless. This is compounded by a slight change in my technical subfield.

3) Anything an academic has to say about the usefulness of academics is suspect from the start :)

1) You learn how to do research. My mum, with a university degree, went into business with a friend who was a nurse, trained before that required a degree. My mum states that one difference she notices is that if she doesn’t know something, she generally thinks of doing some research into it, while her partner doesn’t think like that.

2) You make contacts in your area of expertise. This is not just a Oxford/Cambridge/Harvard thing. In NZ there are too few universities to work like that. But as a result of my degrees, I do know people doing things related to my work who I can then call up and ask questions. I do not think this would be so relevant for general office jobs however.

3)You get a broad base of information. One academic I know described it as “a set of tools with which you can jump into any foreign situation and make a complete fool of yourself”. Now, having worked for a number of years I know what he means. But even though I do regularly make a fool of myself, I can also suggest ideas from other areas that might be useful for a new problem that the job is facing.

I do not know how much this applies to arts graduates. And I do think it is a pity to see arts students at university who just sort of wandered into the degree since they got their best marks at school in English, but without any plans for what they will do with that degree in the job market and without the passion for the subject that makes spending 3 years and tens of thousands of dollars worthwhile for its own sake (even if uni is free you face the opportunity cost of the wages you could have earned).

That’s a problem even for the credentialed. And certainly it’s going to be hard to obtain work experience if credentials are required first.

Trade unions seem to have alleviated this problem somewhat, with apprenticeships, which pay below the level of a fully-trained journeyman but which nonetheless come with wages. The trainee is exchanging labor for training, to a degree, and the credential is a mark not merely of classroom study but of a certain amount of practical work under others’ supervisions.

The alternative to meaningless credentials is meaningful credentials, which can be obtained through work experience. Not many institutions offer bachelors’ degrees in real-world experience, useful or no.

In education and other practically-oriented programs, it’s often clear enough that the schools are selling access and credentials. One top of everything else, the gatekeepers (who often haven’t worked in the field for years, if ever) develop an arrogance based on their “research” and “methodology”.

Dan, the employers I was talking about were not voluntarily extending credentialization beyond hiring. Credentialization is institutionalized and enforced. The employers were forbidden to hire or promote certain employees who were capable of doing the work and who,m in some cases, had already been doing the work satisfactorily on an interim basis for some time.

I’ve known people who qualified for difficult uncredentialed fields (software) by self-study. In ermegent areas that’s the most common way.

Required tests can be every bit as bad in each of these respects as required courses. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, a number of professions limit entry not by requiring a degree or course credential, but rather by requiring their members to pass a set of exams—said exams testing knowledge of a large body of mostly irrelevant material that in practice takes expensive and time-consuming courses to master.

Now, the proliferation of entry-limited “professions” may be a problem in its own right. But even in their complete absence, employers interested in avoiding cronyism would still seek out credentials—even only-minimally-meaningful ones—as an unbiased means of narrowing the job applicant pool.

I did mention an additional difficulty with credentialization, which is that it works to the disadvantage of people who were already doing the job before credentialization was required.

I agree that it’s unfortunate that some employers extend credentialism beyond hiring to evaluation of existing employees. But the fact that some employers misuse it in that way doesn’t make it any less useful or important as a method for avoiding cronyism in evaluating outside job applicants.

“Government claims that extra money for England’s schools has boosted GCSE results are not based on fact, MPs say. Real-terms spending rose by 31.6% from 1999 to 2003, while the proportion getting the equivalent of five good GCSEs went up five percentage points. In the previous four years, results rose by 4.4 points, while investment increased by just 3.4%, the Commons education select committee found.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4151879.stm

“The higher-grade GCSE success rate in England appears to have reached a plateau, official figures suggest. Last year the proportion of pupils who achieved at least five GCSEs at grades A* to C – as opposed to other qualifications – was 50.2%.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4202327.stm

“Government policies on education are failing to remedy the UK’s shortage of skilled workers, the director general of the Institute of Directors has said. Around 25,000 16-year-olds a year leave school with no GCSEs, Miles Templeman said in a speech to the Institute of Economic Affairs. He said the skills shortage last year left 135,000 vacancies unfilled.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4200659.stm

Why on earth should it matter whether or not an employer outsources its job candidate testing to a university?

Dan, I’m starting to wonder whether I should take you seriously. I was talking about what people mean when they talk about credentialization. Not “why it should matter”. I was just defining a term and the issue. But the reasons why the difference should matter in terms of social mobility (and the recruitment of talent) are: first, that requiring a class provides a barrier to entry (financial and otherwise) which going by a test does not provide; second, as I have said, that often the classes required are irrelevant make-work; and third, that outsourcing to a university often is hand in glove with attempts by organized groups to restrict entry to a trade.

Perhaps the postal requirements were in excess of the actual requirement, but what you said was that the requirements were “only vaguely related” to the requirements of the job, which is completely false.

You really seem to have an obtuse talent for ignoring things you don’t have an answer for. I did mention an additional difficulty with credentialization, which is that it works to the disadvantage of people who were already doing the job before credentialization was required. In a case I knew of, the requirement of a BS degree ended up causing the hiring of a lot of lab assistants who often had no intention of staying on the job even long enough to learn how to do it.

But how does one first obtain work experience?

As for “meaningful credentials”, what happens if—as is usually the case, in practice—more than enough candidates have them? How does an employer distinguish among those in that pool?

I only know of two options: proceed to the “meaningless credentials”, or at least, the somewhat less directly meaningful ones, or start counting “subjective intangibles”. The distance between the latter and rampant cronyism is, I claim, rarely very far.

I’m all in favor of restoring meaning to primary and secondary education credentials, which are today often pretty much meaningless. The key to doing so, of course, is to set and enforce rigorous standards in primary and secondary education—and I’m all for that, as well. Indeed, I doubt too many people who are serious about education would disagree with you. (Sadly, education theorists and ed-school academics are, for the most part, shockingly unserious about education.)

But I was under the impression that the discussion here was less about the time scale of the education system than about society’s goals in providing one, and its effectiveness at achieving those goals. Whether education contributes to social mobility, for example, or inhibits it—as Chris argues—via credentialism, seems to me to be a question that is independent of whether the education in question is a hard-won university degree or an equally-hard-won high school deploma.

Dan Simon—hiring by test is NOT credentialism. Asking people who can pass a test to take a series of college courses is credentialism.

Why on earth should it matter whether or not an employer outsources its job candidate testing to a university?

In the US most mailpersons start as mail sorters who are expected to work very fast. This test is very apropos to their work.

I’m given to understand that the level of performance required at the tasks in the tests was far in excess of what was actually needed for the job. That was the whole point—because the jobs were so desirable, a huge pool of applicants was available, the majority of whom were perfectly well-qualified to do the job. The alternatives were credentialism—awarding the job to the applicant whose test score was most extravagantly above the bar for excellent job performance—or cronyism.

The same holds, I would argue, for most jobs: there being no perfect way of ranking candidates for a job, credentialism at least has the advantage of relative objectivity. Sure, it tends to result in overqualification and credential inflation, but the alternative is still far worse.

False dilemma. The alternatives to meaningless credentials are meaningful credentials and work experience. (If an applicant has no college degree but spent ten years working at a high-level programming job at Microsoft, does the employer really have no idea of their skill set or reliability?)

As I said, one manifestation of credentialism is having an uncredentialed worker, who has actually been doing the job, train an inexperienced new hire who has credentials. This is something that really happens a lot. (If the new hire has been hired to upgrade the job with new skills, that’s not so bad; but in many cases the credentialed new worker’s education has nothing much to do with the job).

Uncredentialed workers can neither change jobs nor be promoted. (In other words, we’re not necessarily talking about the initial hire of untested workers.) Either by company policy or by law, employers are often forbidden to promote or to hire the people they want.

Another case is declaring “education” to be a specialty and hiring education majors to teach HS math and English in preference to English majors and math majors.

All sorts of skills that could only vaguely be correlated with postal work—memorization, manipulation and sorting of long lists of words and characters, and the like.

In the US most mailpersons start as mail sorters who are expected to work very fast. This test is very apropos to their work.

The hope is that employers would then be more willing to look at people with good high-school results, hence forcing less people to have to go to university and incuring the cost associated with that. I’m arguing for replacing a credentialism based upon an optional university education with a credentialism based upon complusory basic education.

Bob, Yes, I think you’re arguing me around to your view. I fully agree with your later comments: the real problem is the continued failure of compulsory education. My thesis advisor (as you’d say in the US) was head of the mathematics department for a time, and often met employers to discuss how the university could alter its courses to help them. He said that a consistent issue raised was basic numeracy and literacy: really, this shouldn’t be an issue that universities have to deal with! That said, to my shame, I did spend my PhD learning how to write again, after doing four years of mathematics with little need for writing anything like an essay!