[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Why do we think that people earn higher degrees to earn more money? Maybe > the love of learning and understanding drives them. > >> From: William B Ward [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] >> I have been associated with some good schools and some mediocre ones and >> can attest that doctoral degrees are more a measure of tenacity than any >> basic intelligence. Why is it that Michael Dell and Bill Gates could drop >> out as undergraduates and do so well? ... >> >> I remember some years ago a Canadian article that pointed out that >> not one >> of the Canadian bank presidents across the Dominion had completed >> university... >> high IQ's as related to professional competence >> are not the be all, and end all, of the discussion. >> Keith had written: >>> the pace of innovation means that high-IQ >>> individuals with high level technocratic skills is becoming >>> increasingly required.
Here's an interesting piece that seems to me to put things into a useful perspective. (I pass it on since it may not be readily available to all.) It raises the question whether we only think we see high level skills and high IQs, whereas they are really a mirage caused by a steady inflation in credentials (which tends to be accompanied by a devaluation of each credential itself). I know for a fact that my father studied Botany, German, Latin, mathematics, etc in his rural Ohio high school almost 100 years ago at a level now only available in college or university. One of his boyhood friends who dropped out in Grade 10 to go sweep up at the bank became - you guessed it - president of the bank and a very succesful man. In any case, the discussion below seems to get many things right while remaining at the level of socialized individuals and not requiring any hypotheses from evolutionary psychology or biology, not needing Pinker or Dawkins. best wishes, Stephen Straker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Vancouver, B.C. [Outgoing mail scanned by Norton AntiVirus] ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ "The Dirty Little Secret of Credential Inflation," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 49 (27 September 2002), p. B20. by Randall Collins http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i05/05b02001.htm College degrees, once the possession of a tiny elite of professional and wealthy individuals, are now held by more than a fourth of the American population. But as educational attainment has expanded, the social distinctiveness of the bachelor's degree and its value on the marketplace have declined - in turn, increasing the demand for still higher levels of education. In fact, most problems of contemporary universities are connected to "credential inflation." In 1910, less than 10 percent of the population obtained, at most, high-school degrees. They were badges of substantial middle-class respectability, until midcentury, conferring access even to the managerial jobs. Now, a high-school degree is little more than a ticket to a lottery in which one can buy a chance at a college degree - which itself is becoming a ticket to a yet higher-stakes lottery. Such credential inflation is driven largely by the expansion of schooling - like a government's printing more paper money - rather than by economic demand for an increasingly educated labor force. Our educational system, as it widens access to each successive degree, has been able to flood the market for educated labor at virtually any level. For example, in the 1960s and '70s, as competition for managerial positions grew among those who held bachelor's degrees, M.B.A.'s became increasingly popular and eventually the new standard for access to corporate jobs. Holders of such degrees have attempted to justify the credential by introducing new techniques of management - often faddish, yet distinct enough to give a technical veneer to their activities. Similarly, credentialed workers in other occupations have redefined their positions and eliminated non-credentialed jobs around them. Thus, the spiral of competition for education and the rising credential requirements for jobs have tended to be irreversible. In principle, credential inflation could go on endlessly, until janitors need Ph.D.'s, and baby sitters are required to hold advanced degrees in child care. People could stay in college up through their 30s and 40s, or perhaps even longer. Many people believe that our high-tech era requires massive educational expansion. Yet the skills of cutting-edge industries are generally learned on the job or through experience rather than in high school or college. Compare the financial success of the youthful founders of Apple or Microsoft, some of them college dropouts, with the more modest careers of graduates of computer schools. Furthermore, a high-tech society does not mean that a high proportion of the labor force consists of experts. A more likely pattern - and the one we see emerging today - is a bifurcation of the labor force into an "expert" sector - perhaps 20 percent - and a much larger range of those with routine or even menial service jobs. With continuing computerization and automation, typical middle-class jobs may gradually disappear, leaving an even bigger gap between a small elite of technical, managerial, and financial experts, and everyone else. In fact, credential inflation is the dirty secret of modern education. If we admitted it publicly, and it became a topic for political discussion, it would force us to face head-on the issue of our growing class inequality. The continual expansion of an inflationary educational-credentialing system palliates the problem of class conflict in the United States by holding out the prospect of upward mobility somewhere down the line, while making the connection remote enough to cover the system's failure to deliver. Credentialing spills over into careers within academe. As colleges expanded with the massive enrollment increases of the 20th century, scholars have had a favorable environment in which to differentiate new departments and specialties within them. The guild of scholars began by controlling admission to teaching through possession of its own credential, the research dissertation. Now, as colleges compete with each other over prestige in innovative areas of research, credential inflation has developed into heightened pressure for publication, not just at the outset, but throughout one's career. As large institutions have developed elaborate internal rankings and salary-step systems, faculty members have experienced C.V. inflation. Many professors prefer to concentrate their energies and derive their prestige from their research and the kind of teaching that is closest to it: apprenticing graduate students. But even many of the most successful graduate assistants will primarily teach undergraduates. Similarly, part of each professor's work time is devoted to shepherding undergraduates through the process that will get them job credentials or intermediate credentials in the academic progression. Undergraduate enrollments are needed to support graduate students. And even though they may complain of the intellectual unworthiness of undergraduates, research professors count on academic credentials' having enough value in nonacademic job markets - those pursued by most undergraduates - for their own jobs to exist. Our current period of credential inflation has been accompanied by grade inflation and recommendation inflation. The prevailing ethos is for faculty members to treat students sympathetically, to try to get them through what the professors recognize as a competitive grind. That ethos fits within the educational structure of self-reinforcing inflation. The top of the research elite does rather well - both materially and intellectually - under the current conditions of credential inflation. Yet at the other end of the professoriate, there is a growing and increasingly beleaguered teaching proletariat. The material conditions of their lives are poor, and their career tracks are highly uncertain. Between the top and bottom is a mass of faculty members who must cope with the publication pressures that go along with increased competition for a declining proportion of research and teaching jobs. Proposals for greater accountability, or even for the abolition of tenure, strike mainly at this middle group. It is entirely possible for the intellectual condition of the system, determined by what is done by the research elite, to flourish while pressure, alienation, and misery prevail at the levels below. Will there be a revolt of the professorial proletariat? While it seems at least hypothetically possible, social-conflict theory suggests that it is not very likely. Mobilization of an unprivileged stratum depends upon the formulation of a self-conscious ideology of group identity. Moreover, mobilization by the bottom stratum alone does not change a system of power. Such changes start at the top, with a breakdown and struggle among competing elites over how to fix it. All this is very remote from conditions of academic life today. Professors still define themselves primarily in terms of the intellectual content of their disciplines, giving enormous implicit power to the research elite. The strains that are palpable today for many scholars lower in the hierarchy will probably remain merely localized, personal troubles. Meanwhile, colleges are under pressure to credential more students at lower cost. If the fundamental versus applied character of the disciplines is at issue in today's university, along with the growing distance between a highly paid elite of noted researchers and an underclass of temporary lecturers, then the causes are in the economic strains of a system whose mass production of educational credentials for employment has become very expensive. Institutions may increasingly choose to cut back on faculty and staff members and to eliminate "superfluous" activities, concentrating instead on the allegedly practical content that is supposed to give students negotiable credentials. That would be a false solution. Even turning over the entire education system to narrowly job-related courses would not stop credential inflation, which can occur with any kind of academic content. In fact, it is doubtful that we could stop credential inflation if we wanted to. The mainspring is students' desire to get credentials that will give them some edge in the job market. As long as a free market of education providers exists, institutions have the incentive to keep offering higher credentials. Draconian measures might include drastically curtailing admissions or raising standards to levels that flunk out all but a small elite. But such standards would be impossible to enforce without a centralized, authoritarian system incompatible with modern democracy. The late Chinese dynasties put such a measure into effect in exams for government office, setting a quota for passing at below 1 percent. But that did not stop many in the Chinese gentry from spending decades of their lives seeking credentials. Nevertheless, a control upon credential inflation is built into the structure of our economy. Expanding the number of degrees may be analogous to printing money, but there is one crucial difference: Printing money is cheap, while the cost of minting degrees is high. It is implausible that the system will keep on inflating through the postdocs-for-janitors phase, because an upper limit is set by the amount that can be spent on education while leaving room for private and government budgetary expenditures. At crunch points, costs become too high, enrollments fall, dropouts increase, government assistance declines, and many educational institutions fail and are challenged by new ones. Eventually, the inflationary trend gets going again. As a society grows richer, it can afford to allow more people to spend time competing in the education marketplace instead of directly in the workplace. But credential inflation and economic growth are not perfectly synchronized. In an era of poor job prospects, the educational system plays an important role in warehousing people and keeping them temporarily off the job market - thus holding down unemployment. It may even serve as a hidden welfare system, doling out support in the form of student loans and subsidizing work-study programs. Such results occur whether government budget-makers are aware of what they are doing or not. In that sense, we may have entered a period in which we can't politically afford to stop the processes that feed credential inflation. The issue boils down to whether we want to manage credential inflation, manipulating policy to smooth out peaks and valleys, or let it take its own bumpy course. Randall Collins is a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. This article is adapted from The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University, edited by Steven Brint and published recently by Stanford University Press. Copyright � 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
