Terry McDonough, Terrence wrote: > ... What I'm wondering about is credentialling that no longer perhaps serves > any function, pernicious or otherwise. ... The process we participate in is > very expensive. Most students learn less than a comparable period in "the > real world" would teach them. Is it simply inertia that keeps it going? Or > is it that all the people involved (students, faculty, administration) have > an interest in bamboozling the public about the value of these degrees? <
My guess is that (1) it's too difficult to get it together to solve a macro-level issue (the familiar collective action problem); and (2) most people don't want to admit that their credentials are worthless. The latter likely involves a certain amount of a response to cognitive dissonance: if confronted with idea that spending 16+ years and an unknown number of megaeuros results in what's basically a worthless piece of paper, most people say "I must have done _something_ to earn it." -- Jim Devine / "If heart-aches were commercials, we'd all be on TV." -- John Prine _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
