I think maybe you and I are just using "certificate" differently. to me, a certificate is very different from a degree. a certificate affirms that a person has a fairly specific set of skills that have been tested against some objective measure. I'm not exactly sure what a degree says about someone, maybe something like "has studied in this field for a while without pissing everyone off to the point where they refuse to work with or teach them".

I can be a certified building envelope inspector if I pass a test that shows I know how to perform an industry standard inspection using the standard tools. I'm not sure there's any meaningful way I could be certified as a software engineer (answering obscure c++ questions? being able to use git?). there's definitely no way I could be meaningfully certified as a historian. I'm sure no matter what I do, it would be controversial whether I was even studying history!

instead of making the study of history less of a special club, maybe we should ask whether it's appropriate for the government to support this endeavor at all?