Perils of Credentialism

> To maintain intellectual honesty and consistency, MIT should announce that it would henceforth stop requiring formal credentials in evaluating candidates for this and other similar jobs. In other words, future candidates like her, who feel confident in their ability to perform the job, shouldn't feel the need to invent degrees on their resumes. Come on, you may say, how are they supposed to find out who is a good candidate and who is bad. Well, they hired her based on an invented degree, didn't they? Didn't she work out OK for 28 years? Then why pretend that the degree was actually needed in order for her to perform her job?

Exactly. I do have an answer for that, however: If they didn't require degrees for the job, they would undermine their own degree-selling business.

A majority of college students are in college because a degree is supposed to help them get some unspecified job, sometime later, out of a job pool which purports to pay better on average than the jobs that let you in based on mere ability.

In effect, colleges have taken on some of the characteristics of shady employment and modelling agencies, the ones that tell candidates to pay a fee and they'll help them get placed. We always hear how the legitimate ones don't charge fees in advance.

If college was only about teaching people what they desired to learn, enrollment might drop by an order of magnitude or more. Like any business, it wants to grow, and so they find ways to market themselves ("you need a degree to get a good job!") and arrange guaranteed contracts for themselves (encouraging you to take on debt) to further their own interests, not yours. Hence they tack on mandatory fees for all sorts of things you may not want and they establish mandatory requirements in quantity of "units" (as if 3 "units" of English or Computer Science makes any sense). Required classes are essentially a jobs program for professors of the less-popular subjects, guaranteeing enough sign-ups to keep the money rolling in for people who would otherwise be unemployable in that capacity.

You can learn most academic subjects out of the book. Having someone read the book at you and write a few phrases from the book on a chalkboard doesn't add information. All it takes is a tiny bit of initiative on your part to learn it on your own without someone else telling you to do it.

If you don't have that initiative, it's probably because you spent K through 12 always waiting to be told what to do by someone else. The usual classroom method is generally inefficient and it purposely stops you from developing self-direction. Why? Because a good employee needs to do what s/he's told and take direction from a "superior". They don't want you to be self-directed -- how's a megacorp going to exist if there're a million little start-ups running around?

Another telling anecdote: I was watching graduation a couple months back, and before they hand each person the degree the dean says, "I confer upon you this degree with all the rights and privileges associated with it." Last time I checked, in America a degree conferred no special rights or privileges. I love though how they look you in the eyes and lie to you while they're handing you the degree. Classy.

I can take the argument that credentials don't tell the whole story. In fact, I think Marilee Jones pretty much changed the face of college admissions (in a good way). Also, she let me in, which means I owe her a pretty large debt...

However, it's really tough to argue for Marilee Jones' job in this situation. She had decades to tell someone that she had falsified her resume and chose not to. Instead, she was found out by some 3rd party and everyone acted in order to save face. MIT fired her, but let her resign. She admitted to lying, but blamed it on a youthful mistake when it was really a continual withholding of information she knew to be pertinent. I suspect had she admitted this wrong doing a long time ago, and without the threat of a PR nightmare from an outsider's expose, she might still have a job now.

Here are some related posts I made to that: http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2006/02/23/the-perils-of-c...

And this series may be particularly interesting to Y Combinator hackers. I wonder aloud whether college is really a placebo (note that placebo has real medical value!) http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2005/11/03/college-educati...

http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2005/11/17/college-educati...