Has America Been Overtaken by Creeping Credentialism? Library-science degrees, hotel management degrees, journalism degrees: Is a college degree necessary for nearly every white-collar job these days?
Editor’s note: In this Future View, students debate “credentialism,” the ever-expanding requirement of college degrees. Very interesting responses….read them all…..rsk
From Blue Collar to White Collar
I went directly from high school to the workforce after graduating in 1985, holding a series of blue-collar jobs of increasing complexity. In the late 1990s I took my first administrative job, where I applied the interpersonal skills learned in blue-collar roles to white-collar tasks.
My 20-year administrative career culminated in a decade at the executive level, earning more than many colleagues with master’s degrees—without onerous college debt. My current pursuit of a bachelor’s degree is a bucket-list item funded by company tuition reimbursement.
Such a career trajectory seems unlikely today. Even entry-level jobs require a degree, although I see little evidence that those degrees improve day-to-day skills. Company communications are frequently riddled with cringe-worthy errors. Nor do the college graduates seem to have learned reliability in the university lecture halls, where attendance is optional.
As Covid has forced a rethinking of traditional business models, the business world has done remarkably little rethinking of its educational requirements. People reasonably expect their neurosurgeon to be both skilled and educated. Countless other jobs, however, could easily be filled by people who have developed applicable skills outside college. Instead of requiring degrees, companies should develop mentorship programs that allow the uncredentialed to apply their skills to the opportunities currently closed to them.
—Thomas Bonnett, University of Minnesota, English
Credentials Are a Shortcut
The proliferation of degrees may set off alarms about inflation of credentials, but the trend could just as well be a matter of economic efficiency. Various professions lack clear-cut metrics to evaluate new job applicants, while the practical need to tell candidates apart persists. A college degree, which signals “I have something,” is an easy device for recruiters to use to justify narrowing selections.
The sobering reality is that neither a college degree nor any other credential can fully capture potential. Mistaking credentials for proficiency leads us to pursue the wrong objectives. Even if we accept credentialism as a necessary evil, its pitfalls are crucial to keep in mind: A college degree certifies the skills required to earn that degree, but it tells little about how well those skills translate into the proficiency that really matters for a job.
—Shih-wei Chao, University of California at Berkeley, law (J.S.D.)
Credentials Matter Less in STEM
The credential of a college degree may be more important when the job in question has squishy selection criteria. It isn’t hard, however, to evaluate whether someone knows how to use something like the Python programming language: Throw the applicants a HackerRank test, and you’ll have a pretty good idea if they can do the tasks you need.
If your firm isn’t so STEM-y, however, you usually can’t get a hard mathematical answer. At that point, many people will lean into credentialism. If the candidate graduated summa cum laude from a top university, that may offer a workable proxy for the abilities needed, in a vacuum of information. Companies like to have as much confidence as possible that an applicant hasn’t slipped through the cracks in the hiring process, and credentials can offer the best degree of certainty that firms can get. By contrast, credentialism matters less when the skills in question can be quantified.
—Will Griffin, University of Chicago, economics and mathematics
The New High-School Diploma
A college degree is required to get a white-collar job, not to do the job. Do I really need a journalism degree to write effectively? No. I can learn that in high school or how most great writers learned it: from practice. Nevertheless, the degree signals to employers that I have crossed some threshold of intelligence. This creeping credentialism has equated yesterday’s high-school diploma to today’s college degree, an expensive shift that leaves many Americans behind.
The wealth gap in America is only getting larger, and if we continue to evaluate people by a piece of paper rather than work ethic, grit and determination, we risk missing greatness. Some of the biggest household names in America are not college graduates: Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs.
—Robin Panzarella, University of Pennsylvania, decision processes
College Credentials Prove Specialization
Progress in education has always tended toward specialization. This has been the case ever since the creation of universities in the Middle Ages, when they were used to train and educate priests in the complexities of Catholicism.
Even a liberal-arts education usually requires its students to pick a major. The job market rewards this specialization, with higher-paying jobs often demanding even higher degrees of academic specialization in the form of master’s or doctoral degrees. At first, a little specialization distinguished applicants. But as more applicants followed suit, employers raised the bar for selection. A college degree became necessary—but not always sufficient—for nearly every white-collar job.
Credentials are merely the way in which employers are best able to verify an applicant’s specialized knowledge without having to spend copious amounts of time screening and testing.
—Francisco Castillo, New York University, real estate
Why Isn’t High School Enough?
A college degree is a proxy for basic aptitudes that were previously common in high-school graduates. The demand for college degrees has prolonged education unnecessarily, created debt and capped the earning power of those without bachelor’s degrees.
The change is understandable. Businesses allow a college to vet a candidate rather than doing it themselves, weeding out applicants who don’t know how to read or do basic math—while reducing the liability associated with other aptitude tests, which are often challenged as discriminatory.
Colleges also have an incentive to inflate the value of a college degree, namely, more government funding and tuition receipts. It isn’t in the best interest of higher education to declare college a waste of money. Instead, colleges feed the narrative that a degree is required to be employable—which is currently true in much of the business world.
Government policies, including occupational licensing, tend to mandate unnecessary credentials. Combine the occupations covered by state licensing laws with the jobs requiring college degrees and the result is a huge percentage of American jobs needing a credential beyond a high-school degree.
Reversing the credentialism of the U.S. economy will require businesses, colleges and all levels of government to make a concerted effort. That doesn’t seem likely.
—Sarah Montalbano, Montana State University, computer science
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