Books: The Credential Society

Schooling, Competition, and Inequality

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The normie view of higher education — the kind of thing my parents believed when they sent me off to school, and that the politicians still spout — is that it provides skills and knowledge. That’s why so many jobs require college degrees, right?

People a little more familiar with the institution will admit that outside of some technical programs, like accounting and nursing, it doesn’t provide concrete career training. But they’ll still argue that it provides critical thinking skills and general knowledge that helps one be a successful individual and good citizen.

College gives you what you need to be successful, and so if we all go to college we’ll all be successful. The way to a richer society is to get everyone in college.

College Skeptics

In the past decade or so there’s been some heavy blows against the “skills and knowledge” model. For instance, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift uses panel data to show that the modal students simply doesn’t gain much measurable knowledge or skill in their time in college. And economist Bryan Caplan draws on these and other findings to forcefully argue that the main function college has (other than providing a middle-class rumpsringa) is certifying and signaling any desirable traits the students already brought with them to the institution. He argues that the market value of a college degree comes less from what it teaches you than from showing you’re sensible and conformist enough to jump the required hoops.

Long before these critiques, though, there was 1979’s The Credential Society, by sociologist Randall Collins. By the time Collins was writing the dramatic expansion of American higher education was already well under way, and he argued this expansion was mostly driven by the dynamics of status competition and social exclusion. Credentials were mostly currency, he argued, for buying social positions. And the currency was undergoing inflation. Hence BA is the new high school degree, and MA is the new BA.

The book may have been ahead of its time. In a recent interview, Collins says “for a long time, I considered The Credential Society was one of my least successful books. My message was what people didn't want to hear.”

In another interview, he adds:

Originally my book was considered scandalous by many people. When I presented the original manuscript to my first publisher (University of California Press), they refused to accept it, even though it was under contract. A new publisher, Academic Press, published it, but then they refused to allow a mass paperback publisher (Anchor Books) to buy the rights to it, and Academic Press refused to issue it in paperback."