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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."
But Collins took his own argument seriously enough that he resigned from academia for several years, before eventually deciding that if the gravy train was going to keep running regardless he might as well do what he was good at.
Nowadays, the idea that college enrollments are driven by credential inflation probably isn’t that shocking to most of you in the Substack-reading crowd. And credential inflation is a simple enough idea to understand: If the advantage of a degree comes from having one when other people don’t, then making the degree common lowers its value — thus incentivizing people to seek advantage in the next highest degree.
Given that, probably the most interesting aspects of Collins’s book are the way he traces the historical dynamics involved, and ties them into theories of cultural production and professionalization.
Against Techno-Functionalism
He starts by arguing against what he calls the techno-functional account of educational expansion: People go to school longer in the modern world because there’s more to learn, what with our society depending more and more on complex technology.
The problem here is that only a fraction of the growth in higher education has been growth in technical fields. You don’t need degrees in sociology or art history to deal with computers. And since Collins has written, the number of non-technical “studies” majors has multiplied even more.
Furthermore, even for technical and professional fields, a lot of the growth in educational requirements hasn’t come from more technical training, but from stacking up non-technical general education requirements. You can’t just study engineering or accounting, you need those art and gym and history electives too — adding an extra couple years to your time in college. And you can’t just go straight to studying medicine, you need a bachelor’s in some other field altogether before you even apply to a medical school.
Add to that what research on actual students, or even the casual observations by their professors and fellows, tells you: Most of them are geared toward getting their preferred outcome with minimal learning. “C’s get degrees,” as one of my own students happily put it.
For those who do go into professional and technical fields, most of their relevant skills are learned on the job, not all that different from the apprenticeships of old. And educational requirements are generally lower in occupations that actually produce things and higher in the bureaucratized service sector.
Rejecting any idea that either society or occupations in generally require a more educated populace, Collins explains educational expansion from a conflict perspective.
This sociological approach has its roots in Marx’s theory of class conflict, and so explains things in terms of a zero-sum struggles for advantage between social groups. But Collins is not a Marxist, and so rejects the narrow Marxian focus on the division between owners and workers. For Collins, the main fault lines are of culture and status. One dynamic is that a culturally defined elite use education to limit cushy jobs to like-minded folks who’ve gone through the cursus honorum; the other is that members of occupational groups use education to build a moat of professionalization around their job.
Culture as Currency
Consider the first dynamic — the relationship between schooling and elites. In the past education was used to keep minority ethnicities from encroaching on the social world of high-status White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. See, for example, the quotas capping Jewish enrollments at the Ivy League. But Collins thinks that pattern has largely given way to one in which elite status groups are defined by education itself.
He starts with the ideas that shared culture is a basis for forming status groups and that culture acts as a kind of currency one can use to gain status. Such culture can come from one of two sources: indigenous (informal) culture production, and formal culture production.
Cultural produced in everyday informal interactions is more local, and its value is often limited to the local — one can trade jokes and gossip on the local culture market, but they tend to have little currency in the wider world.
Formal culture production involves specialized culture-making organizations, like schools or the Church or network news. It tends be less specific to any locality, and thus have wider currency. It is the culture of states, social movements, and religions, something that can tie together otherwise socially distant individuals rather quickly.
(Compare to Riesman’s argument in The Lonely Crowd about mass consumer culture being a source of shallow ties between shallow people.)
The extent to which culture behaves like currency is itself variable. When formal culture producing organizations quantify the culture they produce or communicate — say, with certificates or degrees — it becomes even more currency-like. Money can become more and more abstracted from any physical store of wealth it’s meant to represent. Likewise, markers of cultural status like a college degree increasingly supplant actually displaying the culture it supposedly measures.
(Reminds me that I’ve now seen two or three instances on Twitter of a public-school teacher resorting to “I have a master’s in education!” to proclaim their superior skill.)
Competition Accelerates Production
The quantity of this cultural currency, or the credentials that pass for it, varies. It depends in part on how much resources a society sinks into its culture-producing organizations. Richer societies don’t always invest more in culture, but because being rich allows for it, they often do.
You also get more cultural production when there’s competition between different factions of culture producers and culture consumers. When there’s a highly centralized regime, you tend to get fewer different schools and different religious movements. When governments are relatively weaker or where their reach doesn’t extend as far, you get a proliferation of competing schools, churches, and so forth.
Furthermore, in the absence of some strong centralizing force, diversity of culture leads to diversity of culture-producing organizations. Times and places with multiple religious and ethnic groups tend to produce a proliferation of schools and education. Root hog or die.
Diversity Breeds Schooling
The background to the modern age of credentialism was the rapid expansion in the number of schools in the US during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Collins says this expansion was the combination of a wealthy society, a fairly weak central government, and the diversity introduced by waves of immigration.
Taking the conditions of the 19th century (wealthy, isolated, and decentralized) and pouring in the massive immigration of the 20th century led to a volatile cultural market and to competition between culture producing organizations. The main line of conflict then was between the dominant status group – white Anglo-Saxon Protestants – and the immigrant enclave communities.
A major problem for the old WASP elite was that whatever passed for schooling in these immigrant enclaves was continuing the backward and alien culture of the immigrants. Compulsory public education was the solution:
Public schools, with their compulsory attendance laws, spread precisely in those states facing the greatest immigration influx; the claims of educators to Americanize the immigrants was a major force in getting public support” (p.102).
The drive to found secondary schools was strongest in cities, which combined a larger tax base with large immigrant populations. Compulsory attendance laws evolved that specified age-ranges who must attend these schools as well.
The Politics of Professions
A second problem for the old elite was that some of those myriad enclave, religious, or otherwise local schools were actually funneling talent into professions — e.g., some of the kids who went to Sal’s Law School at night were passing the bar, and so now too many riffraff were getting into high status occupations like law.
But it wasn’t just an ethnic thing. For members of an occupation have their own interests, apart from any other groups they belong too. Sure, having too many of the weird sorts can lower the stature of your profession. But so can just having too many professionals altogether. If one is already a doctor or a lawyer, it pays to keep the club as exclusive as possible. For one thing a limited supply means you can charge more; for another the cachet of your profession comes in part from how wide a moat you keep around it.
The history of law and medicine is a history of widening the moat, and educational requirements were the main means of doing it.
In the 1830s Abraham Lincoln could become a practicing lawyer by reading law books on his own, and most would-be lawyers learned through apprenticeship – no law school necessary. Even in 1889, botanist Roscoe Pound could pass the Nebraska bar exam without going to law school, and in 1916 he became Dean of Harvard Law School without holding a law degree.
By the twentieth century though upper-class lawyers campaigned against just letting smart people test their way into the profession by passing the bar. No, no, you had to go to law school first before even taking the exam. The push was successful, and a law degree became necessary.
Demand gets supplied: The requirement of law school led to a proliferation of law schools, including night schools and more of those pesky neighborhood schools. But then, of course, most of the prestigious schools began to require a prior bachelor’s degree in, well, something or other, or at least a couple years’ worth of college work. No big firm will hire you without going to a good school, and no good school takes anybody who hasn’t completed his gen eds.
A similar situation happened in medicine. Interestingly, medicine has always been fairly high status, despite only being effective in recent history. So running an exclusive club was nothing new to doctors, and pushing medical training purely into postgraduate education — and shutting down a hundred medical schools not already attached to four-year universities — helped keep it exclusive. (Though to be fair to doctors, Congress limits them as well.)
The creation of a strong profession is an exercise in political power. The strongest, law and medicine, are backed by state force: You will go to jail for practicing without the requisite credentials.
Collins thinks part of what allowed law and medicine to professionalize to this degree that they became highly organized under elite leaders. Educational requirements are a function of power which is a function of organization. For instance, the first law firms emerged in the 1850s and competed to acquire a stable of wealthy clients. These firms bred an elite class of lawyers, who joined together to form the American Bar Association and began the push to require laws schools for the bar exam.
There’s also features of these occupations that makes them prone to professionalization — that is, to becoming autonomous, self-regulating, elite, and exclusive. Both jobs involve teachable skills with demonstrable results, but with work process and results that are unpredictable enough that they’re not easily judged by outsiders. The relationship between the predictability and observability of output and worker power is curvilinear.
When the outcome is least predictable and observable the worker is basically ineffectual. At the other extreme, those whose work is easily inspected and judged are easily controlled: Let’s run the water and see if you got a watertight fit.
In the human body or the courtroom, the relationship between action and outcome is causally obscure and unpredictable. You know a completely unskilled person will likely make a mess of it, but just because things went south doesn’t mean the expert had no skill. It’s a good breeding ground for a strong profession.
Collins compares the modern professionalization of medicine and law to the failed attempts to professionalize engineering. This really gets to the heart of the technocracy myth, for engineers are at the center of technological advance. Yet they have less educational requirements than law or medicine, which also have higher social status. Engineers never unified or organized in the same way. There have been various attempts to upgrade the status of the profession by requiring more liberal arts education of engineering majors. (One of my friends mentioned this in his own engineering program to explain why he had to read Chinua Achebe.) But one never got anything like the shift to engineering school being a completely postgraduate study, requiring four years of some other major first.
Collins notes that having multiple autonomous professional communities in a society should have the same effect as having different ethnic groups. It feeds credential inflation.
Education as Ethnicity
The two dynamics — status striving and competition by ethnic and occupational groups — started the ball of credential inflation rolling downhill. It would pick up speed even as the nature of social divisions changed.
Writing decades out from Harvard’s Jewish quotas, Collins argued that the status competition driving credential inflation has largely lost its ethnic character. The twentieth century saw a halt to large-scale immigration, and the generation of assimilation that followed muted the ethnic and religious fault lines. The kids who made it out of the enclaves and into the elite were by and large assimilated and accepted — and their own kids would certainly be. At least, if they demonstrated they were the right sort of person…
…Which, Collins argues, was increasingly defined by education itself. By the time of his writing in the 70s, he claims, colleges were largely in the business of passing on middle-class culture. The shared culture acquired in the educational system transformed the elite and the upwardly mobile, welding them together into a recognizable educated class, and increasingly dividing them — socially and economically — from the less educated class. For Collins, education itself has become a kind of pseudoethnicity.
He probably isn’t alone in this, but he deserves some credit for recognizing decades ago what is obvious now: Education is increasingly the great predictor of everything from income to politics to style. This foreshadows Charles Murray’s argument in Coming Apart. Class is increasingly defined by education, and the credentialed class increasingly lives in a different world than the rest.
The Sinecure Society
Members of the new educated class have many educated occupations, including the professions. But perhaps the most interesting are those jobs that don’t seem to actually produce much.
Collins argues that the reason is that while technology has made society in general far wealthier, wealth continues to be distributed through work. Technology has eliminated some jobs, sure, but it has also lead to a drastic multiplication of easy jobs — including a drastic expansion of government employment.
Advanced technology, far from demanding hard work and long training from everyone, has made occupational demands more and more superficial and arbitrary (p.55).
In other words, wealth led to more of what anthropologist David Graeber later called Bullshit Jobs.
Only for the educated classes, these bullshit jobs often bring pretty decent material rewards, and often some titles and respect as well. These new jobs resemble Max Weber’s concept of prebends — “positions distinguished for the purpose of monopolizing their incomes” (p.57). Instead of being bought directly with cash, however, these positions are paid-for with cultural currency of educational credentials. The term used in medieval society is sinecures.
Modern society is stuffed full of sinecures. But there are not enough to match the rapid growth of the cultural market. Credentials increase faster than the positions that require them. Credential inflation results.
This has all happened before, in the German Universities and to the classical Chinese exam system.
The Future of Credentials
In a 2018 interview, Collins reflects on his analysis in light of more recent developments, including more widespread questioning of the value of higher education. One thing he would wish to add to a revised book would be a consideration of how credential inflation is different from monetary inflation:
But educational credentials are not just the paper that diplomas are printed on, but require much investment in school buildings, salaries for teachers and administrators, etc…"printing" more educational degrees becomes very expensive when degrees are inflated and students spend more years of their lives in school. So the historical trend to inflate degrees goes through periodic crises-- either the students can't afford the degrees when their job payoff declines, or the government (or parents) can't afford to keep expanding the educational system. There was a mini-crisis like this in the 1980s, and again in the 2010s; and we can expect more such crises in the future.
Elsewhere he speculates that “the endless expansion of years of schooling” may be a backdoor way to make capitalist societies outright socialist, perhaps solving a looming problem of technology obsoleting middle class jobs.
For my own part, I wonder whether technology can ever truly make a sinecure obsolete. After all, the point of the job isn’t that it gets done, but that somebody does it. We create the position to have the right sort of person in it.
Though perhaps technology can make it harder to pretend the jobs have their manifest function, and insofar as make-believe is part of how people get their status some adjustment will be necessary.
And I wonder what it heralds for the future of college-as-gatekeeping that universities around the country are quietly gutting vestigial meritocracy — for example by doing away with standardized test scores in admissions decisions.
There may indeed be a great contraction of higher education as credential inflation strips degrees of their value and employers turn en masse to more accurate ways of certifying the competence of potential employees.
This may interact with another trend. As many observers have pointed out, shifting admissions criteria toward expensive and time-consuming volunteer activity, proper knowledge of the latest verbal etiquette, or other vague “personality” based criteria is likely to advantage the people who already come from wealthy and credentialed households. This makes me picture a future in which an expensive university education is much more explicitly part of the cursus honorum of elites, a station o the track of achievement by which they prove their worth to hold prestigious or lucrative positions.
As it becomes so, and as these elites get more distant from the masses, maybe the idea that higher education should be available to everyone will fade away, the relic of a strange, chaotic, and egalitarian phase in history.
Further Reading:
Collins, Randall. 1971. “Functionalist and Conflict Theories of Educational Stratification.” American Sociological Review 36(6): 1002-19.
Collins, Randall. 2023. “Credential Inflation Makes College Degree Not Worth the Cost.” Sociological Eye Blog, April 14.
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