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issue dated September 27, 2002 	

 <<...OLE_Obj...>> 	POINT OF VIEW The Dirty Little Secret of Credential
Inflation By RANDALL COLLINS  College degrees, once the possession of a tiny
elite of professional and wealthy individuals, are now held by more than a
fourth of the American population. But as educational attainment has
expanded, the social distinctiveness of the bachelor's degree and its value
on the marketplace have declined -- in turn, increasing the demand for still
higher levels of education. In fact, most problems of contemporary
universities are connected to "credential inflation."  In 1910, less than 10
percent of the population obtained, at most, high-school degrees. They were
badges of substantial middle-class respectability, until midcentury,
conferring access even to the managerial jobs. Now, a high-school degree is
little more than a ticket to a lottery in which one can buy a chance at a
college degree -- which itself is becoming a ticket to a yet higher-stakes
lottery.  Such credential inflation is driven largely by the expansion of
schooling -- like a government's printing more paper money -- rather than by
economic demand for an increasingly educated labor force. Our educational
system, as it widens access to each successive degree, has been able to
flood the market for educated labor at virtually any level.  For example, in
the 1960s and '70s, as competition for managerial positions grew among those
who held bachelor's degrees, M.B.A.'s became increasingly popular and
eventually the new standard for access to corporate jobs. Holders of such
degrees have attempted to justify the credential by introducing new
techniques of management -- often faddish, yet distinct enough to give a
technical veneer to their activities. Similarly, credentialed workers in
other occupations have redefined their positions and eliminated
noncredentialed jobs around them. Thus, the spiral of competition for
education and the rising credential requirements for jobs have tended to be
irreversible.  In principle, credential inflation could go on endlessly,
until janitors need Ph.D.'s, and baby sitters are required to hold advanced
degrees in child care. People could stay in college up through their 30s and
40s, or perhaps even longer.  Many people believe that our high-tech era
requires massive educational expansion. Yet the skills of cutting-edge
industries are generally learned on the job or through experience rather
than in high school or college. Compare the financial success of the
youthful founders of Apple or Microsoft, some of them college dropouts, with
the more modest careers of graduates of computer schools.  Furthermore, a
high-tech society does not mean that a high proportion of the labor force
consists of experts. A more likely pattern -- and the one we see emerging
today -- is a bifurcation of the labor force into an "expert" sector --
perhaps 20 percent -- and a much larger range of those with routine or even
menial service jobs. With continuing computerization and automation, typical
middle-class jobs may gradually disappear, leaving an even bigger gap
between a small elite of technical, managerial, and financial experts, and
everyone else.  In fact, credential inflation is the dirty secret of modern
education. If we admitted it publicly, and it became a topic for political
discussion, it would force us to face head-on the issue of our growing class
inequality. The continual expansion of an inflationary
educational-credentialing system palliates the problem of class conflict in
the United States by holding out the prospect of upward mobility somewhere
down the line, while making the connection remote enough to cover the
system's failure to deliver.  Credentialing spills over into careers within
academe. As colleges expanded with the massive enrollment increases of the
20th century, scholars have had a favorable environment in which to
differentiate new departments and specialties within them. The guild of
scholars began by controlling admission to teaching through possession of
its own credential, the research dissertation. Now, as colleges compete with
each other over prestige in innovative areas of research, credential
inflation has developed into heightened pressure for publication, not just
at the outset, but throughout one's career. As large institutions have
developed elaborate internal rankings and salary-step systems, faculty
members have experienced C.V. inflation.  Many professors prefer to
concentrate their energies and derive their prestige from their research and
the kind of teaching that is closest to it: apprenticing graduate students.
But even many of the most successful graduate assistants will primarily
teach undergraduates. Similarly, part of each professor's work time is
devoted to shepherding undergraduates through the process that will get them
job credentials or intermediate credentials in the academic progression.
Undergraduate enrollments are needed to support graduate students. And even
though they may complain of the intellectual unworthiness of undergraduates,
research professors count on academic credentials' having enough value in
nonacademic job markets -- those pursued by most undergraduates -- for their
own jobs to exist.  Our current period of credential inflation has been
accompanied by grade inflation and recommendation inflation. The prevailing
ethos is for faculty members to treat students sympathetically, to try to
get them through what the professors recognize as a competitive grind. That
ethos fits within the educational structure of self-reinforcing inflation.
The top of the research elite does rather well -- both materially and
intellectually -- under the current conditions of credential inflation. Yet
at the other end of the professoriate, there is a growing and increasingly
beleaguered teaching proletariat. The material conditions of their lives are
poor, and their career tracks are highly uncertain. Between the top and
bottom is a mass of faculty members who must cope with the publication
pressures that go along with increased competition for a declining
proportion of research and teaching jobs. Proposals for greater
accountability, or even for the abolition of tenure, strike mainly at this
middle group. It is entirely possible for the intellectual condition of the
system, determined by what is done by the research elite, to flourish while
pressure, alienation, and misery prevail at the levels below.  Will there be
a revolt of the professorial proletariat? While it seems at least
hypothetically possible, social-conflict theory suggests that it is not very
likely. Mobilization of an unprivileged stratum depends upon the formulation
of a self-conscious ideology of group identity. Moreover, mobilization by
the bottom stratum alone does not change a system of power. Such changes
start at the top, with a breakdown and struggle among competing elites over
how to fix it.  All this is very remote from conditions of academic life
today. Professors still define themselves primarily in terms of the
intellectual content of their disciplines, giving enormous implicit power to
the research elite. The strains that are palpable today for many scholars
lower in the hierarchy will probably remain merely localized, personal
troubles.  Meanwhile, colleges are under pressure to credential more
students at lower cost. If the fundamental versus applied character of the
disciplines is at issue in today's university, along with the growing
distance between a highly paid elite of noted researchers and an underclass
of temporary lecturers, then the causes are in the economic strains of a
system whose mass production of educational credentials for employment has
become very expensive. Institutions may increasingly choose to cut back on
faculty and staff members and to eliminate "superfluous" activities,
concentrating instead on the allegedly practical content that is supposed to
give students negotiable credentials.  That would be a false solution. Even
turning over the entire education system to narrowly job-related courses
would not stop credential inflation, which can occur with any kind of
academic content.  In fact, it is doubtful that we could stop credential
inflation if we wanted to. The mainspring is students' desire to get
credentials that will give them some edge in the job market. As long as a
free market of education providers exists, institutions have the incentive
to keep offering higher credentials. Draconian measures might include
drastically curtailing admissions or raising standards to levels that flunk
out all but a small elite. But such standards would be impossible to enforce
without a centralized, authoritarian system incompatible with modern
democracy. The late Chinese dynasties put such a measure into effect in
exams for government office, setting a quota for passing at below 1 percent.
But that did not stop many in the Chinese gentry from spending decades of
their lives seeking credentials.  Nevertheless, a control upon credential
inflation is built into the structure of our economy. Expanding the number
of degrees may be analogous to printing money, but there is one crucial
difference: Printing money is cheap, while the cost of minting degrees is
high. It is implausible that the system will keep on inflating through the
postdocs-for-janitors phase, because an upper limit is set by the amount
that can be spent on education while leaving room for private and government
budgetary expenditures. At crunch points, costs become too high, enrollments
fall, dropouts increase, government assistance declines, and many
educational institutions fail and are challenged by new ones.  Eventually,
the inflationary trend gets going again. As a society grows richer, it can
afford to allow more people to spend time competing in the education
marketplace instead of directly in the workplace. But credential inflation
and economic growth are not perfectly synchronized. In an era of poor job
prospects, the educational system plays an important role in warehousing
people and keeping them temporarily off the job market -- thus holding down
unemployment. It may even serve as a hidden welfare system, doling out
support in the form of student loans and subsidizing work-study programs.
Such results occur whether government budget-makers are aware of what they
are doing or not. In that sense, we may have entered a period in which we
can't politically afford to stop the processes that feed credential
inflation. The issue boils down to whether we want to manage credential
inflation, manipulating policy to smooth out peaks and valleys, or let it
take its own bumpy course.  Randall Collins is a professor of sociology at
the University of Pennsylvania. This article is adapted from The Future of
the City of Intellect: The Changing American University, edited by Steven
Brint and published recently by Stanford University Press.