The Overselling of Higher Education, George C. Leef, Sept. 5, 2006 (www.popecenter.org)

Recommended Overview :

David K. Brown, “The Social Sources of Educational Credentialism: Status Cultures, Labor Markets, and Organizations,” Sociology of Education, Extra Issue (2001): 19-34.

ABSTRACT: The expansion of access to higher education and the proliferation of formal degree requirements for entry to employment have been enduring trends over the past century. This article reviews the contested development and promise of the Weberian theory of educational credentialism, which views competition for credentials as a primary determinant of modern stratification systems. The key issues that are elaborated include the relationship of educational expansion to economic growth, the relative importance of technical skills versus occupational status-group cultures in degrees and recruitment, the significance of the formalization of degrees, and the peculiar dynamics of bureaucratic and professional credential markets. The future trajectory of credentialism is assessed in light of potential policy reforms, market crises, and state interventions.
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Although Credential Inflation is implicated in a long list of ills that plague American higher education, it remains ignored by policy makers. Whether this is due to their stupidity or stubbornness, I do not know. But as these studies/essays above indicate, the credential inflation spiral is accelerating, with dire consequences for those caught up in its ever tightening coils.

Among the problems in higher education associated with credential inflation are :

Climbing college tuition and fees (colleges charge what the market will bear, and there is no end in sight); mounting burdens of student debt (delays starting families, smaller families, higher levels of birth defects for those couples working longer to pay off student loans); increased involvement of the Federal government in higher education;

Shallow, credential-driven student learning in college courses; Grade inflation pressures; the loss of degree-value in the job market; failed curricular reforms;     

Hyper-competitive college admissions and soaring numbers of applicants for desirable upper-echelon schools (as growing access at the bottom drives competition at the top of the heap);

Increases in high school dropout rates and the overall devaluation of high school diplomas; more wasted years in graduate school (Ivar Berg called them “aging vats”);

Raids on the wall of separation between secondary and postsecondary education that took over a century to establish (through the awarding of college credit for Advanced Placement, dual enrollment, etc., courses given at local high schools);

Overworked faculty, crowded lecture halls, impersonal courses, a standing army of poorly paid adjuncts; a corporate culture of rampant cynicism and the loss of faith, generally, in higher education; cheating and dishonesty of all kinds;  

The loss of the capacity to innovate; stifled reform and other manifestations of increased institutional path-dependence.

And, lastly, the continued hegemony and entrenchment of the regional accrediting guilds.

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“The school system, the cornerstone of reformist hope, has expanded to include the vast majority of the youth population, but with paradoxical results: Instead of providing everyone with an opportunity for upward mobility, the mass school system has served mainly to push up educational requirements for employment, so that high-school graduates now search for the same low-level jobs that were once the lot of grade-school dropouts. And as the giant bureaucracies expand to include ever-larger segments of our lives, the rebellion and alienation found at the bottom of a competitive stratification system merely move into the school system. Instead of a solution to social problems in the outside world, the schools have become the containers and creators of their own problems.”