The following questions
were posed by a Chinese on-line newspaper, The Paper [https://www.thepaper.cn]:
[The Paper:] 1. The Credential Society was published in 1979, but its Chinese
edition has just come out. Therefore, I assume it is a good
opportunity for you to review the days when you wrote it. So, after 39 years, do you still believe
your observation and judgment of education and society? Has the educational
system operated in the way this book presented in recent years?
Yes, inflation of
educational requirements for jobs has increased quite a lot. In the US, the
value of a 12-year (high school) diploma now is almost worthless for getting a
job; it is only useful for entry into university to get a higher degree. Jobs
that formerly had lower requirements, like police officer, now require a
college degree, while a M.A. in Criminology or Criminal Justice is required to
become a Police Chief. In the 1970s, when I wrote the book, a B.A. degree was
becoming common for a job as a business manager; now most of these jobs require
an MBA (as I predicted). This has
happened all across the spectrum of jobs.
[The Paper:] 2. Although the Credential Society
focused on the U. S., it has been globally influential over the years. How do you evaluate its universal impact and
value? In your opinion, is it applicable to other countries?
Credential inflation has
become applicable world-wide in the last 30 or 40 years. The US began
credential inflation earlier than most other countries; already by 1930 it had
a higher percentage of university students and 12-year high school students; it
started aiming for universal high school education in the 1950s, and now for
universal university education. Russia (the old Soviet Union) and Japan were
two other countries that developed mass high school and university systems
early. Most European countries-- England, France, Germany-- had elite systems,
with only a small proportion attending high schools (lycée, Gymnasium, etc.)
and even smaller fractions attending university. They began to follow the US
path of inflation in the 1960s and 70s, and then accelerated. Now many other
countries-- for example, Chile, South Korea-- have pushed to a level where a
large majority of the youth cohort attend universities; and it has become a
major political demand-- how to provide free university education for everyone.
[The Paper:] 3. Since its publication, the
Credential Society has caused persistent discussion. Has
any relevant comment or discussion impressed you?
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. So the book became hard to buy; and people would write to me to ask
for a copy. Since it was written before the time of word-processing programs,
the best I could do was send them a photo-copy.
Over the years, the
argument was known to specialists in sociology of education-- especially those
with a more critical viewpoint; and several articles I had written on the topic
were well known to students. The issue of credential inflation started becoming
public after the 2008-9 financial crisis; and in the following years newspapers
started carrying articles questioning whether a university degree is a good
investment, because its value as a job payoff has fallen, while its cost has
risen sharply.
[The Paper:] 4. What does this book mean to your academic career and your life? Has it
influenced your other works?
When the book was first
published, I resigned my university position, because I felt it was wrong for
me to work in the system that I had criticized. But the other books and
articles that I published-- I worked in many other areas besides sociology of
education-- resulted in receiving many job offers. I took a position that
mainly consisted of doing research, and have published books that have had a
good reception-- on sociological theory, creativity in intellectual networks,
face-to-face social interaction, and sociology of violence. I stopped writing
on credential inflation for many years, to work on other topics.
[The Paper:] Are you satisfied with this book? If
you were given a chance to rewrite it, would you like to make any modification
or improvement?
To rewrite it now, I
would need several research assistants to examine all the research that has
been done of education and careers, education and its rising costs, education
and social inequality. In general, the correlation between parents' social
class and children's education has not changed from the 1930s through the
present-- i.e. a huge increase in the percentage of children who go to high
school, university, and advanced professional schools has gone up but
stratification hasn't changed. The belief that more access to education would
bring social equality has proven wrong.
On the theoretical side,
the main thing that I would add to the book is to refine the concept of
credential inflation as similar to monetary inflation. As economists have known
for a long time, putting more money in circulation reduces the buying power of
money. But the difference is, printing new money costs very little; and in the
centralized banking systems we now have, it is possible to increase the money
supply just by changing the procedures for making loans or to change the
numbers in a computer. (This happens every day when the market value of a
popular stock goes up.) 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. Therefore: although monetary
inflation theoretically has no limit, "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.
At some point, if 100% of the population is going to spend 20 or more years in
school getting more and more advanced degrees, the cost of education becomes
equal to almost the entire economy.
[The Paper:] 5. What research did you do
for the book? What was the most challenging part when you wrote it?
Besides the theoretical
analysis, I made two main research contributions. One was to assemble data to
show how the job value of degrees has inflated during the 19th and 20th
centuries in the US (the modern country that started credential inflation). I
showed, for instance, that jobs as business managers required only high school
degrees (or even less if one started as a family member or apprentice) until
the 1950s. Surprisingly, even technical jobs-- engineers, the most essential
technical job for modern industry-- was mostly learned by apprenticeship or
on-the-job, rather than by formal education. Traditionally in the West, lawyers and medical doctors, along
with priests, were the main occupations that required university degrees; and
even in these fields, people could learn these professions by apprenticeship. Abraham
Lincoln, for instance, was a lawyer who never went to school, but learned law as an apprentice. The movement to require university and advanced degrees
came in the late 19th century (in the US) and explicitly tried to make these
fields more socially elite.
I would add here that if
I were to revise The Credential Society
today, I would add a section on how the big fortunes in the Information
Technology area were made: Not by going to university to get a degree, but by
dropping out of the university, to follow one's own innovations. This was the
way the founders of Apple came to create the personal computer, and later the
career paths by which Facebook, Google, and other digital empires were created.
(Apparently this is true in China,
too, where the founders of Alibaba and Tencent were not academic stars, but
failures in the exam system, who found experience in telecommunications work
that gave them the idea of spinning off new products.) There is an important
theoretical reason for this: the fortunes were made by creating a new
technology, and it was too new to be taught in the universities. The creators
went directly to the most advanced practitioners of technology of that day,
examined their equipment, sometimes stole their best ideas or put them to new
use, hired away the best technicians and engineers. For them to wait until they
got their degrees would have put them behind in the race to invention.
This is one reason why
the creators of high-tech industries and especially the entrepreneurs who make
huge fortunes, are usually men. In the US, women have made great advances in
getting into universities and advanced professional schools, and are the
majority of the students now at these levels. But the educational degree
pathway is a bureaucratic career pathway, step-by-step. Women increasingly get
to be named the head of a big corporation now, but few women do what Steve Jobs
or Mark Zuckerberg did-- drop out and concentrate on the innovation, not on
getting the degree.
I mentioned that The Credential Society made two main
research contributions. The second one was to test the dominant theory about
educational expansion, at the time I wrote it. This was the technological
theory of education. It said that modern jobs become more complex and more
technical, so in order to get a job in the modern sector one needs more
education. This was a theory; no one ever tested it. I got data on many kinds
of organizations, their educational requirements in hiring, and how technologically
advanced they were. I found that the high-tech organizations of the time (i.e.
the 1960s) had lower educational requirements than low-tech organizations; and
that higher credential requirements were in high status organizations (such as
elite law firms). Economists favored the
technical-skills argument; but they never measured whether advanced education
really did provide the skills for the job. They developed another theory that
education may not provide skills, but it is a signal that a person has some
thing unmeasured which makes them good at acquiring skills. They never tested
this either. In more recent years, the examples of people like Steve Jobs and
Mark Zuckerberg have made some economists (or at least newspaper writers)
recognize that entrepreneurship and innovation are not really what education
teaches, and that there is a more direct route to the technological frontier.
[The Paper:] 6. The Credential Society has been well-known for its fierce criticism to the educational system. How did you realize the inequality of the educational system and start to query its rationality?
My father was a
diplomat, and we lived in foreign countries while I grew up. Most of what I
learned came from reading my father's books or books in the Embassy
library. My last two years in high
school were an a prep school in New England, where most of the other students
came from rich families, and the school taught us how to take the exams that
would get one admitted to an Ivy League college. I went to Harvard, where
everybody was proud of how much more elite they were than anyone else. What I
learned about education at that point in my life was that it was stratified,
some schools were considered more elite, and it was mainly children of rich
families who went there; but even if your family wasn't rich (my father never
owned a house until he retired), if you could get into an elite school, its
high status would rub off on you too. (This is only partially true. I was never
really accepted into the clubs of the rich kids; but I did become part of the
academic elite.) Going to Harvard meant that you could go to graduate school at
Stanford or Berkeley, and those degrees got you hired at a top research
university. But the elite status of being a faculty member at those
universities depended on doing the most famous research inside the network of researchers,
and my professors were the best network I could have started from. I learned
what topics were on the advanced edge, how to do their kind of research; even
criticizing them and moving on to new theories was the kind of skill they
favored. From my perspective now, I would say that elite research universities
provide a kind of apprenticeship, or on-the-job training, by starting as a
research assistant to famous professors. Academic research is the one job where
an academic credential pathway coincides with actually learning the skill you
will apply later on.
[The Paper:] Which
theories affect your thinking at that time? Was it related to your own
experiences?
To sum up my early
experiences: education clearly was related to stratification, since the elite
schools were always bragging about how elite they were. But this was
incongruous with what social scientists were teaching as a theory of
education: that education is a
pathway to social equality.
When sociologists
starting doing field research and survey research in the 1930s-1950s, they
discovered that the most important division in people's lives was by social
class. Research on social mobility (now called status attainment) found that
the strongest predictor of a child's future job was the education of his or her
parents. So the theory of meritocracy was developed: if a child could get more
education than one's parents,
he/she would end up in a higher social class. Most research since that
time-- from the 1960s until today-- concentrates on the first part of the
chain: what factors lead from family to school attainment. (They paid little
attention to the second part of the chain: once you have the educational
degree, what determines what happens to you then?) In France, Pierre Bourdieu
became famous in the 1970s, by showing that children acquire "cultural
capital" from their parents, and this determines how well they do in
school; Bourdieu also thought that this "cultural capital" would also
affect would kind of jobs they would get, since the people doing the hiring
want people who have the same cultural tastes as themselves.
My early work was done
parallel to Bourdieu. Both of us were critical of the idea that expanding
education would make a society more equal. The main differences in my work
were: [1] to empirically criticize the theory that advanced technology was the
reason why all societies were now demanding more education; [2] focusing on the
mechanism of credential inflation, or the dynamics of the system over a long
period of time.
[The Paper:] 7. The Credential Society presented an
in-depth exploration in the educational system and employment of social sciences, but seldom mentioned natural sciences and engineering. Do you
think that your analysis and inference also make sense to natural sciences?
Yes. First, to describe
the history: as I mentioned, engineers were the last major profession to
credentialize; the inventors and entrepreneurs who made the industrial
revolution, the automobile revolution, etc. were not educated in professional
schools of engineering, but from working with the machinery itself, trying out
new combinations. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were the Steve Jobs and Jack Ma of their day. Yes, it is
possible to create educational credentials in engineering and science, but this
happens after the key developments begin, and it standardizes them so that they
can be taught.
In recent years, as
universities have been squeezed for funds (because of the rising costs of
mass-producing credentials), they have encouraged engineering and science
departments to connect more directly with entrepreneurs, or to become
entrepreneurs themselves. This means, instead of focusing on the credential,
focusing on getting into the entrepreneurial and technological networks
themselves.
Natural scientists also
do "basic research" and here the careers within universities and
research institutes are like what I described for my own career in social
science. The universities are the center of these networks, and scientists
learn how to innovate by apprenticeship to scientists who are already doing it.
So one can make an
argument that natural science-- at least some of it-- really does have a
technological and economic payoff. I have already suggested that following the
academic route to credentials is not what the most famous innovators have done.
But assuming that some of the credentials pay off, is it reasonable to expect
that a majority of the jobs in a society of the future will consist of
scientists and technicians? Especially if credential inflation goes up towards
100% of the population: does China really need 1 billion engineers and
scientists, or the US needs 300 million?
[The Paper:] 8. In this book, you show your approval
of credential Keynesianism and credential abolitionism as the solutions to the
problems of education, do you still believe these? How do you evaluate their
feasibility?
Political efforts to
abolish credential requirements for certain occupations have been tried in the
US, but have done nothing to slow the general trend. Keynesian economics was
out of fashion with economists for many years, but since the 2008 recession
"stimulus" spending has often been favored. Few people seem to
realize that government expenditures on education are Keynesian, in the sense
that they provide jobs both for teachers, payment for builders and other
suppliers of material resources; they also keep full-time students off the
labor market, and if they receive room and board, it is a transfer payment
which puts more spending money into the economy. In the book Does Capitalism Have a Future? (written
with Immanuel Wallerstein et al., 2013, Oxford Univ. Press), I suggested that
in a future where computers take over human jobs, expanding the school system
to everybody for lifetime learning would be a way to carry out socialism
without calling it by that name.
[The Paper:] 9.
According to the preface, despite your criticism to
education, you had to work as a university professor for many years. What do you feel about this situation?
It is rather pleasant to
work in a high-level research university, so my only objection to working there
was my moral objection to living off an institution that operates on false
promises. But it is interesting to work around intellectually creative
colleagues and thoughtful students-- especially if they are more interested in
intellectual discoveries than in getting credentials.
[The Paper:] Have you made any attempt to change the educational system?
Hardly anyone in
American schools objects to credential inflation, if they recognize it at all,
because where there is a large demand for degrees, there is a demand for
teachers. My colleagues, if they
think about it at all, would probably say that to criticize credential
inflation is to attack their jobs.
[The Paper:] 10. Have you ever paid attention to
China’s education and society? And do you have any academic interest on it? If
so, please share your observation and thoughts.
Yes,
both historically and for the present.
In my book, The Sociology of
Philosophies [1998, Princeton Univ. Press], I wrote several long chapters
about networks of Chinese philosophers. Their organizational base included the
Imperial university and the examination system for government positions. The
Han Dynasty had one of the world's earliest educational bureaucracies; and the
Song Dynasty created the first period of credential inflation, which grew
stronger in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. But although candidates had to pass an
increasing number of exams and degrees, and some studied until they were more
than 40 years old, the exam system only provided credentials for employment in
the Imperial bureaucracy; unlike modern credentialism in the US and elsewhere,
it did not spread to other kinds of jobs. So dynastic China had credential
inflation that was confined to a rather small elite.
Since
the Deng Xiao-ping market reforms, Chinese high schools and universities have
expanded, and the intense competition among students to enter elite schools is
famous. There are some differences from the US system of credential inflation,
however. The Chinese system is more "meritocratic" in the sense that
university admission depends so heavily on academic examination. The US system,
under political influences, uses multiple criteria, including scores on
national exams, but also grade point averages in high school, participation in
athletics and other extracurricular activities, desirable personality, and attempts
to include ethnic minorities in (unofficial) quotas. As a result, I would say
the US system tends to be somewhat anti-intellectual, whereas the Chinese
system is more narrowly focused on intellectual performance. The US system also
has a trend to "grade inflation" as most students now are awarded the
top grades, with the effect of diluting the criteria of excellent performance;
the Chinese system appears to uphold more strict standards. This is probably a
reason why US students tend to score low in international comparisons, whereas
Chinese students score high.
I
would like to draw one theoretical conclusion from this comparison. The US
economy has performed strongly, almost all the time for over 100 years. It
performed well when we had a small elite school system; it performed well when
we expanded to mass education; it continues to perform well even when we dilute
the standards and undergo both credential inflation and grade inflation. My
conclusion is: it does not matter how the school system performs. Not everyone
educated in American has to be a scientist or engineer; if only 10 percent of
them are good at this, nevertheless we have such a large system that it
fulfills our technical needs. And other features of the US society foster
entrepreneurs of the Steve Jobs/ Thomas Edison type; so the economic dynamism
is there.
China,
in proportional terms for its large population, does not have the extreme
credential inflation found in the US.
Perhaps it will get there in the future. Or perhaps it will go a
different path.
A new edition of The Credential Society will be published in 2019 by Columbia
University Press.
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