
The Case Against Credentialism (1985) - zt
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1985/12/the-case-against-credentialism/308286/?single_page=true
======
JumpCrisscross
> _What immigrant saga would be complete without the peddler 's grandson
> receiving his M.D.? But such an ideal is also at odds with most analyses of
> what the society as a whole needs if it is to continue to achieve. If
> everyone has the tenure and security that come with professional status, who
> will take the risks?_

A crowning achievement of Silicon Valley culture is its professionalisation of
risk-taking. This culture nudges highly-trained computer scientists, aerospace
engineers and M.D.s towards risk. The risks this educated person can take are
different from the one illiterate tradesmen a century ago could. They are
deeper, more complex and more fruitful–to the individual and to society.

~~~
empthought
> A crowning achievement of Silicon Valley culture

Yes, those ads won't make impressions themselves, nor will people be able to
network socially, without the heroic contributions of SV risk-takers.

------
jval
Sad thing about this article is that it is amazing, and yet the last thirty
years has probably favoured well-credentialed people more so than any point in
history. While there's an argument to be made that this is now turning around
(and no doubt it should, and should have many years ago), I still think the
trend is moving in favour of credentialism rather than away from it.

I don't really know what can be done about it because as Nassim Taleb put it,
university degrees are like racketeering - bad for the collective but good for
the individual,[0] so unfortunately I think it will continue to get worse for
the foreseeable future at least. If you had disregarded everything this
article said in 1985 and gone straight to HBS followed by Goldman, you would
probably be sitting in your mansion right now and not care in the slightest
about the credentialism problem, entrepreneurship or Silicon Valley. Obviously
there's a ton of value judgments you can make about that, but the fact it is
true is a huge net negative for society, as we need to align prestige and
financial incentives around behaviours which are good for the collective.

Ultimately I think any solution to this problem would have to go back to the
root of it, which is the increasing strength of vested interests in Western
society who push for the creation of rents to perpetuate their wealth and
power. Ultimately that reality is what makes rent-seeking professions so
attractive, and in turn allows those professions to monopolise and 'rent seek
from rent-seeking', i.e. have a monopoly over rent-extraction in the same way
the law and investment banking does.

How you would solve that? ... well I don't know. Get some sort of 21st century
Theodore Roosevelt, I guess.

[0]
[https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=13012333374&story_...](https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=13012333374&story_fbid=10150962509078375)

~~~
IndianAstronaut
>Ultimately that reality is what makes rent-seeking professions so attractive

This is what peolle that want a programmers guild or union want. Put up
barriers to new entrants so they can protect their prestige and positions.

I do hope sites like Hacker Rank set a model for finding workers on pure
talent rather than degrees or anything else.

~~~
jamesmiller5
The article specifically states that an arbitrary measurement of
"professional" fitness is the problem. How would a ranking system be any
different than a credential system?

A more effective solution at finding the right candidates is an educational
system available to all.

~~~
IndianAstronaut
>A more effective solution at finding the right candidates is an educational
system available to all.

Yes, will be good. Also important is the free movement of talent to where it
is needed.

>arbitrary

Not all ranking is arbitrary. A lot of it is targetted for the skillset a job
needs. What I find arbitrary is quotas. I see this in medicine and actuarial
science. Where instead of basic competency, they take the top x %.

------
tome
A thirty-year-old article which reads like it could have been written today.

~~~
andyzweb
Try this one from the same publication. Written in 1945 and reads like it
could be written in the future
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-
ma...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-
think/303881/)

~~~
phkahler
From that link: "He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive
task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge."

I've been meaning to write a book. I accidentally became a bit of an expert in
an area that is not very accessible. I started doing it in the 1990's and find
it's still not accessible and not taught until at least the masters level. I'd
like to do a book that brings it down to a more normal level and pull it out
of the hands of the PhD - there is no real reason for that. Need some time and
motivation, but I recommend anyone who has expertise to write a book or blog
and try to simplify complex subjects. Wikipedia is often the opposite, with
technical subjects dominated by equations and complex math - that's fine for
advanced people but does nothing to help anyone get started.

~~~
eru
You could start by improving Wikipedia.

~~~
phkahler
>> You could start by improving Wikipedia.

No. I don't have sources for whats in my brain. I also tried updating
Wikipedia - a simple matrix equation for the Clarke Transform. It's supposed
to be 2x3 matrix converting from a 3d space to a 2d one. They had the 3x3 form
which adds an additional element, but AFAIK that is not the form Clarke used.
I fixed it, it got changed back later.

~~~
eru
That's a bit of a problem. You can get involved in Wikipedia culture, if you
want to. I think the talk page of an article is where you hash those things
out (and don't forget to add sources). (Or just publish elsewhere, if that's
too much work.)

------
at-fates-hands
Its important to note the backdrop for the time period when this article was
written.

A few key things that happened in 1985:

\- Steve Jobs leaves Apple to found NeXT

\- John Hendricks launches the Discovery Channel in the United States.

\- Super Mario Bros. is released for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

\- The Free Software Foundation is founded in Massachusetts, USA.

\- Microsoft Corporation releases the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0.

\- Solarquest, the space age real estate game, is first published by Golden.

There are a ton more, but there was a huge wave of Entrepreneurship in the mid
80's which would have a profound effect on the next 20 years of nearly every
part of of culture.

Source -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985)

~~~
hayksaakian
>next 20 years

do you mean next 30 years? :)

------
1457389
> The business-school community closely studies each school's “return on
> investment” or “value added” ratio—how much an M.B.A. degree adds to a
> person's salary, compared with how much it costs to obtain. At Dartmouth's
> Amos Tuck School, the nation's oldest graduate business college, tuition
> this year is $11,000, and the average starting salary for graduates is
> around $43,000. “That four-to-one ratio has been constant for at least the
> fifteen or twenty years. I've been aware of it,” Colin Blaydon, Amos Tuck's
> dean, says. Harvard also reports a four-to-one ratio, down from the heady
> seven-to-one ratio of 1969, but not so far that Harvard has any trouble
> filing its admissions quotas.

Interesting. Ratio for recent years is roughly 2.

[0] [http://www.hbs.edu/about/facts-and-figures/Pages/mba-
statist...](http://www.hbs.edu/about/facts-and-figures/Pages/mba-
statistics.aspx)

~~~
optimusclimb
>how much an M.B.A. degree adds to a person's salary, compared with how much
it costs to obtain. At Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School, the nation's oldest
graduate business college, tuition this year is $11,000, and the average
starting salary for graduates is around $43,000. “That four-to-one ratio

I find it interesting that at first that sentence talks about how much the
degree "adds to a person's salary", but then pegs the ratio at "four-to-one".
Assuming the person entering the MBA program already had a 4 year degree,
their salary potential wasn't likely $0, i.e. it didn't move the needle by a
4:1 ratio.

Factor in the interest on the loans, and the fact that the added salary (over
their pre-MBA earning potential) would likely be taxed in the higher brackets,
and I'd imagine the ratio jumps a lot lower.

And still - intuition tells me that value add of an MBA, from a salary
perspective, over a person's career - is still quite good.

~~~
derf_
Don't forget to add in the fact that you could have been earning that non-zero
salary potential for two years instead of _paying_ tuition...

When I started my Ph.D., early on they ran the numbers with us. The increased
starting salary from having a Ph.D. (probably somewhere in the $15...$20k
range... I forget the exact number) will _never_ make up for the four year
head-start someone who stops at a Bachelor's degree gets on actually drawing a
salary, once you discount to net present value (even when you factor in a
graduate student's meager stipend).

~~~
tjradcliffe
Ergo, you should be doing a PhD for the love. The purpose of education is to
make you a better human being, not to get you a job (that said, a PhD in an
interesting subject can vastly increase your employment flexibility in ways
you can't even imagine.)

------
rab_oof
Pedigree fools fools.

