Students chase degree after degree, adding crushing debt, as jobs vanish. It is time to radically rethink college
RANDALL COLLINS

Excerpted from "Does Capitalism Have a Future?"

Credential inflation is the rise in educational requirements for jobs as a rising proportion of the population attains more advanced degrees. The value of a given educational certificate or diploma declines as more people have one, thereby motivating them to stay in school longer. In the United States, high-school (i.e., twelve-year secondary school) diplomas were comparatively rare before World War II; now high-school degrees are so commonplace that their job value is worthless. University attendance is now over 60% of the youth cohort, and is on the way to the same fate as the high-school degree. It is a worldwide trend; in South Korea, 80% of high-school graduates now go on to higher education. The main thing that inflated degrees are worth is to plough them back into the educational market, seeking still higher degrees. This in principle is an endless process; it could very well reach the situation of the Chinese mandarin class during the later dynasties, when students continued sitting for exams into their thirties and forties— only now this would affect the vast majority of the population instead of a small elite. Different countries have gone through educational inflation at different rates, but from the second half of the 20th century onward, all of them have followed this path.

Educational degrees are a currency of social respectability, traded for access to jobs; like any currency, it inflates prices (or reduces purchasing power) when autonomously driven increases in monetary supply chase a limited stock of goods, in this case chasing an ever more contested pool of upper-middle-class jobs. Educational inflation builds on itself; from the point of view of the individual degree-seeker, the best response to its declining value is to get even more education. The more persons who hold advanced degrees, the more competition among them for jobs, and the higher the educational requirements that can be demanded by employers. This leads to renewed seeking of more education, more competition, and more credential inflation.

Within this overall inflationary process, the most highly educated segment of the population has received an increasingly greater proportion of the income; at least this has been so in the United States since the 1980s. One should be wary about extrapolating this particular historical period into an eternal pattern for all times and places. Those at the top of the inflationary competition for credentials have benefited from several processes: [a] they were in the relatively safe havens when technological displacement was hitting, initially, the last of the decently paid manual labor force, and then low-paid clerical work. [b] The quality of work performance between different levels of the educational hierarchy has apparently widened.

What has been insufficiently recognized is that the inflationary spiral in schooling has brought increasing alienation and perfunctory performance among students who are not at the top of the competition, those who are forced to stay in school more years but get no closer to elite jobs. Grade inflation and low standards of promotion are symptoms of this process. There is considerable evidence, from ethnographies of teenagers, of youth culture, and especially youth gangs, that the expansion of schooling has brought increasing alienation from official adult standards. The first youth gangs appeared in the early 1950s when working-class youth were first being pressured into staying in school instead of going into the labor force; and their ideology was explicitly anti-school.

This is the source of the oppositional youth culture that has grown so widely, both among the minority who belong to gangs and the majority who share their antinomian stance.
Credential inflation is the rise in educational requirements for jobs as a rising proportion of the population attains more advanced degrees. The value of a given educational certificate or diploma declines as more people have one, thereby motivating them to stay in school longer. In the United States, high-school (i.e., twelve-year secondary school) diplomas were comparatively rare before World War II; now high-school degrees are so commonplace that their job value is worthless. University attendance is now over 60% of the youth cohort, and is on the way to the same fate as the high-school degree. It is a worldwide trend; in South Korea, 80% of high-school graduates now go on to higher education. The main thing that inflated degrees are worth is to plough them back into the educational market, seeking still higher degrees. This in principle is an endless process; it could very well reach the situation of the Chinese mandarin class during the later dynasties, when students continued sitting for exams into their thirties and forties— only now this would affect the vast majority of the population instead of a small elite. Different countries have gone through educational inflation at different rates, but from the second half of the 20th century onward, all of them have followed this path.


[. . .]

Although credential inflation is the primary mechanism of educational expansion, overt recognition of this process has been repressed from consciousness, in virtually a Freudian manner. In this case, the idealizing and repressing agent, the Superego of the educational world, is the prevailing technocratic ideology. Rising technical requirements of jobs drive out unskilled labor, the argument goes, and today’s high-skilled jobs demand steadily increasing levels of education. Thirty years ago, in The Credential Society, I assembled evidence to show that technological change is not the driving force in rising credential requirements. The content of education is not predominantly set by technological demand; most technological skills—including the most advanced ones—are learned on the job or through informal networks, and the bureaucratic organization of education at best tries to standardize skills innovated elsewhere. In updated research on credential inflation vis-à-vis technological change, I have seen nothing that overturns my conclusions published in 1979.

[. . .]

In Does Capitalism Have a Future?, a global quintet of distinguished scholars cut their way through to the question of whether our capitalist system can survive in the medium run. Despite the current gloom, conventional wisdom still assumes that there is no real alternative to capitalism. The authors argue that this generalization is a mistaken outgrowth of the optimistic nineteenth-century claim that human history ascends through stages to an enlightened equilibrium of liberal capitalism. All major historical systems have broken down in the end, and in the modern epoch several cataclysmic events-notably the French revolution, World War I, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc-came to pass when contemporary political elites failed to calculate the consequences of the processes they presumed to govern. At present, none of our governing elites and very few intellectuals can fathom a systemic collapse in the coming decades. While the book's contributors arrive at different conclusions, they are in constant dialogue with one another, and they construct a relatively seamless-if open-ended-whole.

Written by five of world's most respected scholars of global historical trends, this ambitious book asks the most important of questions: are we on the cusp of a radical world historical shift?

Thought provoking
By Jonathan Lankford on November 24, 2013
Format: Paperback
Thought-provoking excerpt:

"If the crisis of capitalism is severe enough—a majority of the population structurally unemployed, robots and computers doing almost all the income-generating work but owned by a small number of wealthy capitalists, the economy in deep depression—at some point a political party could win electoral power on an anticapitalist program. Some governing party or coalition would have to replace capitalist production, distribution, and finances with a system that redistributes wealth outside the system of labor market and profit-taking."

Basically, the author supposes the only answer to capitalism is government control, i.e. educational socialism. But one thing the author fails to consider is those capitalist members who have monopolized education also pull the strings in government. There is really no solution at all. Both capitalism and socialism in education leave the same influential people in positions of influence.