The rise of credentialism

Credentialism refers to the increasing reliance on formal certificates as an indicator of competence in any job or profession, and the increasing number of certificates one must possess to get permission from The Regulator to pursue their chosen profession. This, in turn, has given rise to a market in which all types of certificates can be purchased online. This saves the purchaser from the need to invest any time or effort in amassing the various certificates needed for professional success, as it takes them only seconds to buy their credentials (or the prerequisites) on the great world wide web where you can buy anything you want.

There seems to be a consensus that the best way to determine competence in any line of work is to ask for certificates, the more the better. Gone are the days when you needed to do a job competently, to prove that you can do it! Now, you just need to rock up with a certificate that certifies your competence. 

For example, if you want to prove your capabilities as a crime-fighter, you have to show that you sat in a university lecture hall for three years at taxpayer expense, being taught how to fight crime by a lecturer who has never encountered an actual crime in his life, let alone fought it:

All new police officers in England and Wales will have to be educated to degree level from 2020, the College of Policing has announced.

It said the training would help address changes in crime-fighting.

Prospective officers can either complete a three-year "degree apprenticeship", a postgraduate conversion course or a degree. The National Police Chiefs' Council said the changes would "help modernise the service".

​bbc.co.uk.
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Predictably, the rise of credentialism has given rise to a market in which gathering up certificates 'Has Successfully Completed the Certificate in Fighting Crime' offers a better ROI than actually bothering to do anything or learn anything.

Another common point of agreement seems to be that it is more important to acquire certification than to learn an actual skill. Professor Bryan Caplan, in his lecture "The Case Against Education," compares this to being stranded on a deserted island: you would choose boat-making skills over a boat-making diploma. In the real world, the opposite is the case: you would prefer a degree from Oxford University over the knowledge provided by Oxford because, though useful, it wouldn't grant you the recognition necessary to your professional life.

​Bill Wirtz, 'Why selling essays to college students is a booming online industry'
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The trouble is, it takes a huge amount of time and effort to acquire university credentials. Hours of slog work in the library, followed by a painstaking process of writing and rewriting that will take an eternity, leaving you with a fevered brain and carpal tunnel syndrome, plus backache from hunching over your computer. You will emerge from your writing lair to find that all your friends have deserted you, because of how boring you are, spending all your time writing essays yourself in the old fashioned way like a dinosaur who has never heard of the internet.

How convenient, then, that there are anonymous people on the internet offering to do all the research and write bespoke essays ready for sale! All the smart student needs to do is commission the essay, pay for it (with bitcoin, obviously) study it carefully to make sure you understand it (to allay suspicion if you're accused of academic fraud and forced to swear that you wrote it yourself - you can't confidently claim that you wrote it if you didn't even bother to read it before handing it in) and thus painlessly obtain the requisite degree credentials that employers want. It's no wonder that universities in the UK want to ban anonymous people from writing brilliant essays and selling them on the dark web.

The Russell Group is backing the campaign to clamp down on essay mills and other forms of contract cheating.

Essay mills provide students with bespoke, original pieces of work that cannot easily be detected by anti-plagiarism software.

russelgroup.ac.uk
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​Solving problems by campaigning for people to be banned from selling stuff on the internet is one way to resolve this, I suppose, and we could possibly go a step further and ban the internet altogether, to stop people selling harmful stuff on it. Ban anonymous payment mechanisms, while you're at it. This is probably why cash is soon to be abolished, because it's really hard to trace fraudsters when they pay for things in cash.

But there is another way. In highly regulated labour markets where employers are demanding increasingly higher credentials, it is inevitable that there will be a market for people to take shortcuts. Instead, why not just allow nurses, hairdressers, plumbers, and even lawyers, to ply their trade or pursue their calling with no need for a raft of certified credentials? 

The Nursing and Midwifery Council, backed by the Department of Health, has recommended that all new nurses should require degrees before being allowed to join the profession.

The move either escalates nursing to the lofty intellectual heights it deserves, or condemns patients to wallow in their own filth while the nurses that used to look after them ponder the abstract philosophical principles of post-modern Bauhaus management techniques.

Nursing Times, 'Nurses need degrees like a hole in the head'

Even the lovely Kim Kardashian should be free to have a go at being a lawyer if she wants to, even though she's not known for her academic credentials: good luck to her with her apprenticeship and caveat emptor, I say, to anyone who chooses to be her client. The gate-keeping protectionist function of credentials, using certificates to decide who can join the regulated professions, is hugely costly and of doubtful utility.

As a lawyer, I agree that attending law school should not be required to practice law. I learned little about the law when I attended Harvard Law School. That was partly due to professors whose teaching focused on ideologically trendy topics rather than common legal problems more often encountered in the real world—or professors who used outmoded teaching techniques, such as hide-the-ball Socratic dialogue. 

Hans Bader, 'Kim Kardashian is right: lawyers shouldn't have to attend law school'

Hide-the-ball Socratic dialogue is great fun, it must be said, although admittedly a very expensive form of fun at three years' full time study and a huge amount of student debt. In the original Socratic model all the sage did was sit under a tree and wax eloquent to any passers by who wanted to stop for a parry. Nobody had to sign up for three years of compulsory study with periodic exams, and nor did they wind up with more credentials after they finished chatting with Socrates. Wiser, yes; credentialed, not so much. 

It's also clear that credentialism, which is bad enough, leads to an even worse thing: the 'credentialocracy'. As described by Christopher Caldwell in The Age of Entitlement (great book, google it, and see page 272, referring to 'Yale and other outposts of the American credentialocracy') a credentialocracy is a system in which the credentialed have ultimate power to dictate society's ideals and moral code. To enforce this code they have power to 'no-platform' or 'cancel' anybody who doesn't agree with them and do exactly as they say. Being cancelled means the twitterati descend on you, denounce you as unwoke, and before you know it, you're fired. Now you have no voice, and even worse, no income. That sucks. The point of an education was to expand your knowledge and learning (and, dare I say, tolerance), not to give you power to have other people fired because they dared to see the world differently from you, and pretty much licence you to treat the uncredentialled with smugness and intolerance.

​Acquiring credentials feels deeply satisfying, I do know that as I have a raft of them myself, but they are merely landmarks along the path to knowledge and wisdom.