Credentialing

Definition

Credentialing is Jane Jacobs's name for the substitution that has taken over higher education: "Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities" (Jacobs 2004, p. 44). A degree and an education "are not necessarily synonymous" (p. 44). The credential's function is selection, not knowledge: "The credential is not a passport to a job, as naive graduates sometimes suppose. It is more basic and necessary: a passport to consideration for a job" (p. 45) — the institution of higher learning performing "the tedious first winnowing or screening of applicants" for employers' human-resources departments, and serving the aspirant as "a passport out of an underclass, or a safety strap to prevent its holder from sinking into an underclass" (p. 45). Jacobs's genealogical analogy is the heraldic coat of arms: credentialing "efficiently combines the services to employers that in simpler and more frugal days were provided by First Class or Eagle rank in the Boy Scouts, and the services to aspiring climbers that in olden days were provided by a College of Heralds with its monopoly on granting the coats of arms that separated their possessors from the underclass. A coat of arms didn't really certify that its possessor could wield a bow or a battle-ax. That wasn't the point" (p. 45).

The concept's economic dynamics: because a degree in a field with a promising job market is thought better, "student enrollment statistics have become an unofficial appendix to stock market performance" (p. 46); because expanded output is easier to measure as credentialed than as educated graduates, "Quantity trumps quality" (p. 49); because credentials are "currency of the realm," they attract counterfeiters — "30 percent of job applicants concoct false résumés," and even executives (Bausch & Lomb, Veritas) were caught inflating theirs (p. 51). Its history: "Credentialing is an indirect legacy of the Great Depression of the 1930s" (p. 51) — the terror of mass unemployment fused with the post-Sputnik realization that "modern economic development… depended on a population's funds of knowledge — a resource that later came to be known as human capital" (p. 61); the multiversity's expansion and the exhaustion of GI-Bill demand made credentialing "a growth industry in the 1960s just when universities needed it" (p. 62). The costs are pedagogical (gypsy faculty, robot-gradeable tests, remedial work) and cultural: "A vigorous culture capable of making corrective, stabilizing changes depends heavily on its educated people, and especially upon their critical capacities and depth of understanding" (p. 63) — which is why credentialing is a pillar-decay, not a sectoral complaint. Its scientific register is direct: traffic engineering degrees exemplify the fraud of credentials for knowledge that is not being taught (see scientific-state-of-mind); its transmission register is the collapse of the mentor redundancy (see redundancy-of-mentors).

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's author: credentialing as education's replacement; the heraldry analogy; the Depression and human-capital genealogy (2004).
• Clark Kerr (not yet paged — see log) — the multiversity's popularizer whose 1964 second thoughts Jacobs records: professors shunting the university's interests aside for externally funded activities (p. 194n).
• Thorstein Veblen (not yet paged — see log) — the older higher-learning critique whose business-incursion analysis anticipates the credentialism diagnosis (conceptual neighbor, not cited by Jacobs here).

Related Concepts

• scientific-state-of-mind — the capacity credentialing starves: education as the training of critical capacities, credentials as their substitution.
• redundancy-of-mentors — the mechanism credentialing eliminates: personal rapport with teachers replaced by large impersonal lecture halls.
• dark-age — the pillar (higher education) whose decay credentialing constitutes.
• mass-amnesia — the risk: a culture credentialed but uneducated loses the ability to transmit itself.
• self-policing — the professional register: professional examinations antedate the credentialing debasement and "have controlled the number of recruits admitted" (p. 129).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the definition (p. 44); the passport-to-consideration formulation and the heraldry analogy (p. 45); enrollment statistics as stock-market appendix (p. 46); gypsy faculty and robot tests (p. 49); "Quantity trumps quality" (p. 49); the counterfeiters and executive résumés (p. 51); the Depression genealogy (pp. 51–55); the human-capital emergence (p. 61); the GI Bill exhaustion (p. 62); the educated-culture dependency (p. 63); mandarinism as the historical parallel (p. 195).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Dark Age Ahead ingest; awaits the sociology of education (Collins's credentialism, Randall Collins's The Credential Society) and the pedagogy sources in the wiki's design-studio-pedagogy cluster.

Open Questions

• Is credentialing a substitution (credentials replacing education) or a decoupling (the two always partly separate, now drifting)? Jacobs's heraldry analogy implies the credential never certified competence — only status. What, then, was ever the content of "educating," and can it be specified independently of the credential?
• The wiki's design-education sources (design-studio-pedagogy, the phenomenological studio) describe an education that resists credentialization by its experiential form. Does studio pedagogy escape the credentialing dynamic or merely sit adjacent to it, protected by professional examinations' older regime?
• Jacobs dates the disconnection's noticing to 1960s student protest and its acceptance to the next decade (p. 47). Does the contemporary debt-finance of education — the credential as collateral, "guaranteed behind the loan… the valuable credential itself" (p. 47) — constitute a third phase she did not name?