Comment by ebiester
10 months ago
This seems to be the general feeling of students right now.
Academia put itself as a gateway and barrier to the middle class. Why would we be surprised when people with no interest in anything but the goal are not enthralled by the process?
> Academia put itself as a gateway
How did academia do that? It doesn’t seem like universities would have the power to do that. More likely, either employers put academia as a gateway. Or even: the culture at large misunderstood what pathways existed to middle class life. Or even: pathways to middle class life became scarcer and more insecure, and the real gatekeepers (hiring managers) had no good ways to select which of the many people at the door to let through.
I agree with you (and upvoted) but consider this: why don’t fancy schools offer the same credentials for MOOCs if the information and assessment is on-par? I believe it is because they recognize the value of the credential and guard it closely.
I think you missed the parent's point. Maybe consider this:
Why don't employers recognize the credentials of a MOOC to the same degree that they would a university degree?
We could similarly ask why employers value the degrees of some universities more than others.
I think it's important to realize that ultimately the decisions come from the employers, not the universities. No one is making the employers do anything. But at least the second question might have a clearer partial answer. In part, there is a selection of a tribe, an implicit "culture fit" that's happening. It isn't uncommon to see employer bias towards specific universities. This is especially true with prestigious universities.
But it's not the universities that are making anyone do anything and that's an important distinction.
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Academia did it with advertising. And it used some of the strategies founded by its marketing, communications, and psychology departments.
It also recognized the GI Bill as an opportunity and also sent lobbyists for the HEA in 1965.
Academia clearly lost their monopoly on information. Since their last moat is a monopoly on credentials, I expect them to defend it intensely.
We could make it less meaningful if employers weren’t so keen on using credentials as their own gateway. That may have more of a chance of happening if the OPs perspective becomes more prevalent and the credential becomes an increasingly worse signal for meaningful skills.
They didn't have a monopoly on information anytime in the 20th century. If you wanted to have all the knowledge, it could be expensive to acquire a personal library, but nothing was stopping you from acquiring the same textbooks. Heck, until the information age it was pretty easy to forge a credential.
But it wasn't about credentials even. It was about inculcating a culture. You knew that someone had the knowledge and ability to reach university, and you knew that they had a shared common culture with you. Shared common culture and norms increases trust. Credentials mattered for doctors, but universities, in the end, were selling something far more intangible: culture.
High barriers to entry are a feature of monopolies. Saying I could start my own railroad by simply buying up billions of dollars of land and investing billions more in equipment isn’t a compelling argument against the idea of a monopoly.
In what way does academia have monopoly on credentials?
You can start issuing your own credentials tomorrow.
I don't know where you live, but in the "developed" parts of the world this is illegal. There will either be some government agency or some council of credential-giving institutions and they will give you a license to issue degrees, or most likely they will not give it to you.
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There are accreditation bodies. So I don’t think your self-proclaimed engineering degree is going to help you get a job or a professional engineering license like one from an ABET accredited school.