Comment by bumby
10 months ago
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.
In the US, you can just make up degrees — but you have to be honest that you’re unaccredited.
Accreditation is regulated by NGOs who need government approval and without that you cant received financial aid (or participate in some programs) — but you can hand out pieces of paper for completing your program.
https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/higher-education-laws-and...
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.