Credentialism

I hadn't heard this story about MIT firing its Dean of Admissions not for any shortcomings in her job performance but for having lied 28 years ago and said she had a college degree when she first applied for a low-level position at MIT. I think Kevin Carey says most of what needs to be said about the irrationality of this and the broader social and cultural obsession with the potentially meaningless bachelor's degree.

There's this current well-intentioned mania for producing policies that will get more people to go to college, and to some extent to get more people to graduate from college, but it's clear that the first step in anything along these lines is that we need to know something about why a college degree is valuable. Insofar as it's a pure screening mechanism (and there's considerable evidence that this is at least what it mostly is) then expanding access to college is only going to devalue the credential. Presumably there are some actually useful skills being imparted to some college students (my appreciation of the flaws of semantic internalism has, for example, much application to my role as a professional political pundit who must occassionally offer views about "originalism" as an approach to jurisprudence -- and, yes, this is irony in case any Atlantic readers out there aren't used to it) but it's really crucial that we figure out what these are and find ways to spread the skills themselves rather than the credential. Meanwhile, the habit of disqualifying perfectly competent people from jobs based on a lack of degrees has become yet another brick in the American wall of inegalitarianism.

Comments

We argued this out at Unfogged, so I don't feel like repeating it here, but I think the majority view (and I know my view) was that MIT had to fire her but that some other University which is displeased by the performance of its admissions department should hire her.

Posted by washerdreyer | April 29, 2007 9:01 PM

Disagree on two counts.

First (assuming MIT follows the same procedures that my institution does) as a Dean, or any other person with faculty rank she would have had to submit an updated CV every year for salary review, etc. In that case, by not correcting it, she was lying every year, not just twenty-eight years ago.

Second, its interesting how many people equate "college education" with "college education in the humanities and social sciences" I know plenty of scientist and engineers who acquired quite a bit of career-relevant skills while obtianing their bachelor's degrees.

Posted by dan f. | April 29, 2007 9:11 PM

It seems to me that if you're going to have a policy against employees lying on the CVs, you need to fire people that get caught telling lies on their CVs or, at least, Big Lies. It's hard to pretend that she wasn't lying big.

As for demanding degrees, yeah, it's quite often pretty daft (although it doesn't hurt me any, so the volume of my complaints may not be enormously loud). If the academic qualifications are demanded, however, and someone lies and later gets found out, they should indeed be invited to seek employment elsewhere, PDQ.

Posted by adam | April 29, 2007 10:00 PM

Sigh. Ezra, Kevin and now you. Jones is a person who was in charge of reviewing the academic records of MIT applicants and it turns out she forged her own. Despite many chances, she failed to fix it over the course of 28 years. Nobody disputes that she was a spectacular director of admissions. But this has nothing to do with credentialism run amok, and everything to do with lack of integrity. It truly is a tragedy, but the decision to fire her was totally appropriate!

Posted by LCD | April 29, 2007 11:08 PM

I wonder if they will keep the BA requirement when they hire their next admissions director. If this incident shows anything, it shows that you obviously don't need a college degree to be a great dean of admissions.

Posted by too many steves | April 29, 2007 11:43 PM

Also, we should note this specifically: she was not fired for having lied 28 years ago, but for having lied quite recently when she applied for (and got) a position as Dean of Admissions.

Posted by everitt | April 29, 2007 11:55 PM

You (and Kevin Carey) appear to be unaware that the US Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) that an employer may not use a high school diploma as a screening tool for job applicants. The Court ruled that because blacks have much lower high school graduation rates than whites, using a high school diploma was discriminatory unless the employer could show that the skills represented by the diploma made it a "business necessity" to require high school graduation - a virtual impossibility.

Of course, holders of college degrees are also disproportionately white, but the Court has never said that you can't require a college degree as a job prerequisite.

Because employers run the risk of civil rights suits if they require HS diplomas, they now require BA's for many jobs that don't require them. Just another example of the law of unintended consequences.

Posted by JR | April 30, 2007 1:21 AM

An institution in the business of granting degrees is suddenly going to decide that degrees just aren't that important? Right!

And the department that is in the business of evaluating academic performance is suddenly going to decide that academic performance just isn't that important? Right!

Posted by treetop | April 30, 2007 4:46 AM

JR: Griggs wasn't just about High School diplomas, it was about aptitude tests, too.

I attended a talk given near here by John Derbyshire where he said that Griggs was a big reason in why credentialism exists (if you can't give aptitude tests then requiring a college degree presumably subsumes that).

Posted by adam | April 30, 2007 7:54 AM

What Griggs means is that, other than requiring a BA, there is virtually no way for an employer to screen cheaply and quickly for entry-level employees who have basic skills and can be expected to show up every day on time. If you need someone who can keyboard 60 wpm, you can test for that- but if you need someone who can talk to customers, make clear notes in a file, read and write business letters and contracts, and and get along in an office- well, then, you need to hire a BA if you want to avoid being sued.

And Matt's ignorance of Griggs is yet another example of a pundit who doesn't know enough to say anything useful about the subject he's decided to opine about.

Posted by Bloix | April 30, 2007 4:21 PM

"And Matt's ignorance of Griggs is yet another example of a pundit who doesn't know enough to say anything useful about the subject he's decided to opine about."

It's also an example of a typical upper-middle-class liberal whose political views are skewed by his lack of close interaction with lower class blacks and Hispanics. If he went to a typical NYC public high school (not a selective one like Bronx Science or a private prep school), he would have different views on a number of subjects.

Posted by Fred | May 1, 2007 5:45 PM