The Poison of Credentialism

Our current society is afflicted with the disease of credentialism and professionalism. More and more specialized education is being demanded generation by generation for almost any job.

I have long thought this was mostly due to the GI Bill and its equivalents in the years after the Second World War. At about that point, going to college developed a huge new cachet.

But it occurs to me, in the recent controversy about private care homes in Canada, that there is a second factor, at least as important. The influence of the GI bill, after all, should have subsided in a generation or two. But credentialism and higher ed has only grown and grown.

I think a second factor, perhaps a more important factor, is the growth of government. And not just government growth, but the growing attractiveness of government work. This seems to me to have kicked off, in Canada, in the Sixties, when the Pearson government allowed government workers to unionize and to strike, and started giving them big pay raises at regular intervals. Similar things seemed to happen at about the same time in the US and UK.

This violated an ancient principle of democratic government. The traditional understanding was that, if you joined the government service, you were sacrificing the chance of high pay in return for job security. A fair enough trade.

As of Confederation, civil servants were actually not permitted to vote. To allow this was seen as self-dealing. Now they were not just allowed to vote, but allowed to set their own pay levels. For both sides at any negotiating table within the civil service are civil servants, and both benefit from a pay raise. In private industry, the employers will resist because they may lose profits, or market share. In government, there is no such annoying friction.

As a result, it has over the years since become significantly more profitable to work for the civil service than in the private sector. The civil service has become, in effect, the ruling class.

Traditionally, government jobs, not depending on meeting any customer’s or client’s needs, as private operations must, tend instead to hire based on “qualifications.” This is seemingly inevitable, and honourable: in ancient China, it produced the Confucian examination system. It is the way to hire on merit.

But it has produced its own problems, now that government work is so attractive. Since the pay is much higher, everyone wants to work for government, and so qualifications, and higher and higher qualifications, become greatly valued, even in the private sector. Because in any sector, people will still hold out hope for that possible government job.

As a result, for many jobs, perhaps virtually all, the required qualifications far exceed what is actually needed to competently do the job.

What happens in the case of a job, like caregiver in a rest home, for which any training of real practical value would take perhaps four weeks, yet the competition for the best jobs, those working in government-run homes, prompts the requirement for a two-year diploma or a four-year degree or more?

Several things. First, in the colleges and universities offering such formal qualifications, you must stretch four weeks of content over two years. You are therefore consistently pitching the job to the least naturally talented in the field. You are weeding out the more competent.

Second, and often as an alternative, you find the need to pad out the curriculum with irrelevancies. But what irrelevancies? Politics is the natural remedy. The politics of the field. Since those designing the curriculum will be those already in the field, this is what will seem most useful to them. Most of the trainee’s time in class may therefore be spent on an ideological indoctrination, into positions that favour the interests of that occupational group. Into class consciousness, and an awareness of class interests.

This is what is known elsewhere as a cartel, a conspiracy against the interests of the general public. Just putting two tradesmen together in a room, Adam Smith observes, is going to produce such schemes. Imagine putting hundreds together in a classroom for several years.

Third, the cost of getting an unnecessary education tends to exclude the poor from the given field. Not only do the poor therefore get poorer, while the rich get richer; this also means that the field is selecting not on competence, but on inherited privilege. The public suffers poorer service.

This is surely a problem in any profession. It is an especially serious problem in professions that in reality require special talents rather than significant formal training: in the vocations. For example, professionalizing has been visibly devastating for journalism. In the old days, kids became journalists out of high school, because they were independent-minded and could write. And they were worth reading. Now these bright poor kids have nowhere to go, and the rest of us have nothing to read worth reading.

Professionalism has been equally devastating to teaching. The ability to teach, like the ability to write, is not something that can be taught. It is a gift of the spirit.

I expect the same is happening with nursing and caregiving. Compassion cannot be learned in a classroom.

Medical doctors no doubt need their specialized knowledge; but perhaps nowhere is creeping professionalism more damaging than among the social sciences. Among social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the like.

Happily, there are definite signs that the high-tech revolution is breaking this pervasive form of priestcraft. At the same time, it seems necessary to end the right to strike within the civil service, and have civil service pay rates set by an independent panel to be a fixed percentage of private sector salaries for the same job description.