Accreditation malaise - certification does not imply learning

"There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first is excellent, the second good, and the third useless." --Niccolò Machiavelli

A definitive characteristic of the North American educational system is that of ever more demand for accreditation resulting in a continuous pattern of attrition. The higher one goes the more credentials one must attain, as the promise of status, financial success, and social mobility are tied ever more strongly to the number of credentials. Airlines will not hire pilots who lack university degrees (arguably resulting in the best pilots seeking employ elsewhere [7]). Would-be managers must obtain MBAs (usually from diploma mills) in order to find employment (despite no correlation existing between management success and accreditation [8]).

Successive waves of candidates must run a qualification gauntlet seeking certificate after certificate in order to guarantee access to economic and social security. Numerous papers [30,31,42,44] have suggested that the system is designed to allow only the most determined, acquiescing, economically able, and crafty to succeed, as all others drop out along an ever-lengthening way.sometimes (Note that this list of skill sets did not include intelligence or discipline expertise.)

All while the value of degrees steadily worsens. Grade inflation at many first-tier universities is rampant [33,34,35,47]. Tying institutional financing to performance measures such as average discipline grade, number of graduates, and the like has further lessened the worth of the certificate [30,42,36].

In the 1940’s in North America the letter grade ’A’ was rare. In the 1960’s the grade was given awarded in colleges a mere 15% of the time [51]. Currently in colleges, it is given 45% of the time, more if one can afford the tuition for a private college [ibid]. Grade inflation is so severe that whilst grades nicely matched the bell curve in the 1960’s, from 1980 onwards postsecondary grades scores where on an ascending curve only - and even steeper for rich private schools [52,53]. But this rise in grade level has had no relationship to how much students study: college and university students in the 1960s averaged far more study time - more than a third more in fact [53] - than todays students. And of course IQ has not risen - quite the opposite [54]. Attitudes of students have also changed dramatically with grade inflation - amost 50% of undergraduate students expect a grade level of B for merely reading assigned work - not writing, remembering, analysing the work... but just for reading it [57]. The majority of students choose courses by ease [58]. That is to say, the select courses where they need to do little work[62], write few or no essays [59], have low reading loads, and have previous records of assigning high grades [ibid] - that is to say, the majority are there not to learn, but to be certified.

“… the once elite high school degrees have become near-universal, common undergraduate training has been supplanted by graduate-level education, and for the lucrative specialties, increasingly by postdoctoral training” [17].

Yet it has been shown repeatedly that “education is often irrelevant to on-the-job productivity and is indeed, often counterproductive” [6,18]. The very grades so prized by students are more or less inconsequential - no correlation has been found to professional performance [19]. Grades serve rather as filters used not for purposes of education but rather for control [20]. For example:

“Many of the skills used in managerial and professional positions are learned on the job, and the lengthy courses of study required by business and professional schools exist in good part to raise the status of the profession and to form the barrier of socialization between practitioners and layman” [16] (See also [21, 22].

Those who resist the political, conformist, and economic pressure of professional associations are ostracized [3,14,17] often before they can even attain certification [4].Combining the winnowing aspect of our educational system with its questionable relevance indicates a hypothesis to be explored, namely that the educational system has a twofold function:

To restrict access to work rather than to enable it [15, 23]
To ensure a perpetuation of the pyramid of control and wealth so clearly modeled by current society.

In large part these two functions result in a systemic suppression of creativity, and further have resulted in an educational system largely designed for the promulgation of ignorance in the mask of scholarship.

(This page is an excerpt from one of my early publications, the central point of which has sadly become increasingly prevalent, as grade inflation and degrees for money are now rampant throughout the postsecondary world.)