Credentialism Quotes

I can't give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.

The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.

Art schools are partly the villain here. (Never mind that I teach in them.) This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture.

One thing that is clear to me: as a society, we put way too much emphasis on a slip of paper - that college diploma.

The United States is probably the most [socially] mobile society in the history of the world. The virtues that are most valuable in it are diligence, discipline, ambition, and a willingness to take risks. Education and credentials are most important in government; elsewhere most skills are learned on the job.

While the universities are increasingly corporatized and militarized, their governing structures are becoming more authoritarian, faculty are being devalued as public intellectuals, students are viewed as clients, academic fields are treated as economic domains for providing credentials, and work place skills, and academic freedom is under assault.

What is still referred to, reflexively and anachronistically, as higher education is supposedly run by and for persons who are products of, and devoted to, learning. Today, this supposition is false.

Students now see college more as a credentialing institution rather than an academic institution.

But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing, I became too stink in’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees.

There's nothing more distasteful than an academic having to, like, trot out his credentials. You really come off as a jerk when you do that.

People make a mistake when they think that if you just accumulate a set number of things on your resume, it's going to lead you to a particular place - the pattern of essentially compiling credentials to climb your way up a ladder. That may work, but that's not at all what happened to me.

...even though I was getting better education at home than any of the kids in Toyah, I'd need to go to finishing school when I was thirteen, both to acquire social graces and to earn a diploma. Because in this world, Dad said, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you go it.

If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

Anyone can get a degree or a certificate in something. Big deal. A piece of paper from a university somewhere doesn't define a person. It won't tell you who I am.

I could just sit back and get someone to spin my achievements, I suppose, but when I see others do it, I always think, 'Why are you telling me how successful you are?' I am always suspicious of those kinds of boasts.

In this world, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it.

People are just waiting around to get certified.

Many high school students are under so much competitive pressure. They are sometimes taught that if they don't have a 4.0 GPA, score in the 99th percentile on admissions tests, and demonstrate leadership in sports and participate in clubs, they won't get into college anywhere. Even highly credentialed professionals get caught up in this.

Compare mathematics and the political sciences - it's quite striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is the concern for content.

Most of my friends from Columbia are going on to get advanced degrees. And why not? A Ph.D. is the new M.A., a master's is the new bachelor's, a B.A. is the new high school diploma, and a high school diploma is the new smiley-face sticker on your first-grade spelling test.

Too few of today’s academics have time for earnest questions and various attempts at answering them. The scholar is now proudly an “expert,” dealing in certitudes and performances of epistemic mastery. This is especially true among the extremely online academic set, where leaning on one’s status or credentials for epistemic authority — prefacing an opinion with “as a scholar of” or “as an expert in,” perhaps putting “Dr.” or “Ph.D.” in one’s Twitter display name — is de rigueur.