Don't make me lie to you.... follow this blog post

posted by Martin Snyder on April 30, 2007

Todd Raphael, as usual, beat me to the punch and has a nice thread going on this MIT Dean of Admissions story.   In short, a highly successful college official operated effectively for 28 years prior to the discovery of resume fraud in her application and subsequent claimed qualifications.

The moment I read the story I saw blog post in it.  Some of Todd?s commenters took the expected tack that zero tolerance is the only acceptable position in a case like this.  Is it true that if a party is revealed to be dishonest once, no further trust may ever be placed in them?   Karen Mattonen, in her indomitable way, takes it up as a matter of justice. 

This case raises fascinating questions that go to the core of how we organize our economy.   What if this Dean had done the job wonderfully for 48 years, or 68 years?  Would the lack of actual ?qualifications? mean anything?     If the ?qualifications?(esp. in the case of public monies for salaries) are not reflective of actual ability to do the job (provide value to the public), is it socially just to demand them?   Is a lie told to evade a social injustice equal to any other lie?

Are we doing ourselves any favors within our economy by allowing credentialism to thrive in places where it should not?   Is credentialism  the price we pay for a kind of shorthand that lets us be comfortable that most people hired for certain roles will indeed be able to do the job?   Is that kind of shorthand really needed today, and without it, would we have to develop better assessment systems to make these determinations?   Would there be both more justice and more value in our economy if jobs were allocated on the basis of actual ability to do the actual job, measured (at some greater expense and care) in a credentialism-discouraged environment?

Disclosure:  I?m well into autodidact territory and I have always eyed the credential inflation feedback loop as a pernicious practice, since grade school, when I observed members of the ?gifted? class going bowling and doing pottery while we lesser lights had to make do with dodgeball and glitter.  

In matters of medicine, flight, engineering, the military, and other areas of life and death, I don?t think you can be too careful; but what of the hundreds of jobs where practical, demonstrable skill should trump some old sheepskin?  Do more primitive economies have an advantage in a low friction sense?  If you can test out best to do a job, shouldnt you be allowed to do it?

This is a deep question.  I wonder how Warren Buffet and Bill Gates really feel about it?

Ever-useful Wikipedia led me to this serious book on the subject.  These are not idle musings (like too much of my mental landscape....)

 

 

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•  Colin Kingsbury

  1 point 2 years ago

  Ahab,

  FWIW flight is more a matter of practical skill than credentialism, depending on how you define it. While the FAA will grant you an Airline Transport Pilot license with 1500 hours of flight time and a passing score on a written test and a flight test, in order to get a job at a major airline you'll probably spend 10+ years building up experience (hours) flying commuter planes before they'll even interview you. Even for private pilots, the matter is mostly up to insurance companies, whose standards for providing coverage usually dictate levels of training well in excess of what the FAA requires.

  As to your larger point, I would agree that as a society we are over-credentialing ourselves. I suspect that around 60-70% of jobs in our economy do not really require more than a year, perhaps two, of vocational training. Continental Europe is a good deal closer to this model I think, in part because they are significantly less egalitarian about education. By the time you hit high school in France or Germany, they're deciding whether you are headed towards being a doctor, a banker, or a machinist. Here, we try to keep nearly everyone on a 4-year college prep course until the very end.

  While this may seem admirable by comparison, this does a disservice to the many students (especially boys) who realize by age 16 or so that high school has nothing more to offer them but two years of clock-punching until they get a diploma--assuming they find enough reason to keep from dropping out completely.

  A lot of this also has to do with the fact that education has become the class system here in America--there are plenty of auto-body technicians and plumbers who make more than many lawyers or CPAs, but even plumbers would rather their daughter married a lawyer than a plumber. David Brooks has written a lot of good stuff about this.

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