The Credential Delusion: A Lecture from the Basement

When the focus is on bums in seats and turning the wheels of lecture, quizzes, assignments and grades you end up with students who waste four years on academic activity but don't learn much.

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My neighbour Toby, a professor of no fixed ideological address — and not coincidentally also the name of my Westie terrier — has been muttering lately about the tragicomic state of higher education. I should stress that Malibu, the other dog, is not a professor. If she were, her name would be her professional undoing — one can imagine the conference nametag: Dr Malibu, Dept. of Semiotics & Sensuality, Sault Ste. Marie. Credentials do matter, but branding, as always, is everything.

Toby and I, holders of graduate degrees entombed behind bar fridges and Guinness posters in our respective basements, are living proof that credentials may confer status without conveying substance. They are emblems — more precisely, decorative talismans meant to impress the idle, like party favours at a soirée for bureaucrats. The parchment exists not to say what you know, but to say you can speak.

Our obsession with credentials — and their bastard cousins, sub-credentials — is a sign of a decaying intellectual culture. One that confuses form with content, polish with rigour, and the mere issuing of grades with the transmission of knowledge. It is like admiring the clink of medals on a general’s chest without asking if he ever won a battle.

The modern university no longer cultivates Socratic enquiry; it cultivates spreadsheets, risk management, and grievance machinery. An administrator recently informed Toby that student protests over low grades would be rectified by “reassessing” 100 students. This is the new model of truth: not that which withstands scrutiny, but that which placates a mob. The faculty member in question, brave and competent, is being steamrolled not for being wrong but for being insufficiently compliant.

In other news, there are naturally anonymous whispers that hiring committees have abandoned verifying credentials altogether. Why? Because checking credentials might imply doubt, and doubting a candidate from overseas might be — well, you know — problematic. So long as the CV ticks boxes and the references hum with the right jargon, nobody asks whether the person hired to teach finance has ever balanced a ledger or the law instructor has ever seen the inside of a courtroom.

The deeper calamity is not hiring fraud, but the intellectual malaise that underwrites it. We have confused the means of education with its ends. A credential is now the goal, not the by-product of a mind sharpened by difficulty. Courses are reduced to hoops, grades to bribes, and instructors to outsourced quiz facilitators linking publisher content directly to the LMS. The goal is no longer truth, but throughput. No wonder nobody learns anything.

Let’s be clear: discomfort is essential to education. It is friction that lights the match. But the institutional response to discomfort today is to eliminate it. Complaints are avoided through grade inflation; accountability is dodged through managerial opacity. Caplan observed in The Case Against Education that students aren’t learning because they’re not expected to — the degree is the signal, the GPA the megaphone. If they can get the parchment without the pain, why not?

I recall teaching a course where I dared to craft my exam questions — an appalling breach of etiquette. “Why don’t you just use the test bank?” one student asked. “Because I don’t want to be replaced by Quizlet,” I replied. He was not amused.

In this context, giving 20% higher grades and collecting your glowing reviews is easier than teaching students how to think. And don’t be misled — students may protest tuition, but they never protest being under-challenged. They cheer it.

“Higher education,” Arnold Kling wrote, “is the only product whose customers try to get as little as possible out of it.” If your lash technician cancels, you scream. If your professor gives you a pass for showing up, you write a thank-you note.

The outcome is obvious. Sub-credentials proliferate. Students graduate with honours but without skills. We convince ourselves that this is equity when, in fact, it is merely fraud. Caplan asked students whether they would rather have a Princeton education without the degree, or the degree without the education. We know the answer. And it is damning.

The state’s complicity compounds the problem. We subsidise this Ponzi scheme with taxpayer dollars, creating debt-laden graduates trained to signal, not to think. Universities quietly admit international students at inflated fees with a wink and a promise of permanent residency. Pay enough, and the passport follows.

This is not education. It is branding.

And like all branding, it resists scrutiny. Ask why a colleague failed half the class, and you get protests. Ask why a department head doesn’t know a conflict of interest, and you get HR on speed dial. Ask why your university promotes a professor who reposts terrorist propaganda, and you’re accused of insensitivity.

The real heresy today is not to question authority, but to expect competence.

So we sit, in our basements, diplomas fading behind spiderwebs and surround sound systems that never worked. Upstairs, the offices are filled with credentialed mediocrities, drinking conference coffee and pretending to be educators.

One day, someone will ask what happened to the universities. And someone else will answer: they mistook the certificate for the knowledge, the title for the intellect, and the performance of justice for justice itself.

And then the match will go out.