Why credentialism is bad

In fact you could make a good case that we produce too many if you really wanted to. A separate argument, that is often brought in to bolster the case for expanded higher education, is that there are social benefits. Perhaps — but this is not what people are generally doing. They are taking hospitality, or business, degrees. As someone who has worked in the industry for 20 years, and has the credentials, I see little evidence for this.

Some of the worst programmers had PhDs in Computer Science. I have found that the average programmers has little interest in their subject, never read a book or blog post on the subject unless they have to, and are not even aware of how bad they are at their craft. Somebody else mentioned how hard it is to design databases effectively.

They make really bad, really basic, errors. Your average programmer is closer to a mechanic, than an engineer. One final point on programming — most of the skill in programming is practical. These are skills that you learn doing the job, and are almost impossible to teach in college. William Berry Moz: You can get a jump on the process just by throwing half the applications in the trash bin right off the bat.

Vetting is what we want. From the wiki: investigate someone thoroughly, especially in order to ensure that they are suitable for a job requiring secrecy, loyalty, or trustworthiness. Time to change our political vetting system. Sonny Jim Another long-time lurker hi, Frowner! My mother has spent most of her working life as an operating theatre OT nurse in New Zealand. These nurses had no idea what to do in an actual hospital setting, she would complain. It took 2 years or so significantly, about the same amount of time as the previous nursing school certification process would take before they were anything more than a liability in the operating theatre.

All the BN had done was insert an extra 3 years and an added set of financial hurdles before the real work of learning to be a nurse through practice and observation could start taking place.

The only real beneficiary here is the polytechnic offering the degree and taking student and government money in order to issue that credential. I should point out that my mother is in no way an anti-intellectual person — she would later go to university herself and complete a BA in English and Italian — but this was her lived experience.

So English degrees to pick an example will now include transactional forms of writing like reports and group work that are supposed to simulate the work graduates will be doing in corporate settings. Much of this work is, I believe, deeply misguided and a product of total pedagogical confusion and indeed it tends to be cordially hated by students, who find it condescending and pointless and who might well object that they signed up for university to find a respite from capitalist realism, not to be subjected to yet another instantiation of it.

There are levels of exploitation and rent seeking here that the article fails to acknowledge or touch on. Trader Joe Speaking as a hirer — I agree with a mix of the comments made both in the paper and in comments. My company hires dozens of interns every year, all from top colleges and all with top credentials. In my experience, the sorting factor normally has to do more with the individuals willingness to work hard, take direction and be conscientious in all that they do whether it is getting sandwiches from the deli downstairs or contributing to a major project.

The credentials themselves usually contribute more to them having a vocabulary and an understanding of what we are trying to accomplish than any first-hand experience with the task at hand.

Without question, I could teach the history major or even I high schooler what they need to do if they were any sort of student at all…. The credentials are just one sort in the process that hopefully helps. Sorting, improving the odds…. Certainly credentialism is wrapped up with both signaling and socialization. A very interesting study, the results of which were reproduced in the NYT as a searchable database, show what institutions and what fields are valuable in moving folks from the lower quartiles of the income distribution to the top.

It also shows the incredible family income disparities at US private universities and colleges. Seems a lot of strong but less pretentious public institutions are successful.. As for fields, engineering unsurprisingly leads the list. The signaling component in law, for example, is insane. Some kid does very well on their SATs as a junior in high school at age 16, gets into an Ivy where they study English and where half the student body graduates with honors, proceeds to an Ivy law school where they leave untrained to write a brief, and gets a job at a white shoe firm that has to train them for 2 years to actually practice law.

Gabriel The Modern University benefits a lot of people, but students are at the very bottom of that list. T The signaling component in law, for example, is insane. Of course, simply graduating with honors from an Ivy as an undergrad is not enough to get you into an Ivy law school or other elite law school.

The notion that some kid who does well on his SATs at age 16 or 17 or whatever is then on some kind of preordained track to the white shoe law firm — all while being unable to write a brief — is rather ludicrous. Of course there is signaling. But you make the whole thing sound more mechanical and absurd than I think it is. Joseph Brenner I work as a computer programmer. I have multiple technical degrees, but none specificially in programming.

CS researchers did indeed do some solid work in this area, but the things that they learned are embodied in standard libraries, and someone working in the field pretty much just uses the libraries. Philip Greenspun once complained that the killer-app of Computer Science was apparently Microsoft Word. I think a good case can be made that this tendency very strong in France, less so in the English speaking world has some severe detrimental effects in the long term.

Because the obtention of certificate plays a central role in future social career in a credentialist society in that sense, agents have strong incentives to maximize the reputation of the certificate they can get given their actual potential as students and institutions have strong incentives to work on the reputation of the certificate they deliver rather than on the quality of the instruction provided.

In other words, just like a society with low capital taxes and low inheritance taxes will be ruled by rich heirs with low actual economic performances, a society with strong influence of educational certificates will be ruled by rich heirs in educative capital with low actual educative performances.

Or in even more cruel form, given what my wife and I can transmit to our children and given how a good certificate influences future status in contemporary France, it would actually be in my own self-interest if the school my children go too was not too good. See also, Betsy De Vos.

I found a lot of the comments above very interesting and helpful in further clarifying this issue in my mind. A person is getting too much education when they take a course such that:. A person in such a situation is going to be understandably resentful, suffering from both the cost and the opportunity cost of the course, and is usually also going to make life worse for any fellow students who actually do want to be there as noted by Matt above.

Why would anyone be in such a situation? Well, clearly because:. In the short term, many of us benefit from the fees of people in such situations, which hopefully serve to cross-subsidise people who actually are benefiting from being there.

In the long term, such situations risk creating ill-will towards education in general, and helping erode public support for it. LFC 49 If your friend went to Harvard, he was particularly thick or disinterested. An A is the most common grade. The sorting factor has to do with class. And that works for your company because they fit in to the culture.

But companies have little interest in doing this because employees are seen as disposable assets. I think a large part of my problem with these kinds of discussions is that there is a tendency to talk in abstractions, without every really interrogating what those abstractions are hiding.

To quote Barbie — Math is hard. In Computer programming there is an expectation that everyone goes to college for four years. Which is equally ridiculous. Most programmers, the vast majority, need very little theory. It just means that the skill required to be a jobbing programmer is not particularly academic. And most programmers are jobbing programmers. They create routine applications for companies that store, update and retrieve data.

Very little of this has anything to do with what is taught in universities — and universities are very bad at teaching these skills which is not the fault of universities — I will return to this point. A minority of programmers do innovative, and complex stuff. They build the standard libraries that Joseph relies upon. They build databases such as Oracle. Or Operating Systems. Or the infrastructure at places like Google. Maybe they work on embedded systems for airplanes, or write video game engines like John Carmack.

So Joseph is wrong. Well sort of. Because the flip side of this is that most jobbing programmers are terrible. Stuff is hacked together with self-delusion and hope. The solution to this would be trade schools. Classroom work but not four years that focus almost entirely on practical problem solving.

An apprentice structure where juniors have a senior programmer experienced in the arcane arts of debugging and optimization mentor them. University is not the place for this. Academics with little practical experience of working on mundane tasks are not the people to teach this. Of course this is never going to happen in the US because reasons. And so this has become a job that for status reasons needs a degree.

Lawrence Being a file clerk requires database management skills? It involved shoving papers into file folders and finding said folders for people. I am a data analyst, although my current job is accounting. And I learned none of it in college. I have a BA in History. Classics, mostly. I find the article at the link completely unpersuasive.

Two of my best hires,immigrants, an Ecuadorian and a Tibetan, rose to Executive Chef level in a few years,starting as plongeurs. In my case, as a financial aid student, I worked for min. Over recent decades, until the change you refer to, the percentage of Harvard College students graduating with honors steadily increased.

Grade inflation existed and increased over time, but it was very possible, at least before the change that capped honors at 60 percent of the class, to graduate with honors with a mixture of grades. As for the notion that anyone who did not earn a 4. Exploring an alternate reality scenario where computers were developed without much guiding academic expertise steam punk? Sure, definitely. Clearly you think you know it all, so its probably not worth the effort to respond, but I think you know little of which you speak.

All state schools. A few demographics. All but 1 will leave with debt. He was the best of the lot in my review — he showed up early, stayed late, asked good questions. Credential wise, he was pretty much the same on paper as the other 7….

LCF—My response may have been a bit strong. However, certain fields and professions tend to be more susceptible to signaling through credentialism than others. Law certainly is one. Just take a look at the SC. Or top ranked law schools for that matter. The judges and faculty are typically from 3 or 4 schools. Joseph — Your point about CS interview-prep courses is interesting and well taken. A not small share of the credentialism is socialization.

You gotta act like you belong. JQ-What I find troubling about many of these comments is that practitioners in technical fields find credentialism run amuck. Those are the fields where I thought credentialism would be most justified. Most commenters here assert that credentialism is rampant, and that most jobs done by college graduates could be done with a high school education. Most people, including employers and college students share the same view, or at least say they do.

If credentialism is correct, there are huge gains to be made by any employer and high school leaver willing to act on these beliefs. The employer can hire high school leaver and pay them less than the salary for college graduates, but much more than the net salary after deducting four years of tuition costs and lost earnings.

So, has anyone acted on the implications of their beliefs? It must be a social convention, believed by no one, but so deeply ingrained as to be sustained, and intensified over time, in every country in the developed world, despite radical differences in education systems, career structures, labour market conditions and so on. Peter T One thought — much or most of the selection process has now been outsourced to specialist firms, or to in-house HR areas.

These people typically have little or no knowledge of the actual attitudes or practical expertise involved, but they can screen CVs for what look like relevant credentials. Not Germany or Austria, nor I think Japan. I tried to act on the implications of this belief, with considerable success. HR put a stop to it and went to credentials, with less success. Last I heard, HR still ran the process.

Is this expectation referring to large firms? That job posting did have a credential requirement. But I ended up taking a different offer at a small company. Nor have I been in an interview, on either side of the table, where academic credentials came up. Germany does a much better job on technical education than do the English speaking countries. But , there is a steady shift towards classroom vocational education.

Compare this from Wikipedia with the OP. Although the dual education system is generally considered to be exemplary, an increasing number of young people are taking vocational education and training VET courses at training sites and schools rather than in real companies, as for various reasons, companies are becoming less willing to take on apprentices.

To counter this, the government considered making it compulsory for firms to take on apprentices. This idea, however, was dropped when the trade associations agreed to a voluntary training pact.

These are pretty good examples of the kinds of deeply ingrained social structures required to sustain discrimination, as I suggested in my comment.

So, to restate the implied claim is that credentialism is comparable in its force to racism and sexism. This despite the contrast between the obvious prevalence of racism and sexism and the evidence for example, this thread that hardly anyone supports credentialism.

Maybe sizeism or ageism would closer comparisons less pervasive and functional for larger systems of domination but still real and significant to those affected. Or maybe it could be compared to excessive top executive pay, which iirc some accounts trace to a dysfunction of recruitment consultancy profession. At the working level, we knew that experienced technicians and specialists with 2-year degrees were worth twice their weight in inexperienced engineers 4 or more year degrees , but in the semi-annual layoffs, the subsection and section managers often started with the lower ranks, assuming an engineer could do anything a technician or specialist could do, but not vice-versa.

The best engineer I ever knew was a specialist with a two-year degree Bob. Sure enough, Al had a job for us. As they used to say, nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM. You know about systemic racism and systemic sexism right?

Structures are in place such that even people with low levels of racism or sexism end up continuing sexist practices. HR departments like three things: the ability to trashcan a bunch of applicants, the ability to cover their ass if a hire goes bad, and the ability to avoid litigation.

Credentialism immediately lets them screen out a bunch of applicants. HR also wants to be able to cover its ass if a hire goes bad. Note that I intentionally have made the credentialed people more likely to fail at the job—perhaps it is too boring for them.

If they succeed, HR will get very little credit. If they fail, HR has a much higher chance of taking the blame. Humans are highly loss-averse and eager to avoid blame. Credentialism also plays into litigation avoidance. If your hire does something horribly dangerous and someone gets hurt, the lack of an available credential can mark against you in court a self-reinforcing dynamic because as the credential becomes more prevalent the lack of it will hurt more.

More subtly credentialism can insulate you against getting sued for your illegal racist or sexist programs because in many fields minorities and women are much less likely to have credentials. So note that even if credentialed people are actively worse , there may be systemic reasons why companies with HR departments tend toward credentialism. I suspect that lots of companies initially see that HR is screening out very good candidates, so with weak HR departments they make hires anyway.

But eventually something bad happens and loss aversion kicks in even if on balance you have gained much more by avoiding the credential than you lost in the bad incident. How about small businesses and the self-employed, for example? They have also increased the proportion of graduates, more or less in parallel with large firms. This example goes the wrong way. So, a risk-averse HR department avoids tests like this. LCF — you should be aware that I wrote 64 before I saw or possibly even before you wrote I was already backing off a bit before I read your post Unfortunately, the comments policy put my post in moderation for quite a while.

This is a real problem with the new system and the lack of flow in conversations is starting to put me off. It might make sense to reconsider the policy. I wonder if this has put off certain blog from posting more often if at all. In English, History, and Political Science however — common undergraduate degrees for lawyers — the school is taken as a signal. Credentialism, signaling and socialization at its finest.

Antonin Scalia famously commented that he only hired clerks from Harvard since they already did the sorting for him. Hence, the panic of upper middle class Americans to get their kids into these schools. This is especially true now that inter-generational mobility is low. With the recent moves in the stock market and the coming tax cuts for the ultrarich, US pre- and post-tax inequality is going to increase to record levels, smashing the and highs.

Guy Harris Peter T :. Third party credentials almost always end up covering your ass so long as the business can show some reason for believing that the credential could be related to some of the tasks of the job. It is an extremely effective way of masking discrimination from legal scrutiny. Until a few years ago that was my area of practice in California one of the most employee friendly states. Your idea of how the law is supposed to work is correct.

Your idea of how the various legal tests actually get applied is not. Re small employers I can only offer anecdotal evidence. I mean: any private firm large enough to have an influential HR dept. So most firms over 30 employees or so? Maybe 40? But enough to make a huge difference. Class is a driver comparable to racism or sexism — it could well be operating here to narrow opportunities for positional mobility.

Maybe the story revolves around the way the greater preponderance of large corporations, and the emphasis on financial rather than industrial expertise, adds to the distance between the office floor and the executive and lessens the ability of the office floor to shape hiring decisions.

But class sharpens the desire of the executive to hire and promote credentialled people. Makes sense the credentialled would more easily make a go in this sector. RichardM This is pretty clearly wrong. Whether or not that has happened yet changes nothing.

The map is not the territory. In most offices, a high school graduate requiring training would be a liability rather than an asset. An obvious implication of this process is that much of the training that was once done on the job is now undertaken in classrooms. Someone seeking a job as a file clerk, for instance, would be well advised to acquire a knowledge of computer programs such as Microsoft Office, and an understanding of database management. This is likely to be done more efficiently in a classroom setting than by osmosis in a busy office.

This complaint is implicitly directed at an extreme version of credentialism, presupposing a one-for-one match between jobs and credentials. The implied policy is a system of central planning, in which the education system has been designed to ensure that there is no excess supply or shortage of workers of any given kind. Finally, the view that people attending university might be better off getting a trade qualification is a false dichotomy.

Some kinds of skilled trades provide wages comparable to those of university graduates. But they typically require a lengthy training period in which the importance of formal education, in trade schools or similar institutions, is increasing over time.

The relevant choice for society as a whole is not between different forms of post-school education, but between higher and lower participation in post-school education.

Ever since the rise of the industrial economy in the nineteenth century, technological change has replaced unskilled human labour with the work of machines. Some skills have also become obsolete, but the overall tendency has been to require ever-higher levels of average skill in the workforce. The rise of information technology since the mid twentieth century has extended the process to routine information processing of all kinds, from running messages to adding up accounts.

This idea is wrong in two ways. First, the skill-biased nature of technological change means that, unless the supply of skilled and educated workers increases over time, the skill premium will rise, as it has done over the past thirty years or more.

Second, while growing wage inequality is important, the biggest contributor to increased inequality is the growth in the share of national income going to profits and to the financial sector. Expansion of education is not going to fix this, at least not directly.

A better-educated electorate might well see through some of the spurious claims made by the defenders of inequality and elect governments committed to producing better social and economic outcomes. But at least in the recent past, the votes of the educated have not been sufficient to produce such outcomes.

To get a good job, you get a diploma: at once time a high school diploma stuffed, and then a B. When Richard Hernstein, a Harvard psychologist, wrote a book called I. Society had to select and conserve its talent, and the best way to do that was through the schools. The process that left it in our landscape is less like the slow raising of a mountain range or the growth of oxbows on the Mississippi, and more like the construction of a dam. Three changes, which took place in the past hundred years, produced the system that is now producing M.

In fond recollection this is the era of ice-cream socials and horse-and-buggy outings and white linen suits, but for those alive then, it seems to have featured one moment of terrifying uncertainty after another.

Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War the nation's population grew faster and migrated more frequently than ever before or since. Tens of millions of people poured through Ellis Island and into the New World; millions more left farms in Wisconsin and Tennessee to work in stockyards and steel mills in such brash new boomtowns as Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit.

Men and women who had grown up on farms or in small towns where everyone knew his neighbors, and where behavior was constrained by the knowledge that nothing could be kept secret for very long, now found themselves kow-towing to impersonal foremen and brushing shoulders with people who has only recently lived in Calabria or Minsk.

The social order and the traditional sources of security were repeatedly called into question. When the transcontinental railroad network was completed, the United States was for the first time something like a national market. Small-town merchants found they couldn't compete with the big chains operating out of Chicago and New York. With the growth of steamship lines and the cultivation of vast new tracts in Australia, Canada, and South America, farmers were exposed not just to a national but to a world-wide economy.

A farm family in Kansas could till, sow, pray for rain, and harvest—only to find that a bumper crop in Argentina had destroyed the price for wheat. At the time of the Civil War more than half of the American work force could still be found on the farm.

By the turn of the century only a third was still there. With the decline of the village and the farm, doors were closing on the man who wanted to work for himself and opening to those who were willing to sign on with Armour or Union Pacific or Standard Oil. Yet to almost all of the people who created them, these themes meant only dislocation and bewilderment.

America in the late nineteenth century was a society without a core A feeling was suddenly acute across the land that local America stood at bay, besieged by giant forces abroad and beset by subversion at home.

Wiebe's book was called The Search for Order. It stressed the different ways in which different groups struggled to recover the social and economic security they had lost. The farmers joined ranks in the anti-foreign, anti-immigrant, anti-bank, and eventually anti-black protests of the Populist movement. Immigrant and other industrial workers fought for protection through labor unions. The traditional American aristocracy of Roosevelts and Cabots tried both to hold off the immigrants who were reaching for control of city politics and to erect barriers of snobbery and taste with which to separate themselves form the grasping plutocrats of the Gilded Age.

For the middling rank of dislocated merchants, craftsmen, and semi-professionals, the most promising route to security was to enhance the prestige of their occupations. Lawyers, teachers, and engineers had similar problems. The economic advantages to be had from professional organization were most concisely explained by Mark Twain, who in Life on the Mississippi described the riverboat pilots' attempt to make themselves into a monopoly.

At mid-century, when westward expansion caused the steamboat business to boom, the pilots' pay unaccountably began to fall. The reason, as the pilots soon deduced, was that any fool off the farm could sign on as an apprentice pilot, increasing competition and depressing the market.

They slowly recruited members and agreed to exchange information about the river's constantly changing snags and sandbars only with other members of the guild. Since no one could become a pilot without the recommendation of two existing pilots, the association could regulate its own competition.

The difference between the pilots' association and the countless other guilds that sprang up and survived was that the pilots were tied to one specialized industry and could be completely displaced, unlike doctors, teachers, lawyers, and engineers. But the economic logic that lay behind the pilots' association shaped the other organizations as well.

They controlled entry into their fields, they often raised professional standards, and they sheltered their members from the more chaotic side of the marketplace. The newly organizing groups could call themselves professions, and not simply resurrected medieval guilds, because their members' mastery of a new body of knowledge gave them claims to a competence beyond the amateur's reach.

Doctors could take advantage of the new breakthroughs in germ theory and anesthesia, engineers of refinements in industrial technology. But it cannot be too reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable, for then outsiders can judge work by its results.

When a patient dies, the doctor might not to be blame, but if a bridge, falls down, the engineer is. As a means of transmitting the knowledge on which their authority was based—and reserving to themselves control over who would enter the field—the professions dramatically increased the educational requirements for new aspirants near the turn of the century.

Afterward, those who wanted to enter the professions had to go to school, and once they had their credentials they enjoyed a near-tenured status they had previously been denied. By the Second World War professionals without advanced degree were becoming an oddity. The new body of knowledge that turned business into a profession was created by the rise of huge, complex, integrated corporations.

With the coming of railroads and telegraphs and nationwide trading firms, businessmen couldn't keep schedules or accounts in their heads any longer, as the small-town merchant had done. Resources had to be coordinated, inventory traced from place to place, new systems of accounting worked out.

Soon after the turn of the century, professional management societies and scientific-management journals sprouted up everywhere. The early generation of professionally trained managers was mainly from engineering schools like MIT. At that point, they were indeed meeting a need. By graduate business schools had been founded at Dartmouth and Harvard, as had undergraduate schools of business at New York University and the universities of Chicago, California, and Pennsylvania the Wharton School.

Still, until the eve of the Second World War specialized training in business was the exception. According to a national survey conducted in , only about half of all employers required that prospective managers have even a high school diploma, and only one eighth required a college degree. Thirty years later a regional study found that nearly half of all managerial jobs formally required either a B.

The first cultural change, then, was the evolution of distinct professions, requiring proof of academic training from those who hope to join. In part the rise of credentialed professions reflected the greater precision of scientific knowledge and the greater complexity of modern business operations, but it also arose from a social choice. When it came to determining professional status, the trial and error of the marketplace would not suffice. Objective standards must be found.

We are accustomed to seeing men leap from farm or shop to courtroom or pulpit, and we half believe that common men can safely use the seven-league boots of genius. Once a professional, always a professional, barring felony conviction or grotesque error. As part of the movement for professionalization, the U.

In the old days practically anyone could be hired for a government job, but no one could count on staying very long. After the Civil Service was reformed, only those who met the standards could sign on—and once hired, they could practically never be dislodged. The corruption of the spoils system symbolized the social chaos that the professional guilds hoped to combat, not only in the government but also in business and the professions. The rigidity of the modern Civil Service illustrates how far the idea of professional tenure has gone.

In five years in office Ronald Reagan has managed to replace fewer federal employees than Abraham Lincoln did in four, and in Lincoln's day the government was one seventieth its current size. To the creator of the first intelligence test, the French psychologist Alfred Binet, IQ meant something very different from what it has come to imply.

As has often been told, Binet was commissioned by the French Ministry of Instruction to develop a test to identify children in need of remedial schooling. He went out of his way to denounce the idea that IQ could be thought of as a fixed, innate value. As he saw it, an IQ test was, to use another analogy, something like a physical-fitness exam given before a conditioning program, which would indicate areas of weakness and serve as a benchmark for future progress.

What a momentous word. Something happened to Binet's concept of IQ when it was translated into English. In both England and the United States, IQ was seized upon as a way of quantifying the long-suspected mental differences among individuals and races. The IQ tests gave the new science of psychometrics—mental measurement—the kind of objective, hard data it had so sorely lacked.

The first ten questions from an Army Alpha exam are listed below. When the results were correlated with the recruits' social and ethnic backgrounds, they confirmed what everyone had suspected: the immigrants and blacks were overwhelmingly subnormal, with the most recent arrivals proving to be the most defective.

The only unforeseen and unsettling wrinkle was that most people were subnormal: the average mental age for white draftees was thirteen. The chief administrator of the tests, Robert Yerkes, noted if the results were taken seriously, 47 percent of white draftees must be classified as morons.

The page analysis of the Army exams was made public in Had American and English society become so perfectly meritocratic by the early s that the smartest people had already reached the occupational summit, despite nativist passions, Jim Crow laws, and the brutalized condition of the urban working class? But beneath the drawn-out arguments about fair and unfair measures of IQ a more powerful concept has often lain unchallenged.

Even the most critics of the tests don't question the current structure of the professions. Forging a link between intelligence and occupation was explicitly the goal of the early psychometricians, even through it was not a goal of Alfred Binet's. Lewis Terman, one of the movement's leaders, wrote in that. Intelligence tests can tell us to which group a child's native brightness corresponds The most important word here is permits.

If the first major social change, the rise of professions based on advanced educational degrees, dramatically increased the importance of higher education, the second change implied that only a few people would be recognized as having the raw intelligence to handle long years in school and the careers that would follow.

The results of this perception were spelled out by Richard Hernstein, in his book on the meritocracy. Surely some people are more talented than others, and some are not fit to be doctors or artists or musicians. Still, the are are reasons to be skeptical of the idea that IQ is usually the limit on occupational ascent. During the first half century of intelligence testing, people with scores below 85 were known, in descending order of intelligence, as morons, imbeciles, and idiots.

As a group the managers had above-average IQs, but a large number of individual managers did not. According to pure meritocratic theory, Olneck and Crouse observed, the greatest diversity of IQ scores should be found at the bottom of the occupational pyramid since some people have the brains but not the gumption or the opportunity to move and the least diversity at the top where everyone would have to be smart to make the grade.

When Richard Herrnstein compared the IQ scores of Second World War recruits with their occupations before induction, he discovered just such a pattern. But Herrnstein's subject were young, starting out in their careers; the Kalamazoo study, which traced its subjects until much later in life, found that the IQ-and-occupation pattern was in fact the reverse. The greatest diversity of IQ scores was found not among unskilled laborers but among professionals.

James B. Of course, when the returning GI enrolled, they confounded all predictions and proved to be famously mature and successful in class.

Researchers found that those who would not have gone to college without help from the GI Bill did slightly better in course work than other equally able veterans. If the linkage between jobs and IQ were as strong and automatic as the meritocratic theories proposed, how could the Kalamazoo morons have succeeded in business and the professions? How could the population of Europe have switched from an overwhelmingly agricultural to an industrial society, with its more demanding skill level, within three or four generations?

Obviously, during the agricultural era the limit on human performance was not the stockpile of native intelligence but the primitive level of technology and social organization. Through most of history, most people have been capable of far more than economic organization has permitted them to do. It would be remarkable indeed if in the s we had reached the precise point of equilibrium at which the supply of human talent exactly matched the high-skill jobs that exist to be done.

Nonetheless, the lasting effect of this second social change was the belief that an individual's IQ placed firm limits on how extensively he could be educated—and, because of the emerging link between education and wok, on the jobs to which he could aspire. Since a person's intellectual ability was generally fixed, predictions about his specific limits could be made early in life, as soon as he reached school.

Though the mid-nineteenth century compulsory-school-attendance laws were all but unknown, and only about two percent of the high-school age population was enrolled in high school. But the very success of this crusade created new complications. But, like IQ testing, manpower channeling took sudden leaps, because of the demands of war. During the First World War, which the United States entered late, mass mobilization did more for the psychometricians than they did for the war effort, since it gave them their first opportunity to collect data on a grand sale.

Twenty-five years later, as the United Stats girded up for total war, its strategic planners knew they had to use human resources as efficiently as rubber or tin. Their principal tool for deploying manpower was the power to draft or defer, and for thirty years, from to , the Selective Service system played a crucial role in, and offered a window on, the evolution of the meritocracy.

General Lewis B. He was especially hostile to student deferments, arguing that they would turn into a collaboration between colleges which wanted to keep their enrollments up and privileged students who preferred to stay away from the front lines. But in such sentiments Hershey soon proved to be on the wrong side of social history.

In the Cold War era the prevailing view was that the United States could not afford to misallocate its intelligence and talent if it hoped it hoped to prevail against the Soviet Union. The plan represented everything that Hershey detested, but he accepted it, apparently out of his bureaucratic desire to keep the Selective Service system alive. He contracted with the Educational Testing Service to write the test, and when he began calling men for service in Korea in , anyone who scored above 70 out of possible on the test could remain in college and be sheltered from the draft.

Eventually the IQ-test deferment evolved into the 2-s deferment that proved so catastrophically divisive during the vietnam War. In a way, the IQ deferment plan was merely symbolic. The number of deferments for married men and fathers, members of ROTC, and those classified 4-F vastly exceeded deferments granted through the IQ test. Still, as symbolism it was potent indeed.