I don’t know that there’s any groups deciding on something but rather individuals acting in their best interest, getting a degree, that ruins it for everybody else. An arms race among individuals.
> I don’t know that there’s any groups deciding on something
Credentialism is exactly that. If in the pre-covid era you went to Washington, DC, you will see huge illuminated ads in the metro stations for companies, for example "graduate school" (literally the name of one company I saw) which offer super sketchy master's degrees. This is because if you have a master's degree, you get a mandated pay bump in your salary as a civil servant.
> If any auditing actually went into the source and value of the credentials
Except that already is case. You need a degree by an accredited institution. The Department of Education regulates the accreditors, which audit the universities.
So we could have better or more aggressive regulation here, either at the DoE or the accreditors. Or even have the department accredit directly, but I suspect these institutions will still likely game the system.
Usually the bargin-basement universities do actually have worthwhile material, the poor ones just don't provide you with the full support to succeed, and often overstate the value of their program relative to alternatives (or cost). I mean, you could just buy textbooks on Amazon and do self-study. And for some folks, that might even be a good program! Good universities provide a lot more than just the lectures and textbooks, but I suspect setting standards to assess those properties is difficult. Even going to a well-respected state school, I had a few classes that were very poorly run. In one case, my dorm-mates and I created a study-group and basically taught ourselves the material. But I shudder to think of a whole university consisting of classes like that, though I suspect they would meet baseline audits of the curriculum. An alternative approach would be to assess the outcomes of students, but looking at the can worms that raises in primary eduction, I don't think that is a good approach either.
> "If any auditing actually went into the source and value of the credentials"
Pray tell how would one prevent gaming of the auditing.
As an aside, my dad worked at the VA. There was a person who was supposed to be promoted to CIO and then they did an audit and found her undergraduate credentials were not correct (don't remember what the exact circumstances were). As a result she got canned instead of promoted.
There are positions in the federal government system where you are required to have a college degree or else you are not eligible, no matter how competent you are.
Look at the quickly expanding credential requirements for nursing staff. Over the last decade or so in my state, the requirement has gone from no degree, to associates degree, to bachelors degree, and now there is talk of requiring a masters degree or a 5 year degree.
Kind of like what's been happening with housing in the places with jobs. It's too bad there isn't some sort of system where we could all have a voice to regulate these sort of things. Kind of like the US had before the Managementism replaced Capitalism and Corprotocrocy replaced deomocracy.
simple, capitalism is where things are run by owners of capital.
Managementism is where the managers of companies run things because ownership has been diluted and ignored.
" With potential opposition melting away through the sales exit, the management is very much in the saddle--and in most of these larger companies it is virtually self-perpetuating. How else could things be run in, let us say, the American Telephone Company, which has over a million shareholders, no one of whom owns more than one-tenth of one per cent of the stock?
Looking at this segment of American business, we would almost find it appropriate to call our present economic system "managementism" rather than "capitalism."
"
