The End of Credentialism?
Cognitive testing might be making a comeback. That could be very important.
Credentialism has polluted the American psyche for generations, and it has impaired the functioning of the job market and the government in the process. At one point, it was believed to be necessary, if not useful, good, and perhaps even complementary to meritocracy. But that belief is delusional, and we are all now victims of credentialism.
Credentialism, like so much rot, has precedent in academia. Consider peer review. Peer review ostensibly improves the credibility of scientific works and helps to prevent fraud while keeping the standards of published research in different fields appropriately high. But it does no such thing; it amounts to little more than an expensive attempt to make the status and opinions of academics sacrosanct. On its absent benefits,
writes:Huge interventions should have huge effects. If you drop $100 million on a school system, for instance, hopefully it will be clear in the end that you made students better off. If you show up a few years later and you’re like, “hey so how did my $100 million help this school system” and everybody’s like “uhh well we’re not sure it actually did anything and also we’re all really mad at you now,” you’d be really upset and embarrassed. Similarly, if peer review improved science, that should be pretty obvious, and we should be pretty upset and embarrassed if it didn’t.
It didn’t. In all sorts of different fields, research productivity has been flat or declining for decades, and peer review doesn’t seem to have changed that trend. New ideas are failing to displace older ones. Many peer-reviewed findings don’t replicate, and most of them may be straight-up false. When you ask scientists to rate 20th century discoveries in physics, medicine, and chemistry that won Nobel Prizes, they say the ones that came out before peer review are just as good or even better than the ones that came out afterward. In fact, you can’t even ask them to rate the Nobel Prize-winning discoveries from the 1990s and 2000s because there aren’t enough of them.
Credentialism is just like peer review: it is a way of laundering the status of the academy to provide assurances. With credentialism, you assure employers, friends, acquaintances, your new mother-in-law, the guy next door, the local HOA, your doctor, your dentist, and your mother’s brother’s high school friend, that you’re the right type of person. But credentialism does this by placing enormous costs on everyone, and because credentialism creates a demand for credentials, it threatens the value of those very credentials by impelling a rat race and generating respected sinecures within credentialing authorities.
The declining value of credentials is evident by comparing the IQs of samples of undergraduates over the generations. A university education went from rare to common, so the ability levels of student samples had to decline, and indeed they did:
At the same time, many job postings began to ask for applicants with formal, university-level educations.1 With every incremental, seemingly inexorable, increase in the job market’s demand for degrees, the need to obtain one became greater and more real.2 Deriding the need for universal degree attainment even became “classist and wrong” or otherwise abhorrent in some circles. The dire need for a sheet of paper certifying an individual had wasted enough of their life in a slog through a mixture of irrelevant general ed courses and cursory coverage of specialized material that wouldn’t be useful to most became so self-justifying that outlets started talking about concepts like a “degree gap”—a supposed deficit in the proportion of the population earning degrees relative to the proportion of jobs requiring them.
But there was never any need for credentialism, and at what point it benefitted anyone, it did so because the alternative was unacceptable to a small, loud share of the population. The alternative to credentialism is selection, or real meritocracy.
The rise of credentialism has a great deal to do with the decline of selection. Selection is the use of tests, work samples, and other assessments to figure out who among a group of job candidates is the most qualified for a job. Inquiry into selection tools has found that the best predictors tend to be cognitive tests, not credentials and interviews3, and cognitive tests tend to have predictive power due to their affinity for general intelligence rather than their relationship to specific, potentially more job-relevant skills.
A major advantage of cognitive tests over any other selection tool is that they can be—and generally are, for most use-cases—unbiased, meaning that conditional on a given level of ability, the results of tests are the same across groups. No one has found any other tool that can be used without injecting substantial bias into selection processes generally. This fact adds immense social consequence to the use of tests, whether the tests in question were those that were common during Tang Dynasty China or modern ones like the SAT and ACT. Cognitive testing helps to sort society by ability level, without concern for people’s class,4 race, sex, hereditary privileges, or other aspects of their origins. This has a notable, two-fold impact:
Testing leads to the displacement of unqualified people of privileged backgrounds
Testing leads to the exclusion of unqualified people of disadvantaged backgrounds
These facts make unqualified people upset. So, instead of selection, they tend to prefer credentialism. The benefit of credentialism for unqualified people is that it’s much easier to figure out how to game acquiring a credential than it is to be smart. Gaming a credential doesn’t make someone a better worker, so the substitution of selection with credentialism is a worse outcome for potential employers, and likely a worse outcome for society, too.
When credentialism becomes the default mode through which people acquire prestige, income, and the tools to achieve fulfillment, society has to be contorted around a biased proxy for skill that some authorities even wish to make more biased. For example, DEI programs and affirmative action militate against some of the most socially beneficial aspects of selection. Namely, if people make it to somewhere through a selection process, you shouldn’t need to think about the groups they belong to. The subtext is: if they belong to a group given preferences, it can be smart to avoid the professional services of members of preferred groups. It’s not nice to discriminate, but a system that raises up unqualified people can make it smart to.
The rise of credentialism is connected to the rise of civil rights law. Disparate impact doctrine and its accouterments have made it impractical to engage in selection, and they’ve left employers vying to select on credentials as proxy ability measures instead.5 The reason for this is that credentialism, unlike selection, cannot be so easily attacked and banned. Credentialism has intuitive appeal, even if it preserves disparate impact nonetheless.6 If you’ve been to school and undergone training and gotten certified and done the reading and whatever, you must be qualified to do $relevant_work. This isn’t true, but for enough purposes it’s been close enough.
Today, the disparate impact doctrine is finally—after decades of unrelenting wins—racking up defeats. Disparate impact cases against police and fire departments are being dismissed, precedents are being overturned, and, amazingly, consent decrees once considered sacred, which barred the application of tests are being challenged. The most recent and portentous example of this is the Trump administration’s attempt to overturn the Luevano Consent Decree that has barred civil service examinations.
On its own, dissolving Luevano is an incredible and unexpected piece of progress away from credentialism and towards a world where selection is possible again. Most importantly, it signals that the new administration in Washington has a grander goal: ending all Title VI disparate impact regulations and setting up a series of court cases to kick off which will—quite likely—make the use of tests in the private sector feasible again.
Let me explain just a fraction of what that could mean.7
The End of Credentialism
The End of Credentialism means the end of saddling 18-year-olds with debt and wasted years of youth, cordoned off from society at large. With these artificial burdens replaced by quick and easy testing, we may see a rebirth of recreational activities geared towards young adults with money.
The End of Credentialism means young people get to reclaim the years they would have spent in higher education, where they’re incentivized to hold back on fertility decisions. This amounts to clawing back years of their reproductive window.
The End of Credentialism will mean a forced restructuring of the dating market, as women8 will lose a currently prominent, but biased, signal of desirability and compatibility.
The End of Credentialism means people will have to think and exercise judgment beyond evaluating people’s degrees. To judge by merits means to judge without shortcuts. We’ve seen how the abdication of responsibility, discretion, and perspicacity has failed academia, with its credential hurdles and peer review process that allow blatant frauds to be passed through its ranks to positions of the highest standing.
The End of Credentialism will mean that high school and college clubs won’t be polluted with people trying to pile up résumé line items, but will instead be more limited to people who are interested and/or good at the activities the club is about.9
The End of Credentialism will endanger the numbers and status of career academics and academia writ large, permanently altering the nature of the ‘expert class’.
The End of Credentialism means the emergence of a period where people who had trouble focusing and didn’t want to sit around in classes can nevertheless reliably, rapidly rise to prominence and success because the world will be able to see that they’re capable.
The End of Credentialism means an end to allowing universities to boost the status of unqualified people so they can obtain positions of undeserved acclaim and respect in the name of ‘affirmative action’.
The End of Credentialism means you can be confident your doctor is going to be able to treat you well, rather than fearful that they were admitted to med school instead of someone more capable.
The End of Credentialism means your coworkers will be capable like you, not a mixture of qualified people and unqualified people who could put in the effort long enough to earn a credential that makes them ‘just like you’ and enables them to enter a position to coast along.
The End of Credentialism means the end of an era of rule by bookish prudes who claim themselves to be your equals or your betters, and the beginning of an era where the competent dominate, because what matters is not the sheet of paper you hang in your office, but instead, the life, the work, and the outlook that you produce. The credentialed and unqualified will lose out to the uncredentialed and qualified.
The End of Credentialism means the abandonment of the period of widespread acceptance of the intellectual and economic equivalent of the dereliction of the civic duty to utilize good and proper judgment that we see in our criminal justice system. Rapists in Rotherham and philistines completing PhDs are grim parallels.
The End of Credentialism means the demise of an incompetent, infinitely-growing bureaucratic state populated by people whose highest achievement happens to be earning their credentials. And those credentials? By and large issued by the state to its agents, as a matter of legitimation and patronage.
The End of Credentialism is the end of the ideological capture of institutions, where your inferiors can gleefully punish you because they’ve been put into positions of power due to their political loyalty. Bypassing the politically compromised professional and accrediting associations (ABA, AMA, LCME, etc.) responsible for normalizing nonsensical leftist talking points and policies via credential-test arbitrage would fix an unbelievable amount of political damage done by ideological zealots of the worst kind.
What the End of Credentialism means is the wholescale elevation of innovation, and not just in the narrow sense of freeing up people at the most spirited, creative times in their live which they currently spend institutionally constrained, with the threat of penury over their heads. In technology, the arts, and the sciences, people will be freed up and there will be a true equality of ideas and an unfathomed fluidity that allows them to rise and fall on their merits. Anything hostile to that is inhuman.
The End of Credentialism means a return to responsibility as civic duty; it means a cultural rebirth in America.
The End of Credentialism and the Rise of Meritocracy can be a thing of beauty, but like so many beautiful things, it will be precious and it will be fragile. The Rise of Meritocracy will be a continuous project, and it will need its shepherds and stewards. The plain fact is that credentialism is a fallback when the project of civil society fails. Because credentialism is gameable by the simple, it is preferred by the masses who demand recognition, status, and respect, in spite of their ability, in spite of their unproductive nature.
Although perhaps—and with luck—this trend is reversing.
This is despite there being diminishing returns to education and plentiful alternatives.
It is worth noting that many selection tools that are not tests have their validity to the extent they are proxies for cognitive ability or cognitive ability plus something else, but unfortunately, that ‘something else’ tends to carry serious bias, as in the cases of biodata keying, structured and unstructured interviews, essays, and so on.
One common counterargument to the unbiasedness of testing is that wealthier people might be able to buy more and better access to test preparation services. While this is intuitively appealing, it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, whether that comes in the form of simple, direct examination of bias with respect to social class (which show it’s generally absent), or empirical investigations into the impacts of test preparation.
It’s also worth noting that the ‘lifelong prep’ of being in a wealthy family doesn’t seem to lead to much in the way of SES-IQ correlations among adoptees, schooling effects on test scores are minimal, and, also interestingly, the validity of the SAT controlling for SES remains high, while the validity of SES controlling for SAT scores is minimal.
Finally, as my other linked sources have illustrated in different ways, non-test measures are easily biased by social class. To the extent class biases tests, it biases everything else to a far greater extent, and where we can estimate its impact, testing tends to reduce bias.
The credentialism spiral has also made credentials signifiers of workplace fit.
Degree attainment by race still differs in similar directions cognitive ability by race does.
As an aside, the paper that inspired this article had a key finding that got my mind jogging on this: educational sorting has reduced the validity of cognitive tests through inducing within-occupation range restriction. This is a tragedy that the return of testing will help to reverse. Why it’s a tragedy is that this is suboptimal for sorting capable people to where they would do the most good, and it is biased in numerous ways.
Women care a lot about education and create a strong pressure for men to have more of it. Men don’t care much.
If you’re an anime fan, you might have noticed differences in how clubs are depicted working in Japanese schools relative to how they operate in American ones. The East Asian focus on entrance exams makes club membership more about real interest than an obvious attempt to get into a better school.
Interesting to note that one of the most dynamic and lucrative industries, tech, has managed to smuggle IQ testing in via the whiteboard coding interview quite successfully for decades.
But even more interesting to note that even given the existence of widespread non-credentialed entry options, it's still far, far more common for professional software engineers to have a four-year degree than not.
My best guess is that the demise of disparate impact doctrine will open up more such opportunities but won't put a major dent in college enrollment. College is at least as much about class signaling as work-credential signaling, and I doubt we'll see much decline in demand for that status marker in our lives.
Spot on. It is also a positive feedback loop. Academics who gained repute via credentialism do not have the cognitive capacity or individuality to assess the merits of others’ work, so they defer to the credentials of the authors of the work instead of the work itself.
I saw this firsthand during my PhD. Many PIs refused to form an opinion of a paper until others, whose credentials they respect, gave their opinions. In any journal club, their first question was always “which lab/institute is this from?”. Before submitting their student’s/postdoc’s work to a journal, they would send it round to at least five “credentialed” scientists, so that they could be sure that (a) the findings wouldn’t rock the boat, and (b) the science was sound—since they couldn’t/wouldn’t assess this independently. Of course, (a) was always more important than (b).
Regarding peer-review specifically—it’s a complete sham. Most journals allow you to block reviewers who don’t like you (i.e., who are wise to any dodgy science that you might have published) and to recommend reviewers who you are best pals with. Very few journals apply double-blind peer review as standard. At least in my field, success is more determined by who you know than what you’ve done/your actual work. It’s super easy to just recommend a reviewer whose grant application was given to yourself to review. You simply have to minimally communicate this mutual-dependability to each other and both sides instinctively proceed with pathetically shallow review. It’s possible for clades of scientists to propel themselves through decades of publications and grants via this circle-jerk tactic. Further, many older academics will deliberately avoid recommending younger academics as reviewers, since they are less tainted by decades of credentialism, and are more likely to actually assess the work.
Credentialism, and its ugly sister gerontocracy, are killing science.