The Credential

*Adapted from a speech given in May, 2016.*

During the past two weeks I’ve had four conversations with six different individuals about the disappointing quality of higher education. It’s boring, it’s too easy, the professors are bad, it’s obscenely expensive, no one is taking the classes seriously, it’s not what students were expecting. Compounding this frustration, of course, is the fact that the college degree is not as valuable in the job market today as it was in days past. But college wasn’t always like this (after all, where do our misconceptions come from?). In the past, colleges really were institutions of higher learning, effectively educating students in a stimulating environment, and their graduates were basically guaranteed a good job after graduation. What happened? Why the drastic decline in quality? 

What’s changed is the significance of a college degree. Way back when, it was only the academically-inclined students who attended college because it was those students who wanted to learn more and who would end up applying the advanced knowledge that they were learning. A bachelor’s degree was a certificate; it certified that the student had advanced knowledge in a specific area. However, the degree also had another function. It was also a credential; it signaled that the student who possessed it had the potential to create more value than a student without it. By virtue of the greater intelligence and four years of rigorous work in college, employers identified college graduates as desirable employees, capable of doing more than the high school graduate. As a result, college graduates were courted and paid a higher salary than non-college graduates.

Of course, everyone else saw what was going on, and a movement was started such that more and more students pushed themselves to get into and get through college and earn that bachelor’s degree. Attendance increased (read: demand for college increased) and, as a result, the price of college increased. Still, attendance increased, and tuition continued to rise. Eventually, the government stepped in and started pouring money into programs that would fund students’ educations, artificially lowering the price and causing attendance to soar, tuition following. As tuition increased, proportionately more so for many of the students who would have gone purely for the learning, it became harder and harder to justify going to college, except as an investment in the future. The certificate function of a college degree, the learning component, was pushed aside, forgotten in all but rhetoric, to make room for the focus on the credential aspect of the college degree and its ability to get the student a good job.

Now we can see why professors and students often don’t click. Ninety percent of the students in a professor’s class don’t actually care about learning. They’re in class merely because they’re going through the motions, doing what they need to do to graduate and receive that credential. The professors have demonstrated, by getting their Ph.D., that they only care about the learning that happens in college. And yet, when they receive their Ph.D. and get their teaching gig, they arrive to find an over-occupied lecture hall filled with students who are utterly uninterested in what the professor has to say. How long do you think it takes before the professor stops caring about the quality of teaching? (The proof of this can be found by visiting a professor during their office hours. If you stop in with a substantive question, the professor is liable to leap from his chair and shout in excitement before giving you a very detailed answer and following up with practice questions. They are passionate about what they’re teaching, but the classroom full of uncaring students is not conducive to eliciting that passion.)

Let’s analyze, for a moment, how a Bachelor’s degree acts as a credential. Employers don’t actually care about what you learned in college. For most jobs, the major is irrelevant. Indeed, on most job postings the requirements include a Bachelor’s degree, but the listing hardly ever specifies what kind of Bachelor’s degree is required. That’s because there is no such requirement. The company is prepared to train you in how to perform the job; your years studying biology may or may not help you do your job, but you’ll get the same training nonetheless. Ultimately, the company only cares about your ability to do your job, your ability to create value for their company. Here’s the thing: it can’t know that you’ll create value, and it certainly can’t know that you’ll create more value than the other applicant. It doesn’t know you or your abilities. That’s essentially what the entire application process is: you trying to prove your ability to create value to the company that you’re applying to. You send in your resume, which is a list of your accomplishments, a list of things you’ve done. You provide a list of references, people that you’ve previously worked for and who can vouch for your ability to create value. And this is where the college degree comes in, during the application process. The company doesn’t know if it can trust you when you say that you can create value, and it doesn’t know if it can trust your references. But the college degree is really your college vouching for you. The employer may not have heard of you, but they’ve probably heard of the State University of New York, and your college degree is SUNY telling the potential employer “You don’t have to trust the applicant, but trust us. We spent four years verifying this student’s ability to create value.” In this day and age, that is all a college degree is: a credential of your ability to create value. 

However, as more and more people recognize this function of the college degree, more and more people are acquiring degrees. These increased numbers are coming from a previously submarginal group of students, students who wouldn’t have gotten the degree if it wasn’t a credential. The government’s assistance further increases this trend, drawing deeper and deeper from the submarginal group. This results in massive amounts of students who don’t care about learning and who aren’t capable of as much as the students who should be in college. Like I said above, this affects the professors, and the quality of college, and eventually, after a few cycles of this, college isn’t what it used to be. 

This actually weakens the power of a college degree. First, as the market is flooded with Bachelor’s degrees (read: as the supply of Bachelor’s degrees increases), their purchasing power decreases. Second, the quality of the student who possesses a Bachelor’s degree declines, which means his ability to create value is not as great as might be assumed at first. (Think about it: everyone in your class will graduate with the same exact degree as you. How many of your classmates are on Facebook, on their phones, asleep? How many showed up today?) This, of course, creates a dire problem for those of us who actually are capable of creating real value. A weakened credential hurts us as well, even if we weren’t the one to weaken it. Again, the employer doesn’t know us. If you want to distinguish yourselves as more capable of value-creation than the other guy (who now has the same degree as you), you’ll need something more than the Bachelor’s degree. 

It has now become necessary for you to create your own credential. 

Sure, there are other ways of differentiating yourself from others. Many students these days go on to get graduate degrees, hoping that this extra credential will be enough to get them the job they want. But I would venture to say that there is a profoundly better way to demonstrate your ability to create value: create value. Build something! Start a blog and write regularly, thereby showcasing your knowledge about a topic and your communication abilities. Take a trip to the hardware store and start building a wind turbine so that you can test various energy theories, and upload your experiments on YouTube. Write a story and publish a book through Amazon. Learn Java and create your own app for the market. Learn about overpronation and prepare a pamphlet for distribution in all NYS School Athletic Facilities. Use LinkedIn to record your achievements at work, such as increasing revenue by 33%. It doesn’t matter what you do, what you build; all that matters is that you do, build, something. If you want a good job, your employer needs to know that you can create value. Millions and millions of students are rushing to purchase a credential from a college that they can use to prove that they can create value. Imagine how powerful an impact your application will have if your credential is not a credential, but an actual demonstration of value-creation. 

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go to college, or that you shouldn’t care about college. But I am saying that the college degree is no longer enough to ensure you your dream job, and it’s no longer a certificate of intellectual prowess. It is a shadow of what it once was, and this trend will only continue. If you want to have an edge in the job market and in life, you’ll need more than the Bachelor’s degree can give you. You’ll need another credential. Your own.