Topics Education

Question Why does our society place more value on the degree than the actual learning? With Ivy league and esteemed colleges publishing their courses online, it is plausible to think that one could learn as much or more than a graduate, yet that knowledge would not be valued in the workforce or in the field of knowledge. This can also be seen in high school. Less knowledgeable students who earn the diploma are far greater valued than others who may have superior knowledge but did not complete.

Accepted:
August 2, 2010

Comments

I'm always a little worried about broad generalizations about society. That said, I'm willing to grant that there is a real bias of the kind you describe. And I would also agree that many very worthy people get overlooked on that account.

As for why it happens, that's an empirical question and as a philosopher I have no special insight into the answer. But I can offer a hypothesis: it's a time-saver. No doubt there are many people with no degrees who are smarter and more knowledgeable than people with Ivy-League credentials. But if I'm an employer, I don't have the time or the means to figure out who among all the applicants is really the most capable. So I will use things like educational achievement as a proxy. If someone got a degree, there's a good chance that they have at least a certain basic level of intellectual ability and stick-to-itiveness. And if their degree is from a prestigious school, that inference may be a little more solid. At least, I'd guess that this is what many employers would say.

There's at least a modicum of sense here. Suppose I need to hire an accountant. One applicant has a high-GPA accounting degree from some good business school. The other says he has read and studied accounting very thoroughly on his own. It could be that the self-taught candidate really is better. But if I'm trying to do triage on the pile of applications, I'm pretty likely to shuffle the self-taught one to the bottom. I'm not in a position to figure out who is "really" better; I give weight to the repeated good grades of the one who got the degree. It's hard to see why I shouldn't.

Of course, if I only look at grades and provenance of the degree, I'm a fool. And there's no doubt that far less reasonable impulses (snobbery for instance) are part of the mix. But it's hard to see how we could realistically get on with things if we didn't avail ourselves of admittedly imperfect proxies.

I'd like to supplement Allen Stairs's fine response with two additional points.

First, giving significant credence to the possession of degrees isn't merely a time saver. As a society we have largely delegated the measurement of learning to degree granting institutions. At least in theory, possession of a degree is supposed to correspond to the actual possession of knowledge. There aren't a lot of reliable alternatives for judging whether or not someone possesses the knowledge in question (especially if the person trying to gauge another's level of knowledge is not an expert in that area herself). Sure, a prodigy might be able to self-teach and attain more knowledge than the credentialed person, but that is still relatively rare.

Second, there is more to the possession of a degree than mere knowledge. It communicates to potential employers (and anyone else who cares) that the person has a level of perseverance and discipline and is able to work within the guidelines of an institutional structure.... things a potential employer is likely to value.

I agree that there is some utility in this way of thinking about formal education, but I also think that this perspective is so shallow that individuals who learn to adopt a richer perspective may learn more and may be able to do more with their learning.

First, I think it can be useful to reflect on the benefits of learning that have nothing to do with social status or employability. Is there intrinsic value in learning and in learning how to learn? Does a high-quality learning make one a better person in addition to increasing social status and employability? Understanding those benefits may improve motivation to work hard and effectively as a learner.

Second, I think it can also be useful to reflect on a more sophisticated manner on the instrumental value of education: those who view a degree program simply as a means to a credential fail to internalize a narrative of self-development and growth (self-consciously directing one's education to increase skills, insight, and wisdom, for example), and as an educator I've found that those of my students who grasp on to such a narrative learn more and learn better. Higher education institutions gesture towards this idea with statements about fostering lifelong learning, but those statements tend to be empty platitudes without corresponding curricular or co-curricular content.

So, one reason why society places more value on credentials than on the learning that underlies them is that too many learners fail to question a shallow and limited viewpoint on the purpose, nature, and benefits of education. Individuals can benefit from rejecting that perspective, and institutions of higher learning have opportunities to help their students do that. Hiring managers may always value credentials highly because they don't have the ability to assess individual learning, but learners and institutions of higher learning can certainly do more to increase the value of those credentials by valuing learning more highly.