From educational sociologist David Labaree‘s foreward to David Brown’s Degrees of Control: A Sociology of Educational Expansion and Occupational Credentialism:

[C]redentialism is astonishingly inefficient.  Education is the largest single public investment made by most modern societies, and this is justified on the grounds that it provides a critically important contribution to the collective welfare.  The public value of education is usually calculated as some combination of two types of benefits, the preparation of capable citizens (the political benefit) and the training of productive workers (the economic benefit).  However the credentialist argument advanced by Brown suggests that these public benefits are not necessarily being met and that the primary beneficiaries are in fact private individuals.  From this perspective, higher education (and the educational system more generally) exists largely as a mechanism for providing individuals with a cultural commodity that will give them a substantial competitive advantage in the pursuit of social position.  In short, education becomes little but a vast public subsidy for private ambition.

The unintended consequences:

The result is a spiral of credential inflation; for as each level of education in turn gradually floods with a crowd of ambitious consumers, individuals have to keep seeking ever higher levels of credentials in order to move a step ahead of the pack.  In such a system nobody wins.  Consumers have to spend increasing amounts of time and money to gain additional credentials, since the swelling number of credential holders keeps lowering the value of credentials at any given level.  Taxpayers find an increasing share of scarce fiscal resources going to support an educational chase with little public benefit.  Employers keep raising the entry-level education requirements for particular jobs, but they still find that they have to provide extensive training before employees can carry out their work productively.  At all levels, this is an enormously wasteful system…

Which reminds me: Remember my educational signaling question on the Kauffman econ bloggers’ survey?  Sociologist Fabio Rojas re-ran it (with one comedic revision) for his largely sociological audience.  Survey says:

socsig.jpg

The results for economists and sociologists are shockingly similar.  The two fields really do need to spend more time listening to each other and less time mocking each other.  I’m happy to go first.