QUALIFIED BUT NOT DEGREED, COMPETENT BUT NOT CREDENTIALED, BIGOTRY THAT THRIVES UNDER THE RADAR

QUALIFIED BUT NOT DEGREED

COMPETENT BUT NOT CREDENTIALED

BIGOTRY THAT THRIVES UNDER THE RADAR

 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

Copyrighted February 6, 2014

 

 

"We are students of words, we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words and do not know a thing," laments American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).  He pines, "I hate the shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credits, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship."

 

Should you peruse a volume of the great wit of this man's writing, you would know as an American, there is nothing new that Emerson hasn't pondered about our culture, and he lived more than 130 years ago.  He hated intellectualism, conformity, the idea that book readers could think themselves erudite without the necessity of experience.

 

You experience the same poignancy today when you read Charles D. Hayes, Ivan Illich and Thomas Sowell.  They concur with Emerson.  Hayes does this in Proving You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People without College Degrees (1995).  Illich does it in Deschooling Society: How to Remake Schools to Meet our Human Needs (1972).  Sowell does it with his Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogma (1993).  There are scores of others who have also addressed the breach between learning and doing, but, alas, apparently to no avail.

 

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in its most recent rankings finds Shanghai of advanced societies first in math, reading and science across the board, while the United States is 26th in math, 17th in reading, and 21st in science, despite the fact that the US spends more than $115,000 per pupil, which is far in excess of any other program including that of Shanghai.

 

This is my attempt to understand the essence of this gap between formal education, and what it espouses to provide, and what it actually delivers.

 

Education is not a classroom.  Education is the arena of life, and we get a report card every day.  That report card is based on experience, on our demonstration of a capacity to learn and an ability to problem solve.  Unintentionally, as it may be, former education produces too many knowers, who once they have their diploma or degree in hand, believe they have a right to a position.  They fail to see that the credential provides an opportunity to develop competence on the job in the discipline of their choice.

 

Too many college graduates expect, since they burned a little midnight oil studying, that they have the entitled prerequisites that only actual skills can confirm.  They expect to replace doers on the job without the need for a lengthy apprenticeship to master their discipline.  They believe they have arrived.  They are ready to be knighted.

 

Those not privileged with a formal education, not having had the $10,000 to $60,000 a year to acquire such credentials, have often taken the long twisted road of experience to arrive at mastery, only to be denied entrance into that esteem company because they lack this piece of paper.

 

This is a problem of bigotry that festers under the surface of enterprise that everyone knows, but nobody talks about.  Too often competence without credentials counts for little as these learners are denied the opportunity to compete for good jobs for which they are qualified, jobs that instead go to knowers who simply have the credentials, but no inclination to compete.  

 

Obviously, this is not always the case, but in my experience the non-credentialed person is commonly found to be a learner and a student of what he does, while the credentialed person is a knower always campaigning for the next job finding little time to do the job he is paid to do. 

 

This is the state of education in these United States, and alas, the state of the nation as well.

 

Read Emerson and you will see he applauds the learner, showing little empathy for the knower, for the individual who acquires a degree and thinks he is educated.  I have met more educated people who have never spent a day in college, indeed, some of them didn't even finish high school.  They are listeners, not tellers, learners, not knowers, hungry to take on new challenges, not comfortable resting on laurels.

 

Yet, most advertised good jobs require a college degree.  Should a non-degreed person be lucky enough to get an interview because of his overwhelming qualifications for the position, the first question he is likely to be asked is, "What is your formal education?"  

 

Take this person I know.  She is an excellent grant writer, psychometrician, computer literate at the highest level, personable, mature, professional, energetic, an excellent resource person, always goes above and beyond, in a word, highly qualified for the open position, but non-degreed.  "What is your education?"  That was the initial question in the interview. 

 

She provided the interviewer with impressive samples of her work, relevant references, and a sterling work history.  The next day she got a call telling her that a follow up interview was not necessary.

 

This gets a bit dicey in the large complex organization where all jobs are posted and ostensibly all employees have equal opportunity to apply for these positions, degreed or non-degreed.  When I was an industrial psychologist at a hi-tech facility of some 4,000 employees, I dealt with the insincerity of this policy on a regular basis.  What follows is typical.

 

A supervisor came to me and said he liked a certain person for an opening in his group, a degreed position, but this person was non-degreed.  "No big deal," he said, "I can deal with that."  Then he added confidently, ""All I have to do is get her supervisor to sign off on the transfer."

 

That was the glitch.  The supervisor had gone to school nights for several years to attain a degree.  Here her subordinate was being invited to the professional ranks without a degree.  Cleverly, she told her subordinate that she was fighting for her to get this position, while telling the supervisor wanting to hire her that despite what he thought "she wasn't qualified to do the work."  The subordinate didn't get the job because the supervisor backed down, not wanting to break ranks with fellow supervisors.  So, a qualified person without a degree, competent but not credentialed, remained in place.

 

The deception, the duplicity, the hidden agenda of American education is Thomas Sowell's rant.  The decline is real.  The evidence is disturbing.  It is reflected in our ranking among other advanced societies across the globe.  The hope is throwing money at the problem, a typical American strategy, is sure to find some of it sticking.  Experience suggests otherwise.

 

We like clean unambiguous, predictable and easily implemented ideas, boilerplates that take discretion and good sense out of the equation, and make matters uniform.  Positions are therefore defined by the college degree positions require, not the competencies.   Corporate society has bought into this Rites of Passage, and this is one of its major sins.

 

This American cultural travesty is not new.  Emerson's writings indicate that he dealt with a similar cast and class system in his day.  Opportunity and upward mobility has been promoted overtly, but covertly everyone is equal but some are more equal than others. 

 

My wonder is if Americans have failed to leave their ancient European roots.  Clearly, from an education standpoint, our institutions mirror those of Europe while professing to be unique.  The consequences, to my mind, when it comes to creating competence and purposeful education, "we are broken and in heaps," as Emerson might say, disunited from ourselves seeking authentication from afar.

 

We pride our individualism but are nostalgic for the aristocratic order of Europe that no longer exists.  Could a degree, or a collection of degrees suffice as surrogate to knighthood?  This obsession with alphabetic letters after our names, badges that have little relevance to what we do or can do, has intensified rather than faded over the decades.  Therefore, you cannot fault this first line supervisor profiled here for protecting her turf and keeping her subordinate in place.  She is doing only what she knows.  Our programmers have a vested interest in things as they are, and little interest in solving this conundrum as Emerson, Hayes, Illich and Sowell know only too well.