A Diploma Moves You Up a Class. That Myth May Be Ending | QDaily's Annual Book Recommendations ⑥

In the great wave of higher-education expansion, the devaluation of the diploma is nothing new to us.

A year has gone by. China and the world, society and the state, the economy and our own lives have all been driven by large questions. In our bewilderment, the voices of intellectuals have vanished, or been drowned in the noise, which only deepens the confusion and the sense of being lost. Or perhaps a turning point is about to appear. In any era, wise thinking is scarce, and people with insight are what allow us to see the road ahead.

That is why, in our "2018 Annual Book Recommendations", we want to introduce, as widely as we can, books we think are worth reading.

As in past years, our editors and reporters have read every book that came within our view, and we recommend them to readers in good faith.

We have also called on guest contributors, who are always ahead of the trend and see deeper. Our thanks to them all.

This is the second piece in our nonfiction recommendation series, on the part education plays in social equality and mobility. The author, Chen Xinxiang, is a professor at the School of Ethnology and Sociology at Minzu University of China, and worked before that at the National Strategic Planning and Analysis Research Center at Mississippi State University, among other posts. His books include 《让教育多一点理想》("Give Education a Little More Idealism"), 《走出乡土》("Leaving the Native Soil") and 《明尼苏达札记》("Minnesota Notes"). His translations include 《后工业社会中的阶级》("Class in Post-Industrial Society") and Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion.

I

One of the great myths about education is that it makes society more equal. What the American sociologist Randall Collins shows in The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification is the opposite: education has not made society more equal, and class has barely shifted because of it. The strongest influence on how much education a person gets is how much education the parents had — in other words, the class the person was born into.

In Unequal Childhoods, the American sociologist Annette Lareau followed children from different racial and class backgrounds and found that very few of them ever climbed out of the class they started in. That differs from China after reform and opening, where plenty of people did use education to leap a class. Even with all the talk now of "class rigidification," a bright, hardworking Chinese child still has a real shot at "changing fate through education." The American case may come down to how long the society has been settled: the walls between classes have set hard.

So, as Collins told The Paper: "On the whole, the correlation between parents' social class and their children's education has not changed since the 1930s. The share of children going through high school, college and vocational training has grown enormously over the years, but the way society is stratified has not changed. The belief that universal education would make society more equal has been proven wrong."

The Chinese edition of The Credential Society has stirred the argument once again over what education does for equality and mobility. I first came across the book more than a decade ago, as a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, and I was drawn in by the way it stripped the magic off education. I even wrote an essay called "The Credential Society: Higher-Education Expansion, Diploma Devaluation, and More." The English edition first came out in 1979, when China's college entrance exam had just been restored and reform and opening had barely begun — and yet the United States was already a "credential society," where diplomas, like money, had started to inflate.

Forty years on, the myth the book exposed has not gone away. If anything it has spread and grown worse around the world. A high school diploma is now close to useless in the job market; it counts only as a ticket to the next school. Where a college degree once made you a manager, you now need an MBA. Diplomas are everywhere and worth less: the same certificate buys a smaller return than it used to.

Over these 40 years we have gradually grown used to the diploma losing value. In the early 1990s, when I was at a secondary normal school, even a technical-secondary-school graduate held an enviable "iron rice bowl." By the mid-1990s, when I was in college, getting into a master's program was a great honor, and no one worried about work afterward. Back then a doctorate made you a prize, with several jobs to choose from. Then, through the 1990s and 2000s, riding the current of the times, Chinese higher education expanded fast. Applicants for master's programs, for instance, grew from 242,000 in 1997 to 1.282 million in 2007, then to 2.01 million in 2017 (the first year part-time graduate students were folded into the unified exam) and 2.38 million in 2018. Admissions, including students exempted from the exam, grew from 64,000 in 1997 to 361,000 in 2007, then to 722,000 in 2017. The latest figures show applicants for master's programs hitting a record 2.9 million in 2019, with 720,000 expected to be admitted. The times change by the minute, diplomas have lost value fast, and today's college graduates do worse in the job market than technical-secondary-school graduates once did.

As Collins put it:

Now that degrees have inflated, their main value is to be put back into the education market in exchange for a higher degree. In theory the process never ends. We could well end up like China under the Ming and Qing, when scholars kept sitting the imperial examinations into their thirties and forties — except that today this may reach the great majority of people, not just a small elite. Different countries have inflated their education at different speeds, but since the second half of the 20th century they have all, without exception, taken this same road.

In the United States, the question of whether college is still worth it has come up again and again in recent years. Tuition climbs every year, work is harder to find after graduation, and pay is lower. After the property bubble, people say, comes the higher-education bubble. That, too, is a reckoning education inflation has forced on people walking this road.

II

One ideal purpose of education is to train a knowledge elite to run the country, so that a person's place in society is set not by birth but by knowledge acquired later, through school. In 1958 the British sociologist Michael Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy: 1870-2033, written as a "manuscript" supposedly composed in 2033. The book predicted that in the early 21st century Britain, an aristocratic society, would become one ruled by a knowledge elite. In an aristocratic society, position is inherited or granted; in the society the book describes, stratification would rest instead on the acquisition of education and knowledge. Sociologists call the first the "ascription principle" — the class standing of the family you are born into — and the second the "achievement principle," or "principle of self-attainment": you do well in school, get into college, and land a good job on your own ability. The shift gave modern society's meritocratic school system its legitimacy. Britain would no longer keep a ruling class that lacked the technical competence it needed; the "achievement principle" would decide where people stood. The rule of the knowledge elite is "IQ plus effort": anyone with an IQ above 125 could reach the knowledge elite through education, whatever their origins. This way of filtering elites by "IQ plus effort" met challenge and resistance from populists, and after half a century the meritocratic order was declared finished. The story also shows us that education never delivered social equality; it was a way of redrawing social class.

By the 1970s the American sociologist Daniel Bell had published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Bell tells us that the founding logic of post-industrial society is likewise the logic of a knowledge elite. Unlike agricultural and industrial societies, post-industrial society puts theoretical knowledge at its center, which makes acquiring knowledge and skill through education the precondition for a high position, and makes the professional class the elite. In such a society, differences in standing and income rest on whether you have technical competence and higher education. That society is, at bottom, a "credential society." To invest in education is to invest in your own "human capital." Bell cited estimates from Gary Becker's research:

A four-year college education "investment" yields a 13 percent annual return over a male graduate's working life. Graduating from a name-brand school carries a further advantage over graduating from a "public," that is, state, school. So the university, which once merely reflected social standing, has become the arbiter that divides classes: it has acquired a near-monopoly on deciding future social stratification.

A college education is prized, then, because "post-industrial society brings people a distinct fear: failing to get onto education's escalator means being shut out of society's privileged place." And "in this society, a college degree, a professional examination certificate, a license are conditions for senior employment." In such a society, education becomes a necessary charm. Bell quoted Lester Thurow's essay "Education and Social Policy," which describes brilliantly what education actually does in a credential society. Thurow wrote:

People find that as the educated workforce grows, they must raise their own level of education simply to protect the income they already have. If they don't, someone else will, and they will find their present position no longer belongs to them. Education becomes a worthwhile investment not because it raises their income while others fail to raise their education, but because it protects that income: if everyone else raises their education and you don't invest, you cannot hold on to what you have. In effect, education becomes the defensive expenditure needed to protect one's "market share." The larger and faster-growing the educated workforce, the more indispensable this defensive expenditure becomes.

Education in the credential society, in other words, has become an "arms race." In Bell's ideal-typical post-industrial society, "equality of opportunity denies the division of status by birth, nepotism, patronage or any other such criterion; it recognizes only fair competition that treats talent and ambition alike. In Parsons's words, equality of opportunity holds universalism above particularism, and stresses achievement above ascription." Modern society's structure is built on that principle. "Modernity means uprooting that hierarchical order, starting from the principles of openness, change and social mobility. … In principle, these new positions are open to anyone with talent." And so "post-industrial society adds a new criterion to the basis and the channels of power: technical competence becomes a condition for holding power, and higher education becomes the means of acquiring technical competence."

III

Young's knowledge-elite society and Bell's were both to be reached through education, and both were "credential societies." Next to Bell, Collins is far more critical of the credential society and its "rule by the knowledge elite." In 1979 he published The Credential Society, a study of the relationship between education and stratification. Collins found that, contrary to what the meritocrats claimed, classes are not in fact divided by differences in the knowledge and skill education confers. Education can genuinely raise professional knowledge and skill in particular specialized fields, but the whole system of high credentials for high pay remains, in large part, a myth. In practice a great many jobs do not require degrees that high, and a great deal of knowledge and skill is picked up on the job. As we say now, after four years of college you still have to learn the knowledge you use at work from scratch. So what is the real reason for staying in school for a higher level of education? Mainly, to absorb upper-class culture. People say there is simply something different about those who went to college and those who didn't, and that difference is the college culture they steeped in for those years.

The cultural line, in fact, is already drawn in childhood, by a family's economic and social standing. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu showed in The State Nobility how economic capital and cultural capital work together to reproduce both the ruling class and the people at the bottom. Institutions like Bourdieu's own alma mater, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris — an "academy for intellectual elites" — are the seedbed of France's senior intellectuals. In admissions, these schools want strong cultural cultivation and an academic bearing, which is exactly what children of bourgeois and aristocratic families have. Through the education system and the credentialing regime, a rigid social hierarchy is disguised: an arbitrary historical order rooted in economic and political power is converted into the polished manners of the cultural elite. That hierarchy, serving as the measure of a member of society's worth, hands some people social dignity and drops others to the bottom. In France the cultural capitalists come out of the École Normale Supérieure, while the leaders of the state and of industry come out of the elite business schools and the École Polytechnique. The students these schools admit come overwhelmingly from the rare families that hold both inherited wealth and credentials.

The idea Bourdieu describes — that in France birth decides a life's prospects — had appeared in China long before, in Fei Xiaotong's 1943 essay 《遗传和遗产》 ("Heredity and Inheritance"). Fei wrote: "If you care to analyze the histories of those who succeed and those who fail, you will find that, with few exceptions, most owe their success to the inheritance their fathers left them. In an orderly society especially, if your father has not left you enough to live on for twenty years without working, don't even dream of getting into school. Without school, however hard you work on your own, you will never obtain a graduation qualification. Many positions are not open to people who lack it. On the surface, selecting talent by learning looks like the most eugenic of principles — but because the precondition for enrollment is economic, what decides the outcome in the end is still inheritance." This is what people now call "relying on your father."

Fei's "graduation qualification" is what we call "a diploma." In modern society, the system of professional experts, marked by diplomas and certificates, has become a major institution. Why do we trust experts? Because they hold specialized knowledge and skill. And why do we believe that? Because they went through specialized professional training and came out with diplomas and licenses. It is precisely those diplomas and licenses that separate the expert from the layman. Collins argues that a credential is simply the protective threshold that sets up a privileged class. Traditionally, we say, a doctor taught his son and the son carried on the practice. Today, can a person without a diploma or a license work as a doctor? Even if he is genuinely able, without that approval he may not. A diploma or a certificate is a label that tells other people: I have been specially trained in this function and I am qualified. Whatever your real ability, other people cannot see it directly, so they have no choice but to use diplomas and certificates to get information about it. Collins therefore holds that credentials are a shield protecting the interests of interest groups — doctors, lawyers, accountants and the like — and of the middle class; education merely supplies the reason that makes stratification legitimate, hiding how unreasonable that stratification is at bottom. It is a sophisticated con. What Collins fails to see is this: if we don't sort people by credential, what standard would society use instead? China once abolished the college entrance exam and assigned positions by family background, which was less effective and less fair than a credential society. More than 40 years have passed since Collins's book came out, and the power of the credential society has only grown. This is the fate of our "credential society." Only against that background can we make sense of our many problems with education.

IV

Go back to the myth that education can make society more equal, and you find that education is itself manufacturing — or reproducing — inequality. Just as Bourdieu showed elite schools like the École Normale Supérieure reproducing the ruling elite, other societies use the split between elite and non-elite universities inside their education systems to sort people who all hold higher degrees into different classes. Those distinctions between universities go to work when it is time to find a job. The sociologist Lauren Rivera, who did her undergraduate degree at Yale and her doctorate at Harvard, published Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs in 2015. Rivera studied the standards top firms in three American fields — investment banking, law and management consulting — use when they hire. The first requirement, she found, was the school of the undergraduate degree: Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, the so-called super-elite universities. Without a strong personal referral, graduates of other schools, even other elite universities, could not get into the interview pool at all; and even graduates of these super-elite schools' graduate programs had a hard time if their undergraduate degree came from elsewhere. Employers explained that they trust these schools' undergraduate selection, which spares them the work of screening a flood of applicants. They have no time to read piles of resumes, so they must simplify, and that is a major force driving up competition for undergraduate places at these schools. When Chinese students fill out their college application preferences, competition is fiercest for the 985, 211 and "Double First-Class" institutions, and it is graduates of those same universities that employers prefer. The logic is exactly the same.

Beyond the name-brand requirement, Rivera found, the thing that mattered most was a student's extracurricular activities — activities that prove personal passion, commitment and being "well-rounded," such as crew, rather than activities inside one's own field pursued to dress up a resume, such as investment or law clubs. The first come out of personal interest, the second out of professional interest. The extracurricular activities that get valued reflect the high-status, resource-hungry pastimes of upper-middle-class white culture. Recruiters typically spend between 10 seconds and 4 minutes on a resume, going straight to what they take to be the most important "signals" of an applicant's quality. They weighed a student's extracurricular activities above the traditional measures: school grades, standardized test scores, the prestige of previous employers, work experience. Those activities were read as evidence of a student's social skills and moral character, since doing them well takes a large investment of time and money and often demands ambition, courage and persistence, and the ability to work with others. One recruiter said they were hiring not just colleagues to work with but friends to hang out with. Grades on their own say little: "grades can't tell us whether you also have friends," as one person put it, and "sure, your grades are great. But if all you have is good grades, you have nothing else." Employers even compared their firms to fraternities for smart people. Extracurricular activities also reveal an applicant's time management: everyone has the same amount of time, and being able to do these things on top of academic pressure is exactly the balancing skill the work demands.

In short, even a student who gets into a super-elite American university must go on competing on extracurricular activities and the like to reach an elite job at an elite firm. Tour the world with a well-known band, or win a national championship or an Olympic medal in some discipline, and employers will of course be impressed. But once these students are working to build a resume that wins in the job hunt — excelling at extracurricular activities on top of every course — they have little of the freedom William Deresiewicz describes in Excellent Sheep, and no time to think about what they actually want or what a life means. Knowledge and skill without any real thought about the meaning of one's own life, and without concern for the public, is what "excellent sheep" means. Wall Street's elite are probably the clearest representatives of this flock. And in the credential society these "excellent sheep" are held up by a solid family position too. In the credential society you get nowhere without a diploma — but even with one from an elite university, becoming an elite at work still depends on coming from a good class.

V

Collins is plainly severe about credential inflation. In his interview with The Paper he said that if he were to revise The Credential Society, he would, at the level of theory, redefine "credential inflation":

I would no longer treat it as the same thing as monetary inflation. As economists generally accept, increasing the money in circulation reduces money's purchasing power. But the difference between currency and credentials is that printing paper money costs very little … whereas an educational credential is more than a piece of paper: its cost also includes investment in school buildings, salaries for teachers and administrators, and so on. So while monetary inflation is in theory unlimited, credential inflation requires students to spend more time in school, which makes "printing" more credentials extremely expensive. … In a sense, if the entire population of the world were to spend 20 years or more in school to obtain ever-higher degrees, the cost of education would come close to the size of the whole economy today.

Is this obsession with credentials easing at all? Here is how Collins answered The Paper: "In recent years universities have been shrinking for lack of money, because mass-producing credentials has sent costs soaring. They have begun encouraging their science and engineering departments to connect directly with entrepreneurs, or letting their own science and engineering researchers become entrepreneurs. That means they are no longer focused on obtaining degrees but on how to get into business and technology circles." "The most famous innovators never set out on an academic road aimed at earning credentials." "Outside education, other features of American society are what produce people like Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison. That is exactly how the dynamics of the American economy work." Which is to say: in a credential society, education needs other social features to make up for it if social and economic development is to keep its momentum. In China's own wave of higher-education expansion, the devaluation of the diploma is nothing new to us. But as Collins sees it: "Because China's population is so large, it has not yet produced the extreme credential inflation seen in the United States, though it may in the future. Or China may take a road different from America's."

Cover image: a still from the film Flying Colors (垫底辣妹), via Douban.