Credentials Shmredentials

I wanna stop credentialism (the valuing of credentials over other qualifying characteristics).

Not because the things that we call credentials are actually bad, but because why we get them and how we look at them is...not the best.

I first came across the term in Sociology 111. It interested me because I found myself in the camp of those who live their lives striving to satisfy its precepts (or, as I put it in another post, being "slave to this platypus").

As I continued to think about the idea of credentialism, I realized that it bases itself in certain outward expectations (as Jerrick commented, a definition of "success") that are the same for everyone (as Spencer commented). AKA, someone somewhere decided--when it was actually a worthy decision--to only hire people who had gone to high school. Later, they decided to only hire people who had gone to college. Then the colleges jumped in and decided only to accept people with a certain ACT score or higher. You see where I'm going? The world of business and education became more about lists of credentials than about the people who had those credentials.

The thing is, though, that credentialism didn't actually start there. There are instances splattered all over history's pages that helped found his idea. (How can credentialism be a good thing if we're repeating the wrongs of the past?)

I found some examples that model the same beliefs that our "modern credentialism" engenders in society today:

• Indulgences (caring more about paper--diplomas and resumes--than a person's real character)
• Mercantilism (amassing credentials like gold in order to prove one's superiority)
• The American Dream (specifically the time Levittown, when everyone needed the same thing to be considered a success)

All these things might seem silly or less-than-grave, but if you think about it (I have), we're trusting credentials over genuineness.

Again, don't get me wrong--credentials can be genuine. People can gain credentials genuinely. I know that. But we shouldn't, I realized, let credentials communicate for 
us--or put the communication of credentials over everything else (which some people do). The outward shows don't necessarily say much about a person's character or potential.

UPDATE!
Credentials aren't all bad, and really, it would be mostly impossible to get rid of credentialism completely if we want to stay efficient as a society in business and education. Something we could do, however, is knock out the attention we pay to some meaningless credentials from the bottom up. I can understand why employers like to hire people who have diplomas and why schools look at your leadership experience on your application. Thinks like scores on standardized tests and hyper-attention to club participation, though, aren't as important in the grand scheme of things. Mostly what I propose is getting to know people for who and what they are before we decide on their worthiness for a position or title, instead of just looking at their credentials. The businesses and schools need to decide individually how they will do that (and again, it might take a little more time and a little more money), but I do believe it requires a change in mindset and a change in how we do applications, interviews, and other things in the process of deciding and judging.