The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification

By Randall Collins

Book Overview

The Credential Society is a classic on the role of higher education in American society and an essential text for understanding the reproduction of inequality. Controversial at the time, Randall Collins's claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but rather created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient.

Collins shows how credential inflation stymies mass education's promises of upward mobility. An unacknowledged spiral of the rising production of credentials and job requirements was brought about by the expansion of high school and then undergraduate education, with consequences including grade inflation, rising educational costs, and misleading job promises dangled by for-profit schools. Collins examines medicine, law, and engineering to show the ways in which credentialing closed these high-status professions to new arrivals. In an era marked by the devaluation of high school diplomas, outcry about the value of expensive undergraduate degrees, and the proliferation of new professional degrees like the MBA, The Credential Society has more than stood the test of time. In a new preface, Collins discusses recent developments, debunks claims that credentialization is driven by technological change, and points to alternative pathways for the future of education.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231192355
• ISBN13: 9780231192354
• Release Date: May 2019
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Thought provoking but ultimately incomplete

This book challenges the taken-for-granted nature of requiring educational credentials to enter high paying professions such as medicine and law. The author, however, carries his arguments beyond what they will support by suggesting that class conflict, not increases in knowledge within various professions, is the sole explanation for an apparent educational credential arms race. It is well worth consideing his perspective as a challenge to the current higher education system, but don't take his story as the complete story.

Read if you want the truth about 20th century America.

A most revealing explanation of American life and the educational explosion, its creation and effects.