The Credential Society : : An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification / / Randall Collins.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Collins, Randall,
• MitwirkendeR: Cottom, Tressie McMillan,; Stevens, Mitchell L.,
• TeilnehmendeR: Cottom, Tressie McMillan.; Stevens, Mitchell L.
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Legacy Editions
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

The Credential Society by Randall Collins is a classic on higher education and its role in American society first published in 1979. Forty years later, it remains an essential text for understanding the reproduction of inequality. Its controversial claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface to the Legacy Edition -- Foreword -- Foreword: Educational Entrepreneurship in a Changing America -- 1. The Myth of Technocracy -- 2. Organizational Careers -- 3. The Political Economy of Culture -- 4. The United States in Historical Time -- 5. The Rise of the Credential System -- 6. The Politics of Professions -- 7. The Politics of a Sinecure Society -- References -- Index