Ibinola, Daniel: Credentialing

   

                  The unending battle between bureaucracy and meritocracy is still on today. This battle has not only moved into the political sector it has also eaten deep into the educational system. It has gotten to a point in society where an individual must have a college degree in order to make a substantially high income. Other ways this battle has affected the educational sector include the widening gap between the rich and the poor and the steady decline in morals and credibility.

                  College is beneficial in providing better career options, monetary benefits, standard of living, better social networking, and insurance against unemployment. But these benefits have been narrowing among the children of the rich and the upper-middle-class. Their grades may not meet the requirements of the top class schools of their choice but they are still likely to be admitted. For people who are further down the income ladder it is more difficult for them to be admitted into these so called prestigious schools, resulting in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

                  Being credentialed should not interfere with credibility. Merit should be the foundation of every society. If the admission of students is not based on merit and jobs opportunities are only given to “elites” who graduated from prestigious schools such as Harvard and Yale, there is no way to avoid corruption. No matter how prosperous a society seems when there is corruption it is a weak or failing one.

                  Like every student, I conform to the idea that I must be credentialed because of the societal state I find myself in today. The article Death by degrees noted that “no administration has embodied credentialism as thoroughly as the current one. Of Obama’s twenty-five cabinet appointments, twenty-two had a degree from Ivy League University, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Oxford, or Cambridge. Which leads us assume that public policy is so complicated that you need a stack of degrees to figure it out.” Nevertheless, in the absence of a college degree, I will definitely go into sprinting. I am a very good athlete and have the ability to learn any new sport there is. When I am no longer athletic because of age, I will consider coaching. That will be my insurance from being credentialed.