Adams, George: Credentialing

Academic credentials are becoming more and more common.  As a larger number of people attend college and receive bachelor’s degrees then those degrees become less valuable.

Employers are always looking for applicants who stand out from the crowd.  In years gone by having a bachelor’s degree may have been sufficient to distinguish them but as more and more people earn bachelor’s degrees it becomes necessary to have a masters or doctorate to achieve that distinction.  Achieving a bachelor’s degree at the “correct” university can also help, meaning one that has serious international recognition that everybody, including employers, has heard of.  Employers would almost always take an applicant from Yale over somebody who graduated from their local college.

The article talks about the importance of having academic credentials when looking and applying for jobs.  It mentions the people President Obama brought into his cabinet when first elected.  It states “of Obama’s first thirty-five cabinet appointments, twenty-two had a degree from an Ivy-league university, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Oxford or Cambridge.”  Although being a cabinet member is a high calibre example it still shows how important it is to not only get a degree but to get one from a recognised university.

If students decide not to go to university after high school then they are really going to struggle to find a job that enables them to live comfortably with their family in a good-sized house.  The opportunities available to them would be greatly diminished in comparison to those who had been to university and earned just a bachelor’s degree.  Looking at the difficulty people with a bachelor’s degree are having finding jobs really emphasizes the difficulty that people with only a high school education will have.  They are pretty much limiting themselves to manual labour jobs and unskilled work when they make the decision to not go to university.

The situation is also the same in the UK as more and more students are going to university and earning a basic degree.  Students must study longer and earn master’s degrees in order to get the jobs they want.  Although a bachelor’s degree is becoming less valuable I believe this is also a positive thing as more and more people are going to university and earning these degrees.  This leads to a more educated population which can only be a good thing.