Hollow Elitism

I have witnessed, across the span of my lifetime (I’m a tail-end baby boomer/Generation Jones), a broad range of cultural shifts, including in education. The percentage of Americans with a college education has grown from 8% in 1960 to nearly 40% today, and the ratio of college-educated men vs women has flipped from 60% male to 60% female. The first trend has produced a shortage of people in the trades, and the second trend has, among other things, had major ramifications for dating, marriage, and procreation.

Since some cultural tropes are persistent. One in particular particular, one I observed across the decades, is the preference that women have to date and marry “up,” even when they are high-earning, highly educated high achievers. I’ve heard, for decades, degreed women lamenting that there aren’t enough men out there while they dismiss perfectly good men who work trades or fail other “up” litmus tests.

Meanwhile, many men who are credentialed and thus worthy of those women’s interest underperform their blue collar counterparts, income-wise. The long-standing statistic that a college degree generates greater lifetime earning reverses if you remove STEM and other professional degrees from the mix. Go to school for some liberal arts or “studies” major, and you are on a path to a cubicle drone job that your degree offers no benefit for. The peril lies in judging the checklist rather than the person.

Yet that is exactly what our Best-and-Brightest do and advocate. I recall when Hillary Clinton was being touted and lauded prior to her failed Presidential run as being one of the most successful women ever. However, her success was more a curriculum vitae than a record of accomplishments. Does anyone remember HillaryCare, for example? Can we point to foreign policy successes when she was Secretary of State? What successes did she have?

I get it. A list of credentials is a quick and convenient way to get a first impression of someone. However, credentials don’t tell the full tale, nor do they guarantee competence or success. Indeed, there are professional students who rack up a long list of degrees, but who never stand out in the real world.

The pervasiveness of progressivism in our academic world reinforces the notion of credentialism on the Left, and that is amplified by the fact that two-thirds of blue collar workers lean conservative.

This is why we get arrogant leftist jackasses like Jimmy Kimmel dissing the new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

Before he was elected to the Senate, Markwayne Mullin was a plumber. That’s right. We have a plumber protecting us from terrorism now.

Mullin served as a Congressman for a decade before being elected to the Senate in 2022. He did two years of college before leaving it to run the family’s plumbing company, which he grew from six employees to the largest in Oklahoma. I haven’t dipped too deep into his history, because I don’t need to for the purposes of this piece. The point is that he is being looked down upon by Kimmel, and we may presume by many who think as Kimmel does, because he hasn’t checked the credentials list that our Best-and-Brightest treat as a better indicator of future success than actual achievement.

Credentialism also indicates, to its adherents, ideological conformity. If you come out of the correct schools with the correct degrees, you can be trusted to have the correct ideas and see the world through the correct filters.

This would be a problem even if the credentials were reliable. There is a dirty and under-reported secret in academia. On top of a long-running replication problem that many believe has grown to crisis levels, we are learning more and more of outright fraud. Of cooked data and crooked analyses that appear to be about either self-advancement or narrative confirmation than about pursuit of truth and supportable insights. Or both. On top of that, activists such as James Lindsay have successfully run totally fabricated papers through journals’ peer review processes with great success, just to expose how broken peer review is. Especially in, but no limited to, the soft sciences.

This further undermines the utility of credentials as a proxy for qualification and an indicator of future success. Unfortunately, we have become addicted to, and even obsessed with, credentialism, and that extends well past academia. Occupational licensing has grown to epidemic levels, with people being required to get government permission to perform more and more jobs. Do we really need the government to bless people to cut or braid hair, arrange flowers, or do interior design work? And in many cases where one might say “yeah, it might be a good idea for someone to be trained,” the requirements imposed far exceed what makes sense for the job. In a growing number of instances, occupational licensing is about gatekeeping and restricting supply rather than protecting the public. We even see this in medicine, where the AMA and the government work to restrict the number of doctors, rather than simply setting a reasonable standard of expertise and letting the market sort the rest out. The problem is so bad that Obama, late in his Presidency, initiated efforts to curtail occupational licensing excesses.

Between those excesses, an obsession with academic pedigree, and the collapse of intellectual integrity in academia, we are justified in being skeptical about credentials and credentialism. Real-world performance is a far better predictor of future success, even if that performance lies outside the silos and echo chambers the Best-and-Brightest limit themselves to.

Credentialism is how the elites justify their sense of superiority over the unwashed and less-educated masses, but when credentialism rings hollow, that sense is also devoid of substance.

As for Kimmel’s put-down of Mullins?

Shame on him.