[1][2] A good example of credential inflation is the decline in the value of the US high school diploma since the beginning of the 20th century, when it was held by less than 10 percent of the population.
At the time, high school diplomas attested to middle-class respectability and for many years even provided access to managerial level jobs.
[7] Credentialism is a reliance on formal qualifications or certifications to determine whether someone is permitted to undertake a task, speak as an "expert"[8] or work in a certain field.
[10] This process tends to involve establishing acceptable qualifications, a professional body or association to oversee the conduct of members of the profession and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs.
[21] This, along with the previously mentioned issue of measuring cognitive skill, has resulted in employers requiring credentials, such as college degrees.
[23] The Gilded Age was a period of time marked by a rise in big businesses and globalization, particularly within the construction and oil industries.
[24] Attempting to increase the prestige of one's occupation became standard among working class individuals trying to recover from the financial hardships of this time.
[25] Referring to this phenomenon, historian Robert Huddleston Wiebe once commented: The concept of a middle class crumbled to a touch.
The so-called professions meant little as long as anyone with a bag of pills and a bottle of syrup could pass for a doctor, a few books and a corrupt judge made a man a lawyer, and an unemployed literate qualified as a teacher.
Nor did the growing number of clerks, salesman, and secretaries of the city share much more than a common sense of drift as they fell into jobs that attached them to nothing in particular, beyond a salary, a set of clean clothes, and a hope that they would somehow rise in the world.
[26]The establishment of legitimized professional certifications began after the turn of the twentieth century when the Carnegie Foundation published reports on medical and law education.
In his book The Visible Hand, Alfred Chandler of Harvard Business School explained that the increase in large corporations with multiple divisions killed off the hybrid owner/managers of simpler times and created a demand for salaried, "scientific" management.
Academic inflation leads employers to put more faith into certificates and diplomas awarded on the basis of other people's assessments.
[32] The term "academic inflation" was popularized by Ken Robinson in his TED Talk entitled "Schools Kill Creativity".
[43] A good example of credential inflation is the decline in the value of the US high school diploma since the beginning of the 20th century, when it was held by less than 10 percent of the population.
At the time, high school diplomas attested to middle-class respectability and for many years even provided access to managerial level jobs.
[3] One indicator of credential inflation is the relative decline in the wage differential between those with college degrees and those with only high school diplomas.
[47] That distribution has remained largely unchanged for thirty years, although the chance of being underemployed in a good job has gone down 28.0% for recent hirings, and 20.6% overall.
[70][71] China is a country exhibiting high wealth inequality and meager social mobility, raising the stakes to get into the few available managerial positions.
[72][73][74] The entrenched high-stakes testing culture coupled with inconsistent governance has led to unusually high levels of cheating among the fuerdai (China's second-generation rich).
“Tang ping” or “lying flat” refers to a peaceful Chinese protest movement calling attention to the desire not to be burned up in an economic race that so many can't seem to win.
Six hundred thousand lives are lost in China, each year, as a result of “guolaosi” (过劳死); traditional Chinese: 過勞死) or "death by overwork.