I've been thinking about credentials.
a long one, thanks!
Thanks for reading this week! I’m skipping the astrological blurb up top because I’m up against the wire and I need to start walking to my friend’s place for Survivor!
Meandering on learning and authority and education and credentials.
I have that familiar recurring dream where I’ve forgotten I’m enrolled in a math class and it’s suddenly many weeks into the semester. The details vary, sometimes it’s a high school course, sometimes it’s college. I’ve forgotten where the classroom is having never been in the first place and I’m at risk of failing the course entirely unless I can quickly make up my missed homework assignments and pass a test. Inevitably I do not accomplish these things in my dream and often also end up naked and wandering the halls of a dreamscape that loosely resembles Ingram Tom Moore High School.
On the surface this reflects a general ineptness that I feel regarding math. When I started grad school I had to take the remedial math course for students who hadn’t taken calculus and who either didn’t manage to test out or who didn’t manage to effectively cheat and therefore test out. It was fine, I tended to get acceptable grades although I also used Wolfram Alpha liberally. I didn’t use ChatGPT, but only because it wasn’t quite accessible in that way when I was in the course, I probably would have otherwise. Really what this recurring dream highlights for me, more than a lack of ease with math, is that I still position myself as a powerless little guy when it comes to the classroom. I am still, approaching thirty, feeling like the student and not the teacher.
Experts have also always fascinated me, whether or not they thought they were experts themselves. It’s a big part of why I fall so hard and fast for a certain kind of arguably overwrought writer—the Maggie Nelsons and Annie Dillards and Joan Didions of the world. I have a tendency to be brought in first by their ability to perform (live or on the page) and then by their argumentation and evidence. This is complicated, because sometimes I fall hard for a writer or an essay before I realize the content isn’t really there. Confidence in style goes a very long way, a belief that I’ve tried to unlearn, but that I might have to just accept as truth.
So what gives those writers and others like them the right to situate themselves as the teacher? It’s not experience, exactly, since the broad strokes of their certain tone tend to be present even early in their career1. Seemingly some amount of this comes from their education, official and whatever they pick up just by living. Most of these confident people are readers, or read enough to “engage with the canon” whatever that means. What about degrees? Nelson cut her teeth in academia and often still situates herself in that world even if her bills are surely paid by her public scholarship far more than anything else. Did she need that graduate study to write The Argonauts? Probably not, though her training is clearly there throughout in her use of reference and integrated citations.
This kind of literature reviewing and contextual situating goes a long way toward helping mark a work as “valid”, and it is possible to make the effort and fail at this. Try reading Post-Colonial Astrology by Alice Sparkly Kat and you’ll see what happens when citation and bibliography are used messily. Is that because they didn’t get a PhD? Probably not, though they’d almost definitely have gotten more practice leveraging the kinds of academic and domain-specific sources they tried to. Does this shoddy research impact their position as an expert? Not really, judging by the 83k followers the have on Instagram and the wave of popularity their book enjoyed. Seems that it didn’t really matter whether they have mastery about what they spoke on, beyond a solid grasp of basic astrological theory.
I don’t mean to pick on Alice Sparkly Kat or their book. It’s impressive to build an audience like theirs without the support of an institution and it’s impressive to build enough faculty with writing to pull together a text like Post-Colonial Astrology and make the case to a mainstream publisher that it’s a good investment. Their command of their community is absolutely at the root of that book’s success. Clearly I have an opinion about whether that command is built on solid ground (I think, outside of that core astro knowledge, it’s not), but I don’t mean for that obvious opinion of mine to distract from what I think is the more interesting question: what do you get to teach and to whom and when?
In higher education we look to higher education as the arbiter of that question. When a university grants you an advanced credential, you’re positioned as “more informed” on that discipline than those with lower credentials and can therefore teach. I don’t mean this theoretically, it’s standard for those hiring for instructor positions to require their candidates to hold a degree that’s a few steps ahead of those they’re teaching. We all know that holding that degree means next to nothing about whether or not someone is a good teacher, but it’s still the basic requirement. We’re primed to believe that the higher a degree is the smarter the individual.
At some point early after graduating with my BA, when I was just a few months into working at the corporate training company where I first landed, I decided I needed to learn more about adult education. I enrolled in some LinkedIn Learning certificate courses that promised to make me into a qualified Instructional Designer.
In these courses, I learned things like: learning objectives are important, always make the business case, and try to build engaging experiences into your learning. I don’t think I learned any hard skills and I didn’t encounter any challenging philosophical questions either. My main takeaway was that if I could just repeat the kinds of things that the instructors said, then I could fit in with my new colleagues and with our clients very well. It turns out it’s not hard to sell the idea that adult learning is complicated, important, undervalued, and needs to be led by HR workers on the front lines, especially when the people you’re selling to are HR workers on the front lines.
In corporate learning again, the question of authority is relevant. I’ve circled back to this idea of getting a graduate degree over and over because I want to teach. I love teaching, I love learning, I love lessons, I love a syllabus, I love plotting out a series of questions and supporting conversation, nudging it this way and that to see what other people uncover. I like it in the ephemeral, theoretical sense and I like seeing people turn those lessons into skills that enable them to do new things.
This was at the core of any benefits I got working at that corporate training company—I got to work with those frontline HR workers and help them figure out how to be good facilitators for their learners. It all worked its way out to support their company’s bottom line, aka I’m sure this training supported firings and eco-damaging policies and possibly war (I never worked with Lockheed Martin, for example, but our company definitely worked with ExxonMobil and we all worked with McKinsey Consulting. My apologies to the world.).
What I found interesting working in that odd, soft HR-coded sub-section of the corporate world was that it was flooded with people who had earned PhDs in “organizational leadership” or “learning management” or, occasionally, “industrial and organizational psychology”. Some had earned them at expensive and well known places like Columbia Teachers College, while many more earned them at (still expensive) online universities like Walden or Antioch. It seemed to matter less where they got that degree and more that they had it, had any advanced degree.
As a vendor in that world, my company was trying to “disrupt education” because our CEO believed we could and should. This meant that in addition to engaging with the ecosystem that loved these PhDs, we were also trying to sell them on the idea that our non-accredited, non-traditional programs were excellent alternatives for the employees at their company. We pointed to all the research that showed experiential learning, real-world lessons, and cohort-based programs were wildly effective at making better leaders. Most of this research came from our own marketing materials and from other vendors, but that was neither here nor there. As long as we could “make the business case” and simultaneously flatter our client’s sense of expertise (they were often PhDs, after all), we were pretty successful. Before I left the company, we were selling several non-traditional, non-accredited programs that could cost the buyer anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 dollars. And we got great feedback!
Right before I and our entire marketing department were laid off (not for business reasons, it was personal 🙂), I was responsible for administering credentials to graduates of our programs. This amounted to generating a PNG with a unique code (automated to pull from a simple Google Sheet) that “guaranteed” the graduate had completed “a rigorous program encompassing topics in people management, business acumen, and executive strategy”. Graduates were encouraged to put these PNGs on their LinkedIn profiles and announce their successes to the world. Very good advertising for a corporate training company, middling benefits for graduates.
So, is this kind of non-traditional training worth it for the students?2 It really depends on what you’re looking for. Do you need to learn how to work with people better? Honestly, go to therapy or work with a coach. Trying to learn how to read a profit and loss sheet? Poke around HBS’s website, Venmo me 50 dollars, and we can get through it in 1-3 hours, depending on how afraid you are of division. Want to know how to be a leader? Don’t we all! My recommendation is to just read the Wikipedia page about the Shackleton expedition and you’ll be able to make conversation with any MBA graduate, much more than you’d otherwise wish to.
The real reason, obviously, that people get any kind of credential is to signal that they know these things, whether they do or not. It’s that signaling (we hope) that results in the higher pay, the new career, the added clout. We hope it means we’re an authority.
On a recent train ride I Googled: what qualifies autodidact.
Why? I guess I see this as a way of making up for the prestige I’m giving up by not getting an advanced degree. In the schema that makes up my understanding of “intellectual authority” I give primacy to advanced degrees from interesting programs, but there must be some kind of an exception for those who managed to achieve significant feats of academic prowess without any of the support of organized instruction. I know this is ridiculous, to be clear. What we call “truth” is hotly up for debate, more so than ever before, so why would one path to knowing something be any better than another? More and more people are falling into that same trap that I see myself in, that tendency to fall for the confident people and the ones who already have a following. When social validation holds as much or more weight than institutional validation, who suffers?
I spent the rest of that ride on that train wondering whether or not I could still qualify as an autodidact if I had a bachelor’s degree. Does it still count if I far outpace what I could have learned in undergrad? Based on the list of autodidacts collected on Wikipedia, the answer is no. Real autodidacts don’t get a BA in a niche liberal arts honors program.
Something embarrassing I do: collect syllabi for classes that I am not taking. I have done this at least since the end of my time in college, reflexively hoarding away the syllabi for classes that I wanted to register for but that I couldn’t, for some administrative reason or another. I loved the university book store for the same reason. I always gave a little time when I’d finished shopping the list for my own classes to wander around and see what other classes had assigned. More than once I grabbed copies reserved for those other classes, probably screwing over other students as I savored my microdose of these other courses.
More recently I’ve felt the urge to seek out more syllabi whenever it feels like the world is getting out of control, when things are happening in ways that I really don’t understand or, more accurately, in ways that feel like I could understand if only I had a little more context. As you’d expect, this happens a lot these days. I’ve got syllabi on climate collapse, cooperative business practices, higher education funding schemes, socialism in practice, voter suppression in America, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Having these PDFs in my Google Drive is a safety blanket. It feeds my delusion I’ll be okay if only I do the reading.
My undergraduate degree was a generalist one, built to give students lots of personal attention and lots of time working with niche interdisciplinary topics. I remember skipping around my grandmother’s home reading the bulletin I’d received in the mail that went over the available World Literature and Freshman Signature courses. These courses used phrases I could barely crack open to describe kinds of literature like “displacement, reflection and formal experimentation”. They promised to expose me to critical theories and alternative points of views.
I’m getting saccharine in this reminiscing, but it’s worth remembering I was a kid who thought “humanism” was the better alternative to feminism and that communism was evil. I had never met a Jewish person before leaving for college. At my high school we didn’t have government teachers and the entirety of our path to college was more or less held up by two crazy ladies who directed our theater program and taught dual credit English classes. I was vibrating with excitement.
Getting to learn from people who had devoted themselves to a depth of knowledge and critical thought about such niche topics, becoming, mostly, real experts was huge for me. I’ll have to punt the bigger question of what this looks like in the university setting for later, it’s too big and this is already too long. But it leaves me itchy to think about the consequences of a credential-happy culture colliding with a culture that raises the most viral ideas to the top. Not exactly an original anxiety, but I never promised to be unique.
Punting that question for higher education broadly down the line, I’ll leave you with this: when I think about being 18 and the giddy excitement I had tearing through my course booklet, the worst thing I think someone could have forced me to think about would have been how my credentials would translate to cash earning potential. Not to say that I didn’t need to worry about that or to undermine the significant stress that college students now feel (and felt then) to recoup their college investment, but in the decision to pursue that degree, to walk down that path, I felt so, so excited. That, specifically, is what I would not trade for anything.
This ended up being one of those more winding, less focused posts. I’m going to be on this for a few weeks I think, looking at the university setting and my anxieties there soon!
I’m also still figuring out what the shift for this newsletter looks like as I’m not doing monthly horoscopes anymore. I’ll be getting back into Enneagram work in the coming months, so I’ll definitely spend some time on that and have some exciting plans for Sagittarius and Capricorn seasons. That’s all I’ll say about it for now, let me know if you have any thoughts on the above. It’s meandering, but I think there are some nuggets in there - let me know what you think!
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
Famously Joan Didion wrote On Self-Respect at the age of 26. Did she know about self-respect then? Enough to write the definitive essay on it?
The short and true answer is that if your employer is paying for it then it is worth it. Otherwise, probably not.