Diplomaism: How We Zone People

...This is the world caricatured by the Suburban Dream of neatly zoned homogeneity...

...When we leave the institution, like carcasses coming off a packing plant’s assembly line, an anonymous hand affixes an indelible stamp (“dropout,” “high school,” “college,” “advanced degree”) which thereafter determines what we can do and how we shall be rewarded...

...When enough people have diplomas, the diploma no longer serves to sort out the applicants...

...Similarly, the superintendent of schools who tells the public that “our teachers hold an average of 17.5 graduate credits, up 1.8 credits from last year,” can draw from that statistic a measure of smugness, if not significance...

...That’s not the way it used to be...

...But the diploma system, for no useful social purpose, reduces this variety of choices to a binary option: get on the single career track or be excluded...

...Diplomaism is inevitable, we are sometimes told, because in the postindustrial age America needs a “more educated work force”-more computer programmers, fewer hod carriers...

...Similarly, those who had three years of college earn only a little bit more than high school graduates and a lot less than college graduates...

...No one, therefore, welcomes a man at the next desk who lacks his own credentials...

...Power and income in those countries - India is the standard example-go to what we call, with varying degrees of disapproval, a “diploma elite...

...Evidence of the trend is plentiful...

...But the greed of those in the professions soon transformed licensing, with its diploma requirements, into a way of restricting the numbers in the profession...

...A 1965 study by Donald Hoyt showed that there is no correlation in any profession between grades and later achievement...

...This leaves us with that most unsatisfying of situations: a crime without a villain...

...State governments license the professions...

...By choosing the graduate, the personnel man gets a trouble-free standardized part and, equally important, he pledges his and his employer’s allegiance to the prevailing cultural values...

...a diploma which usually bears no relation to performance...

...Given an ample supply of graduates, the choice that will be made by Personnel-hardly a nest of dissenters-is obvious...

...the American Medical Association is just better at it than other people...

...The nation is now approaching a level of prosperity which, if equitably distributed, would allow us, perhaps for the first time in human history, to devote more effort to living than to surviving...

...Except in the older movies, the man doing the hiring is no longer the boss of the small enterprise, the keen judge of men who sees a million dollars in the lean and hungry youth standing before his desk...

...Ideas, like rumors, get distorted out of recognition if they are repeated often enough...

...With a myth of such power available, we do not need a conspiracy to explain diplomaism...

...The “self-made man” is an American hero...

...Whatever the merit of that claim, it has nothing to do with diploma requirements for employment...

...Yet the world we are moving towards will exclude everyone who refuses to submit to the tyranny of the diploma...

...Even in the professions, the road to today’s medical and bar associations is paved with yesterday’s good intentions...

...They dole out their few plums to those holding school credentials, whether or not they have proven their merit...

...In its lyrics she captures the importance of the diploma in assuring the uniformity of those boxes and their inhabitants: And the people in the houses All went to the university, Where they were put in boxes And they came out all the same...

...Stiff examination instead of a diploma requirement would not serve the purpose...

...When the difference is pointed out, they are likely to respond with a defense of schooling for its cultural value...

...Industry increasingly requires diplomas as a prerequisite for the first rung of the ladder...

...and the American people are getting poorer medical care than they did a generation ago...

...There are very few uncredentialed industries left,” Arthur Pearl of the University of Oregon commented recently, and he listed three holdouts that are still fair game for the degreeless: “politics, the movie industry, and professional writing...

...Schools today are not a humanizing or an educational force as much as a credentialing agency, sorting people out who do not fit into the regular channels of educational development,” writes S. M. Miller of New York University...

...In the minds of most, learning equals schoo1,and so a person with a diploma is more desirable than one without...

...Berg reports that the employer was “shocked’ by this news...

...The degreeless creative oddball who can perform better than his competitors is not allowed to compete...

...In that business, the medical profession has used the weapon of credentials to create an artificial shortage of doctors...

...her daughter may have to produce a B.A...

...In the series of articles of which this is the first, we will explore the trend to diplomaism in America...

...But local and state government controls most of the jobs in the school industry, and here government has been a powerful force for diplomaism...

...What good old U.S.A...

...We are well on our way to repealing the American dream of individual accomplishment and replacing it with a system in which the diploma is the measureof a man...

...The idea of licensing doctors and lawyers was to protect the public by imposing some sort of standards, and it may well be that there are fewer butchers and shysters around now than before licensing (although the ones we have now are a lot more expensive...

...We will describe a particularly horrible example of the social effects of diplomaism: the health business...

...Government has considerable influence over the job market, both as employer and as regulator...

...In a system run by diploma, all avenues to personal advancement are blocked except one: the school that gives the diploma...

...The pettiest bureaucrat uses the most arcane language to describe his non-functions...

...Though Berg’s findings indicate that it does not tell much about the person’s ability to produce, the diploma does give the personnel department another kind of information about the applicant...

...The desire to exclude exists in all of us...

...ASCAP...

...But the evidence indicates that what seems obvious is not in fact true...

...The Pentagon may be the greatest immediate threat to our security as well as our income, but what we like to think of as American values are also threatened by what Paul Goodman calls the “school-monks,” who are sorting us by diploma...

...The reformers ended the rule of the political machine...

...He was docile enough (or good, or patient, or stupid-choose your adjective) to stay out of trouble for 13 or 17 or 20 years in a series of institutions that demand a considerable amount of unthinking conformity...

...Most places Berg looked he did not find any connection between degrees and performance...

...he’ll be a good corporate or bureaucratic or academic boy...

...Employees also get nice status feelings from a diploma...

...Like the civil service, the personnel department must process hordes of applicants, and so it needs standardized routines...

...The size of the average place of employment is growing...

...It is interesting, also, that job performance in college (grades) does not predict job performance in the real world...

...he is likely to go on accepting society’s judgments on goodness...

...is that...

...Diploma requirements, then, are a way of sorting people without expending scarce time or precious brain power...

...Our life chances depend increasingly on a decision we made in first grade and did, or did not, sustain through the following 12 to 20 years: the decision to conform to the requirements of the institution...

...The brownie points to be earned by plucking out a genius impress him less than the backfire that is inevitable if his unorthodox choice fails...

...Copyright © 1962 by Schroder Music Co...

...This is another semantic fallacy...

...The controllers include both high school and college graduates...

...But, like an arms race, this process is ultimately self-defeating...

...In one chemical plant, executives told Berg that their best laboratory technicians were those with the most education, but Berg found the opposite was true: the best performance (by supervisors’ ratings) was turned in by the less-educated technicians...

...and, as we have seen, the evidence is that school does not perform this service efficiently...

...Take, for example, the industrial manager talking about his work force...

...Not, we harrumph, like the good old U.S.A., where a man is judged by what he can do...

...At the turn of the century, when only six per cent of us went through high school, diplomaism was rare...

...Ivar Berg of Columbia University has been collecting information on jobs that are being done by both graduates and non-graduates, (His findings will be published later this year in a book called Educational Credentials for jobs in a Democratic Society...

...The trend is for each profession to try to increase the years of school required before you can hang a shingle...

...Damn Indians do nothing except brag about having gone to Oxford...

...Isn’t that why they were sent to school in the first place...

...And they all have pretty children And the children go to school, And the children go to summer camp And then to the university, Where they are put in boxes And they come out all the same.* *Words and music by Malvina Reynolds...

...Ragged Dick and the other Horatio Alger heroes represent the many Americans who did in fact rise as far as their talent and motivation could take them without benefit of diploma...

...A confirmed believer in the diploma might well reflect, the next time he is stacked up in the crowded air over a metropolitan airport, that his chances of getting down alive may well be slightly better if the man guiding his plane down does not have a college degree...

...Diplomaism is a perverted by-product of our belief in learning...

...No reversal of the trend seems likely today, for diplomaism, like an arms race, has a built-in tendency toward escalation...

...Diplomaism has made the school our fastest-growing industry and one of the most diploma-ridden as well...

...Government also has regulatory powers...

...This diplomaism (some call it “credentialism”) is a method of selecting human beings that expresses the neat, monotonous values you find in a suburban zoning code...

...But this system suffers from the same weakness as the system it replaced: paper credentials are no more a guarantee of performance than political affiliation used to be...

...The effect is to zone out the person who wants to make 5’s own way to a productive place in society...

...People with degrees form a huge, if unorganized, credentialist complex...

...What we got from political reform was bureaucracy - semi-independent organizations staffed by people whose main loyalty is to the organization itself...

...He has learned to present a bland face to authority, also desirable...

...As it grows, industry’s personnel methods become bureaucratized...

...Of course this reasoning does not include the possibility that the learning was irrelevant to the job in question, nor does it allow for the possibility that someone might achieve the same amount of learning outside the school walls...

...to get behind the counter...

...Sheer size is undoubtedly a factor leading to diplomaism...

...Since there is only one way forward, we are freed-like the personnel man who hires us-from the burden of choice...

...Women and minorities were excluded...

...It is quite possible to learn to perform many jobs without going through those “regular channels,” but the diploma system forbids us that option...

...We are told that graduates earn more, which must mean that they produce more...

...In government as in the professions, diplomaism is the poisonous by-product of good intentions...

...In some cases he found the opposite: those with more education performed less well...

...I would add organized crime, although it is distressing to reflect that the Mafia is the most up-by-the-bootstraps institution in America today...

...We can afford, as a poor nation cannot, a wide variety of life styles, each productive in its own way...

...In the later articles, we will take up other aspects of the trend...

...Similarly, diplomaism David Hapgood is a research fellow at New York University...

...We all try to pretend that what we do is harder than it really is...

...Diplomas give status to employer and employee alike...

...In Washington, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is charged with preventing discrimination, but the Civil Rights Act under which it was created does not consider diploma requirements, even when clearly irrelevant to the job, to be a form of discrimination...

...what the personnel man wants is a way to choose those 10 without getting himself into trouble...

...they have largely gone along with restrictive diploma practices initiated by professional associations...

...By sticking it out during those years-his not to reason why-he showed that he accepted society’s judgment that school is a good thing...

...the second suggests that the only place it can find employees is on the reject pile...

...The personnel man is threatened with using judgment...

...Were de Tocqueville to return for another examination of Democracy in America, he would no longer find that “among the Americans, all honest callings are considered honorable...

...With its rigid stratification by diploma, lack of internal promotion, wide income ranges, and frequent indifference to the public good, the health business has developed a social structure that might well have been considered retrograde by Louis XIV...

...whereas, if learning determined earnings, their incomes should obviously be closer to the men who had just one more year than to those who had three years less...

...The converse is true of the non-graduate...

...As that famous non-graduate, Eric Hoffer, has pointed out, specialists from ancient scribes to modern intellectuals use jargon to conceal from the public the easiness of the work they do...

...The diploma also serves as a cultural sieve...

...By the 1960’s, few of the once-many fields were open to the non-graduate...

...This is a violation of the zoning code that sends property values plummeting...

...The one-track world of the diploma expresses values that are as much part of our heritage as the American Dream of freewheeling personal achievement...

...He was a good boy in school...

...That zoning code is designed to eliminate variety and surprise: to ensure that, in any neighborhood, all the boxes will look the same...

...So he protects himself by picking the graduate...

...Malvina Reynolds’s song, “Little Boxes,” is about the building blocks of the Suburban Dream...

...In this article we are primarily concerned with the purposes that diplomaism does and does not serve in American society...

...But if hiring was no longer to be based on loyalty to the party, there had to be another way of sorting out great numbers of applicants, and it had to be “objective,” for any method based on someone else’s judgment of the applicant would-the reformers rightly feared-result once more in political hiring...

...In the professions, diploma requirements get tighter and tighter, creating artificial shortages in areas of great social need...

...doctors have made themselves our highest paid profession...

...A few wise guys would always pass the examination without going to school...

...The first indicates that the firm is an extraordinarily desirable place to work...

...He has successfully avoided using his head...

...The Federal Aviation Agency gives awards for outstanding performance to its air-traffic men...

...It is a world of unitary order in which human sloppiness is forced into a table of organization and a white picket fence neatly marks off the good from the bad...

...Since those people do not exist, it may be necessary for the critics of diplomaism to invent them...

...Today’s salesgirl needs a high-school degree where her mother needed none...

...If he refuses to conform to the values of one institution, he is likely to be a dissenter within the corporation or bureaucracy...

...He would find that democracy in America was threatened, not by the industrial elite that he feared, nor by the aristocracy of birth feared by Americans in his day, but by an aristocracy of the diploma...

...Many people, especially intellectuals, seem to have trouble grasping the difference between “skill” and “school...

...The purpose of civil service was to get government jobs 0u.t of the hands of the political machines...

...Whether these skills are acquired through school or some other way does not matter to the needs of the economy...

...That is why there is a long-run trend to demand higher and higher degrees for the same work...

...But probably not shocked enough to change his hiring standards...

...The irony is that diplomaism is impoverishing American life just when our potential is greatest...

...E pluribus unum,” translated by small minds, comes out as: “Out of many life styles, we make one...

...Diplomaism has been accepted by Americans with little opposition and almost no comment...

...Finally, our series will report on what the few critics of diplomaism have to say and what proposals for change are being circulated...

...Careers in industry were not limited by degrees, and even in the professions a person was able to enter and advance without formal schooling...

...but in a generation the applicants catch up with the new requirements...

...There is no man here that we can love to hate, no counterpart to L. Mendel Rivers and Herman Kahn...

...Used by permission...

...The career market is closing its doors to those without degrees...

...He is not looking for a genius who will do great things for the company...

...It would be easy to guess that the better educated women were just bored, had Berg not found the same result with air-traffic controllers-one of the most demanding and responsible jobs in this or any country...

...His presence lowers the status of the job, and it may also lower the income if word gets around that you can do this job without putting in those years in school...

...But such statistics only prove that the better-paid jobs are reserved for graduates, and this much we already know...

...A college graduate can do the job better than a non-graduate, we tend to assume, and a high school graduate better than his dropout peer...

...yet we punish in practice what we praise in myth...

...Diplomaism: HOW WE ZONE PEOPLE by David Hapgood When Americans journey to the undeveloping nations, they are likely to make sardonic observations about how those countries award their positions of privilege...

...All our janitors are college graduates” is a proud though idiotic statement compared to “Half our engineers never finished school...

...We could be as rich in choices about our way of approaching a career as we are already in choices about our brand of soap...

...Instead, he is an assistant personnel man who has to hire 10 out of 200 pieces of paper, all of which look pretty much the same...

...Terrified, he escalates...

...If more diplomas are required, more people get diplomas in order to get the jobs...

...But there is no evidence - except in the professions - that the growth of diplomaism can be blamed on education lobbyists...

...We will also be concerned with the role government plays in the diploma trend...

...If they think about it at all, most people doubtless deduce that diplomaism exists because it works: that the diploma is an effective way of sorting people out by ability...

...This was the case in a comparison among women working in Mississippi plants making trousers: the women were on piecework, so it was easy to compare their production, and those with the most school produced the fewest pants...

...And that stamp, unlike the imprint on a side of beef, reflects neither our personal value to the society nor the needs of the economic system...

...But Berg also discovered employers who believe in the diploma even when the evidence in their own plants was to the contrary...

...The college men have received proportionately fewer awards...

...Probably, then, he won’t make trouble in the institution that hires him...

...zones people into a set of categories that tend to eliminate the variety and surprise of the human experience...

...The often absurd degree requirements imposed on those working in education make the school its own best customer...

...Certainly not the America of 1969...

...Civil-service tests and diploma requirements do help to sort out the applicants...

...Plot theorists, who, like other primitive peoples, have to explain anything they dislike as being the result of evil intent, may conjure up a picture of school superintendents and eraser manufacturers lurking like retired Air Force generals in the lobbies of government...

...The federal government, which employs about three million people, appears to be one of the less diploma-ridden institutions...

...Because of the accelerating rate of technological change, what America needs is a more skilled work force or, more accurately, a work force capable of learning new skills...

...It is true, of course, that the American Dream was open to only a minority: the male WASPs...

...The scattered information now available shows that the diploma is not a yardstick that measures job performance...

...in its place they gave us what Hannah Arendt calls ‘‘rule by nobody...

...The belief in the diploma has the quality of myth, and myth is always more persuasive than fact...