Reflections on Randall Collins’s sociology of credentialism

Introduction

Class conflict may be even more pervasive and less historically revolutionary than had been supposed. (Collins, 1979: 71)

Collins critiqued academic credentials as the operational hinge for the functionalist, technocratic theory of human capital (Becker, 1964). The conflict perspective questioned what education had to do with skills and knowledge, what credentials actually meant, what relationship actually existed between higher education and the job market, and indeed what the ‘job market’ actually was. Higher education’s relationship with the changing labour market is arguably even more fraught today than it was in the 1970s, due to globalization. Collins’s critique of credentialism seems to remain quite central to the sociology of education, the sociology of work and organizations and the sociology of knowledge. Its continued currency is reflected in the publication of a new edition by Columbia University Press this year, with a foreword by Tressie McMillan Cottom.

Cottom’s own book, Lower Ed (2017) offers a critical, political-economy inflected reading of ‘the new credentialism’ in a new political economy which has replaced state-bureaucratic credentialism with individualized, market-bureaucratic, for-profit credentialism. Some two million Americans, disproportionately non-white and female, are enrolled in for-profit ‘Lower Ed’, so termed because it represents lower prestige, part-time and shorter-term qualifications, but at relatively high cost. Cottom estimated that in the 2000s, the cost was approximately ‘$15,000 for a nine-month certificate in at the Beauty College. In 2014…a similar beauty college in a suburb of Atlanta was $21,436’ (Cottom, 2017: 162). Financialization has become a major driver of expansion of a new credentialism that deepens inequalities by forcing more debt and greater likelihood of debt default on poorer students. ‘Lower Ed’ students are over-promised regarding the employment outcomes from their qualifications, if they manage to complete their courses and graduate. ‘Lower Ed’ unsurprisingly compounds disadvantage as ‘[n]ew credentialism promises high-wage, high-demand jobs that have statistical discrimination baked into them’ (Cottom, 2017: 176). Poorer, predominantly female Black and Hispanic students end up paying a high price for the ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) of an education system that promises success, but cannot guarantee stable livelihoods, let alone social mobility.

The credential society

Collins explained credentialism in terms of a general social theory of power struggles and conflict dynamics. His ‘no-nonsense scientific theory’ (Seidman, 2017: 87) claimed a straightforward scientificity in the way it connected theory and research. Its interpretive, explanatory aim is to develop general explanations about social behaviour, with a causal and empirical focus. Its basic assumption was that social life is a field of struggle and conflict, involving heterogeneous struggles broadly following Weberian fault lines of economic class, cultural status and socio-political affiliation. Individuals and groups struggle to create, maintain and defend power advantages using all possible resources, including education. Educational credentials are a means to game and hoard privileges, rendering the meritocratic labour market ideal problematic, if not completely redundant.

Plural struggles over knowledge, education and cultural power were seen to occur in a wider context where social capital trumps actual knowledge or intellectual capital. The 1970s heralded a new social reality of deindustrialization through globalization, with declining labour share in productivity. Occupational stratification leaned on a large, state-supported ‘sinecure sector’, driven by the political: individuals and groups, using ‘political labour’ to monopolize ‘sinecures’ and gatekeeping their cultural currency, namely educational credentials. This interpretation basically reversed the Marxian base-superstructure thesis, given new conditions in which technology enabled labour productivity to outstrip jobs. Immaterial culture became more determining of the social structure than the material, productive base: ‘cultural exchanges are the organized empirical means by which all forms of stratification are enacted and by which class struggle over work and materials are carried out’ (Collins, 1979: 58).

Collins’s analysis foreshadowed current debates about robots displacing human labour and necessitating the reinvention of education. Conflict theories are critical and therefore unhomely – social structures exist, but they are often uncomfortable places to live in. It is this discomfort that provokes the sociological imagination and surfaces questions about the connections between particular and individual circumstances and the wider social reality or social ‘system’. It becomes impossible to avoid the shadow of things that go wrong, entire systems can go awry, making us question the nature of ‘the system’ itself. Discomfort seems unavoidable for academics when the ‘system’ in question is higher education, the habitus of credentialing and the role and identity of the professions.

The Credential Society invited us to reflect on, and challenge, a trifecta of dominant thought patterns. The first of these was ‘social stratification’ as a functional scheme of occupational classifications, as opposed to a field of social struggle, conflict and hierarchical ordering. The second concerned meritocratic ideology, as a justification for deeming social mobility, immobility and differential outcomes to be socially and politically legitimate. The third concerned assumptions about the evolutionary, mutually interdependent relationship between education, knowledge, technology-based innovation, productivity and jobs. This trifecta could be debunked as a structuralist-functionalist fantasy to justify economic and socio-cultural hierarchy as both merited and efficient (Young, 1958), in a reality that was quite different: ‘it is good sense to appoint individual people on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others’ (Young, 2001).

The conflict-credentialist critique explained social closure in systems where power was not primarily determined by economic, material or financial capital, but instead by the possession of symbolic or positional property. Rejecting the professions’ claims that education serves to transmit highly specialized knowledge and skills, Collins characterized the ‘medical monopoly’ and ‘legal guild’ as essentially dependent upon ‘mystification’ to cement economic and social positioning and create social closure (Collins, 1979: 54). Meritocracy was merely window-dressing for a ‘sinecure society’ in which high-status positions and correspondingly high material rewards were distributed, but not necessarily in line with effort or skill. In medieval times, sinecures were obtained from popes or kings. In modern societies, sinecures are dispensed by large government bureaucracies, large private corporations, and the burgeoning corporate subsector whose work was to define new ‘rules’ of the organizational game, structuring alliance-making and producing new forms of social conformity.

Each year, I induct a large cohort of undergraduate students into the discipline of sociology by inviting them to consider functionalist versus conflict takes on meritocracy and social stratification. I find this job somewhat uncanny, given my own imbrication as a sociologist studying debates about higher education. How and why have they come to ‘choose’ sociology? What is the ultimate goal of the higher education that we provide? Sociology lecturers largely behave as if we accept that the education we offer ‘leads to’ employment, or other instrumental goals. Yet our educational purposes remain vague and conflicted in everyday life, at least for those of us researching the sociology of higher education, the sociology of work, the sociology of the professions, or the sociology of knowledges. Education, technocracy and meritocracy – in short, human capital theory – stubbornly remain the status quo, despite the torrents of critique and maelstrom of reforms that have churned through higher education since the 1970s, and most particularly since the 1990s. Meritocracy continues to provide the default ideology for liberal-neoliberal societies. Education, especially higher education, continues to expand, despite declining governmental support. Mass-credentialing ultimately leaves us unsure about where ‘the system’ is supposed to go.

Collins disagreed with functional justifications for educational expansion as necessary for innovation and productivity. He argued that more educated (or at least more qualified) societies are not necessarily more innovative or productive than less educated (or less qualified) ones. The knowledge transmitted by formal education is likely to be forgotten or superseded by knowledge ‘on the job’. Schooling was left with the job of reproducing dominant (middle class, white, Anglo-Protestant) cultural understandings of propriety, not specific technical or cognitive skills. The goal that remained was cultural and status group reproduction and closure. By the mid-20th century, credentialing by diplomas and degrees had become a tortuous and costly mechanism for maintaining the positions of already-privileged status groups. The status groups historically originated in the religious denominations, which wanted to preserve hierarchical cultural orders transgenerationally, through the selection and induction of incoming members. As the elite expanded and changed, the professions and business came to the fore. Each status group maintained their own interests in developing and expanding education as a way of ‘minting’ specialized forms of cultural currency and reproducing their groups, while pushing the costs onto aspirants (or their parents).

As educational provision expanded, duration increased, causing costs to rise, rather than fall. Although different ‘courses’ proliferated, a massively inclusive educational system led to more and lengthier bureaucratization and educational overproduction. The proliferation of aspirants is desired by the educational producers because they represent resources and future prospects. However, too many incomers also pose a threat to the status-objective of group closure. Specific, substantive content tended to become meaningless over time, reflecting an ironic Weberian trajectory – a system initially intended to preserve the culture of a group lays the foundations of its own stagnation, dilution and decline.

Collins argued that the social revolution that built and harnessed schools and universities to the meritocratic task of social selection via education ended up reproducing a narrow band of social and cultural values, not specific technical knowledge. However, of the three professions studied by Collins – law, medicine and engineering – engineering stood out as somewhat different. Engineering continuously expanded, without employers trying to restrict entry. Engineering remained an open profession because it reflected ‘productive labour’ generating ‘real outcomes’, congruent with a rational division of labour, while medicine and law had to rely on mystified ‘political labour’. Collins proposed credential abolitionism, dispensing with paper qualifications in favour of a return to apprenticeships as the mechanism for occupational selection. He thought that this would wipe out ‘half of the existing inequality’ (Collins, 1979: 202). While this foreshadowed the prescriptions of some educational reformers today, US and global empirical trends of ‘new credentialism’, job precaritization, financial exploitation and pervasive, growing economic inequality make such inequality reduction unlikely today without other distributive reforms.

The Procrustean dynamics of contemporary higher education and work

Procrustes was a mythical smith, who trapped travellers with the offer of hospitality, then chained his ‘guests’ to a bed that was always either too short or too long. If the bed was too short, he would chop his guests’ legs off, and if it was too long, he would hammer their legs to stretch them to fit. Today, higher education has become locked into Procrustean dynamics of widening enrolment with declining state effort, techno-Utopianism with declining jobs, and increasing inclusion with widening inequalities. Neoliberal and managerial reforms have deepened an existential crisis of higher education (Connell, 2019). The obvious contradictions have not dampened relentless expansion and increasing stratification, with competitive league tables for national and global elite institutions and students, and ‘Lower Ed’ for the rest.

Uncomfortably, the expansion of higher education involves academic sociologists personally. We cannot avoid awkward questions about higher education’s purpose, relevance and sustainability. Pressure is coming from all sides, from governments who promise more education to their electorates but are de-funding public systems; by mediatized educational commentators and TED talkers jostling for attention space; and by a student body that is growing in size and diversity and facing a growing mountain of debt alongside increasingly doubtful employment prospects. Precaritization has spread at a particularly swift pace within academia, while employers complain that the education system has failed to inculcate the right kind of graduate ‘skills’, be these ‘hard’ scientific or technical knowledge and skills or ‘soft’ communication, teamwork and thinking.

By the end of the 1970s, Collins had asserted that the majority of jobs no longer required particularly specialized skills. Occupations had begun to be hollowed-out through a combination of automation and relocation to cheaper locations. In other, later writing, Collins saw technological displacement as the possible source of a terminal crisis in capitalism, ‘all by itself and without the other processes in Marxian and neo-Marxian theory’ (Collins, 2013: 37). While Weber had the interpretive edge in dealing with class, politics, culture and gender, Marxian theory retained the long-term explanatory framework for structural change and crisis. Crisis is imminent because nothing works to forestall the technological displacement of jobs – not innovation, not globalization, not financialization, not government spending and not even credential inflation. The last of these represented the last redoubt of ‘hidden Keynesianism’ (Collins, 2013: 51). Credential inflation vindicated techno-optimist meritocracy by promising that more education would produce more equality of opportunity, high-tech economic growth and good jobs. By financially subsidizing and underwriting educational expansion, the state managed education as a Keynesian safety-valve and the only plausible escape from capitalism’s crisis. However, this measure required a significant redistribution of resources from capitalists and the employed to labour-market aspirants (Collins, 2013: 56).

Internal mushrooming of immaterial labour and growing managerialist bureaucracy give rise to what David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’ (jobs that have little or no social or productive value) and ‘managerial feudalism’ (Graeber, 2013, 2018). These new, popular theses advanced by Graeber are essentially Collins’s critiques of credentialism and sinecures redux: ‘the educationocracy […the backbone of the technocracy] is bureaucratic hot air rather than a producer of real technical skills’ (Collins, 1979: 7).

Amongst a minority of ‘leading edge’ employers, new expectations have emerged about what needs to be learned (Darling-Hammond, 2015). ‘New learning’ involves ‘soft’ skills such as interpersonal communication, teamwork, adaptability to change, problem-solving, analytical and conceptual skills, self-management (including the management of one’s own performance), creativity, ability to innovate and criticize. ‘Learners’ must become able to engage in learning new things at all times, and ‘cross the borders’ of specialist knowledge (Wardlaw, 2006). ‘New learning’ is pushed by national authorities, seeking global competitiveness. Individual workers are required to be extremely competent and ready to contribute to their societies’ needs for economic innovation, development, invention and solutions, but they are also expected to compensate for unstable or absent opportunities, or conditions of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011).

In the 2000s, a series of videos, ‘Shift Happens’ (Doxtdator, 2017), went ‘viral’ on social media claiming that:

The top 10 in demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet, [jobs] using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet. (Doxtdator, 2017)

Collins encouraged critical sociologists to address the relationship between technology and education, and to try to understand the reciprocal relationship between technologically-enabled work, the education system and the future of capitalism, generally. He did not address pressing questions of inequality directly, but got at some of the structural dynamics underpinning the dilemmas of higher education by placing the problem of educational credentialism at the centre of the problem-space.

His credential society was a deadpan analysis of Michael Young’s original satire (Young, 1958). In Young’s work, the ‘meritocracy’ he named had not yet felt the full effects of higher education massification, nor had the new credentialism begun to emerge. Young’s critique was pointed at meritocracy itself, while Collins focused on credentials. Neither opposed equality of opportunity in principle, but both found it problematic where inequality of outcomes promised to be a near-certain reality. Both pointed to the rise of business-oriented status groups. Young’s most cutting critique concerned the seal of approval that meritocratic ideology afforded to the already-privileged minority, while Collins suggested that educational expansion would expand the middle class to the extent where minority and majority strata would become more difficult to distinguish, creating a ‘new class’ with more diversified claims and social struggles over cultural capital. For Young, from the 1950s up to the 2000s, the major problem arising from the rise of meritocracy was the opposite of diffusion: it was the rise in disconnected entitlement -- what Branko Milanovic today calls ‘social separatism’ (Milanovic, 2016):

The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get…They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. (Young, 2001)

Sociological theory and social transformation

Technological displacement has driven Collins’s analysis towards a consideration of a structural crisis of capitalism, necessitating the resort to state practices of ‘hidden Keynesianism’. However, it remains impossible to disguise a reality of unemployment and job-competition that is far from the utopian scenario envisaged by the ‘Californian ideology’ of digital Utopia, where technology enables everybody to be both hip and rich (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996: 44).

Several decades after The Credential Society, Collins came to the conclusion that a generalized fiscal crisis of the state, social movements and potential social revolution was likely, but he remained unsure about how it was going to pan out. It could even involve a transition to a post-capitalist future and a turn to socialism, ‘when capitalism gets bad enough’ (Collins, 2013: 58, 66). The future where working class manual labour gets displaced by robots has now arrived, leaving education itself as the only remaining lever that can be operated by ‘hidden Keynesianism’. However, the Golden Age of Keynesian welfare capitalism had already ended by the time Collins wrote The Credential Society (Marglin and Schor, 1992). Declining prospects for Keynesianism, the divisive new political economy of higher education and declining wages have combined to betray the American Dream with a growing cost burden, unmanageable for most poor and middle-income families. Of US families, 75 percent are paying at least 20 percent of their annual income towards higher education, after grants are accounted for (Goldrick-Rab, 2016: 4).

Some critics of Collins’s conflict sociology remain dissatisfied with the absence of normative commitments and foundations in his conflict sociology. The premises and concepts of conflict theory have their limits:

he seems unaware that these same premises may gain their credibility as much from cultural or ideological resonance as from their explanatory value, namely the ideology of liberal utilitarians, and its resonances of individual self-interest, resources, competition, social networks, alliance-building, symbols as instrumental and so on, having little to say about moral values. (Seidman, 2017: 91)

Elsewhere (Collins, 1998), Collins approached his conflict sociology via a much broader work on the sociology of philosophical networks, using these as ‘a way of penetrating deeply into the very shapes of sociological thought’. By contrast, Collins’s fellow rebel against the Parsonian legacy of structural functionalism, Herbert Gintis, chose a completely different direction for social theory. Gintis’s recent work (Gintis, 2017) has the ambition to re-engineer the social sciences completely, advocating a reductionist-convergent transdisciplinary scientism, as opposed to more divergent or emergent alternatives (Khoo et al., 2018). In contrast to Collins’s carefully descriptive theorizing from empirical observations, Gintis rashly advocates ‘disciplinary imperialism’ centred on rational choice modelling and ‘individuality’ as the chosen methodology for all social science (Gintis, 2017: xiv). Individual behaviour modelling of economic preferences, orderings, and constraints are simply assumed to be fundamentally compatible with political democracy, ‘affording people an identical power in public life that markets afford people in their personal life – the combination represents the power to implement preferred social outcomes’ (Gintis, 2017: 1). Gintis’s sociobiological idealism treats culture as universally adaptive over time, oriented towards population ‘success’. The problem, surely, is that cultures are pervaded by heterogeneity, inequality, domination and violence – one culture’s eugenics has often been predicated on another’s oppression, even genocide. Gene-culture coevolution theory can be used to legitimize any number of possible forms of domination. By inviting the entirety of social science to adopt ‘economics imperialism’, Gintis appears to unproblematically accept, even celebrate, problematic forms of cultural complicity in imperialism and the domination and expropriation of its Others.

By contrast, Collins’s entanglements neither presume, nor reach toward, a particular unilinear or evolutionary path. Social reality is not treated as ‘autonomous’, but as something that can only be grasped via non-reductionist, thickly observed and thought-through understandings of experienced reality. Collins’s conflict sociology connects empirical observations to high levels of generality, but the unasked question is what transformation does conflict sociology find itself in the middle of, as he argues that sociology’s observations always are ‘in the middle of things’ – in medias res:

The individual thinker…in privacy, thinks something which is significant for the network only because his or her inner conversation is part of the larger conversation and contributes to its problems.…Truth arises in social networks; it could not possibly arise anywhere else. (Collins, 1998: 877)

Conclusion: A sociology of absences in conflict sociology

The major criticism that we can level at Collins’s critique of credentialism, and his conflict sociology more generally, is not that it lacks analytical or explanatory power, but that it practices a ‘narrow reflexivity’ that leaves too much unexamined and unquestioned (Fuller, 1999). Collins admits that the more naïve forms of scientific realism clash with the kind of reflexivity practised by sociologists of knowledge. To what extent has Collins’s ambitious sociology of conflict accommodated wider reflexive possibilities and addressed the original criticisms of Parsonian structural-functionalism (Barber, 1956) that Collins vowed to move away from?

Conflict sociology partially overcame structural-functionalism’s tendency towards static accounts, by tracing dynamic change and system development. However, his incrementalist historical accounts tended to remain unclear about how new states were substantively different or normatively ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than old ones. To what extent can any theory of social change do more than describe flux – i.e. can it illuminate transformation? Collins is highly critical of attempts to monopolize and close off social power by hoarding symbolic and cultural capital. Yet, his theorization of educational credentialism and social conflict fails to offer a substantive account of the educational or the social, beyond a formal analysis of relationships between the various concepts such as education and merit; merit and employment, intellectual creativity and stagnation. Conservative assumptions about the intrinsic value of learning or philosophical depth are debunked, yet conflict theory seems incapable of substantively challenging the dominant and basically conservative liberal-neoliberal ideological complex of competition, individual self-interest and utilitarianism. It tells us how social stratification comes about, but is reticent concerning whether or how it might be changed.

When The Credential Society was first published in 1979, the enormous shift from accepted understandings of education as a generalized system of training and selection had not experienced the full onslaught of New Right ideology and managerial practices. These have shifted the educational ground comprehensively towards individualism and entrepreneurialism, making each citizen the principal investor in her own education while increasing inequality and exploitation immensely. Bureaucratic power has also increased, but in rearticulated forms with state-market hybrid characteristics. The doctrinal decoupling of education from the state has promised individual choice, efficiency, productivity and returns to the economy in general and to selected private ‘edupreneurs’ in particular. These contradictory social forces have justified greater educational, economic and social differentiation and increases in both vertical and horizontal social distancing.

Iris Marion Young offers a model of social connection centred on the responsibilities of persons as socially-connected moral agents, relating their social agency to their location vis-a-vis unjust global structural processes (Young, 2006). She gives examples of how processes of production, distribution and marketing (in her example, clothing, but in this article we could say higher education and credentialing) are bound by ethical obligations of responsibility for justice. The social connection model of responsibility says that all agents who contribute by their actions to structural processes that produce injustice have responsibilities to work to remedy those situations of injustice.

The ‘sociology of absences’ is a term coined by the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, to refer to silences as absences that are actively created through particular historical processes. Every sociology, and every history of education entails some things or experiences ‘to be marginalised, suppressed or not be allowed to exist in the first place’ (Santos, 2001: 191). In relation to higher education and credentialing, responsibilities for justice oblige sociologists to pay attention to the sociology of absences as a discipline, surfacing questions of material and cultural domination. Questions of epistemic freedom, epistemic domination and epistemic injustice have arisen in current debates about higher education, to the extent that they can no longer be ignored in mainstream sociology. The majority of the world no longer simply accepts the sociologies that were taught, because the naïve realism of structural-functionalism turned out to be deeply entangled with imperialist-colonialist and racist-sexist formations of power. The ‘epistemicides’ of the ‘long 16th century’ conditioned the emergence of social science (Grosfoguel, 2013), and this colonial-modern of social science is actively contested by decolonial scholars seeking alternative, epistemically disobedient ways of defining and knowing about social ‘reality’ (Mignolo, 2001).

Aside from labour market functions, the most important and possibly overlooked aspect of neoliberal educational reform is its de-educationalization. Education is continuously spoken about in terms of its functionality for the labour market, but it is almost never discussed in terms of what it actually is, as a substantively ‘educational’ thing (Rømer, 2011). It is not a matter of the attainment of a higher standard of knowledge, specific philosophical ideas or techno-scientific advancement driving the demand for higher knowledge, but competition between educational entrepreneurs and the competition state that are driving the runaway expansion of education and its Procrustean dynamics.

Collins’s conflict critique of credentialism did not lack ambition. His works that have been discussed in this article draw from a huge canvas of Weberian, Parsonian and even Marxian foundations, but with notable lacunae – a political economy characterized by a non-abstract class, sexual and racial analysis and a moral and educative vision possessed of a distinct philosophical core. These lacunae originate in conflict sociology’s ancestor – structural functionalism. If the purpose of education is not, as the functionalists would suggest, as a form of human capital investment to increase capitalist productivity and profits, what on earth is this monstrous, barely-relevant and too-easily-outdated but resource hungry and crisis-producing system that we call ‘higher education’ for?

Epistemological, critical and normative aporia open up whenever one engages in teaching sociology. To invite students to use sociological thinking to understand norms and social forces is to ask them to consider questions about power, resource differentials and human vulnerabilities. Sociology’s educational purpose is to get students to wonder and think for themselves, even as each individual is caught up in the constraints and promises of social mobility in a world governed by technocracy, facilitated or obstructed by educational practices, processes, norms and institutions. Collins’s sceptical appraisal of credentialism has not lost its salience as higher education has continued to expand. Yet, the basic premise and centre ground of conflict sociology remains that of liberal competition, at least until the present system collapses, perhaps under the great pressures that educational systems have come under to justify the logic of competitive individualism as neoliberalism’s universal and universalizing premise (Davies, 2017). The constant expansion of the higher education system is not leading to the promised scenario of individual and group social mobility. Instead such expansion leads to a persistent trend of credential inflation, privilege hoarding, social closure and social separatism.

If all social encounters involve conflict and are structured by relations of domination and subordination (Seidman, 2017: 88), the strongest potential critique of conflict sociology is its articulation of, rather than challenge to, the dominant public ideology of neoliberal (as contrasted against classically liberal) competitive utilitarianism. The Credential Society continues to remind us that the debates about education that are current right now are not so different from those that emerged in the 1970s. Surprisingly, the debates haven’t gone away, or even changed very much. Seidman complained that Collins could not escape the question of moral vision in society, being ‘largely blinded to the moral import of his work’ (p. 91), having advanced a theory of social stratification, structured and trapped in its contradictory dynamic of expansion and disavowal. Education remains the single most important determinant of people’s positioning within a fully bureaucratic, technological economy. Where compulsory schooling and educational credentials are the norm, higher education continues to promise educationally-determined social mobility, while delivering restricted chances of actually-achieved mobility in reality, together with substantial economic penalties levied by the new credentialism.

As the educational system continues to produce more and more credentials, jobs must demand more credentials. All the questions remain: rising costs and who is to bear them, problems of ‘grade inflation’ and the failure of education to produce the promised return of more and ‘better’ jobs with higher pay and status, commensurate with the ticket price and not easily replaceable by robots. The professions commanding high pay and status try to close ranks while the entire middle of the occupational ladder is vanishing. ‘Lower’ educational credentials are more universally attained, but have become devalued, while costs continue to rise, most dramatically for the poorest. The lack of ‘good’ jobs is blamed on technology – it is automation that has taken the jobs.

The critique of meritocracy developed by Michael Young (1958) was a satire that was meant to be a warning. However, meritocracy continues to be accepted as neither satire nor warning, but as a workable justification for inequality. It seems highly improbable that the final revolt that Young imagined in 1958 will happen by 2033, and highly probable that class conflict will be even more pervasive. But will it be less revolutionary than was ever expected (Collins, 1979: 71)? Contradictions of increasing inequality and contestations of racism, sexism and coloniality add to the crisis tendency and may yet overturn the forces of stabilization.