> That's how any profession maintains its price of labor-power:
> gate-keeping. Doctors do it, professors do it, accountants do it.
> Professional gate-keeping is most often practiced through state
> licensing. In the case of university professors, gate-keeping is
> maintained by peer reviews & "apprenticeship." All cases call for
> advanced learning, access to which is narrowed by standardized exams
> & "weed-out courses."
>
> In return for publicly sanctioned monopolies, professionals are
> supposed to serve "clients," instead of gouging "customers" all they
> can -- sometimes charging standardized fees, instead of wildly
> fluctuating prices directly determined by supply & demand; to eschew
> advertising; to uphold high standards of ethics & competence; and so
> on. :-)
>
> Yoshie
************
Charles Derber wrote a book a few years ago, "Power in the Highest Degree" -Oxford- about the US mandarin class and how they love their cognitive monopoly rents and the power/wealth dynamic. It's still in print too.
Here's a Nobel "prize-winner's" take on the situation:
"The conventional view among economists is that education adds to an individuals productivity and therefore increases the market value of his labor. From the viewpoint of formal theory, it does not matter how the student's productivity is increased, but implicitly it is assumed that the student receives cognitive skills through his education. Educators, on the other hand, have long felt that the activity of education is a process of socialization, with the latent content of the process-the aquisition of skills such as the carrying out of assigned tasks, getting along with others, regularity, punctuality, and the like-being at least as important as the manifest objectives of conveying information. This last doctrine has been revived by radical economists, though with a negative rather than a positive valuation...
"I would like to present a very different view. Higher education, in this model, contributes in no way to superior economic performance; it increases neither cognition nor socialization. Instead higher education serves as a screening device in that it sorts out individuals of differing abilities, thereby conveying information to the purchasers of labor." [Kenneth Arrow "Higher Education as a Filter" in "The Economics of Information"]
Ian