On Mon, 24 Oct 2005 09:40:53 -0400 Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu>
writes:
> Jim:
>
> > Well in the United States colleges and universities have
> > long been interested in recruiting students who had
> > little interest in intellectual pursuits as such. Back in
> > the 19th century, it was not the norm even among
> > the wealthy upper class for young people to go on
> > to college.
>
>
>
> True. But that changed in the second half of the 19th century with
> the
> introduction of research universities based on the German model, of
> which
> trend the Johns Hopkins was the precursor.
Sure. Until then, even at Harvard, most professors only had a B.A. degree. The idea that the main purpose of universities was to generate research and to train people to do research did not take hold in the US until the end of the 19th century. That's when major universities began to establish graduate schools that issued PhDs and other advanced degrees. William James, among others, opposed the new trend, and was rather critical of the notion of a PhD. Lots of people have held and still hold that this development led to a shortchanging of undergraduate education.
>
> I am not denying that the credential dispensation has always been a
> part of
> academic institutions. I am arguing that the credential
> dispensations
> function was relatively less important in the past than it is
> nowadays due
> to the changes in the workplace, especially the loss of status of
> skilled
> workers, the popularity of the idea of social advancement through
> education,
> employers' demands, and structural unemployment.
Well back in the 19th century, colleges and unviversities were confronted by the fact that most professions did not require degrees. Even in a profession such as medicine, a degree from a proprietary school was considered good enough to qualify one for practice. Therefore, this limited the pool of potential students down a rather small percentage of young people who were mainly concerned with engaging in intellectual pursuits. Obviously, if schools were to expand their enrollments, they had to figure out ways of attracting students who were less enamored with the intellectual life, so they wound up doing things like instituting athletics, bringing in fraternities and other forms of social life that would make it more attractive for affluent young men to want to spend four years in such institutions.
Later on in the 20th century, the growth of credentialism would make university attendence a lot more popular, so that even young people from working class backgrounds now commonly attend colleges or universities. Now a days, employers very frequently use degree requirements as a screening device, so that degrees are often demanded for jobs that not, so long ago, did not require a college degree. To take IT for instance, not so many years ago, most programming jobs did not require degrees, and there were lots of programmers who did not have them. Now a days, a degree is a requirement for almost all programming jobs, and many employers want candidates to have masters degrees. Even for IT jobs such as network admin or even helpdesk positions, employers often demand that candidates have degrees. This has been especially true since the ending of the high tech boom back in 2001.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
>
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