Has University Education Been Replaced By Credentialism?
Learning? Critical thinking? Hello?
I am a lecturer/professor/instructor/poorly dressed middle-aged male. I am not particularly pronoun-sensitive, show up regularly in front of my university classes, and sometimes swear under my breath at the podium when technology fails me.
I do not discuss religion or politics in class and avoid reading PowerPoints as my working assumption is that postsecondary students can still read and do not gain anything from being read to.
Some of my PowerPoints have three words, and the class thus is forced into discussions. However, telling the students that they might need to do more than just study from the PowerPoint presentations is a joke that never gets old.
I have taught business and writing courses at the university for approximately 15 years. It is a quintessential human tendency to romanticise the past. Things were better when we were young but harder; school was up the hill both ways, two feet of snow; the world was smarter; people were kinder, and we left our doors open. After sifting through a collection of old papers and essays following my father’s passing, I discovered, to my chagrin, that I was not the straight-A student I had remembered. This Monty Python skit, although it is in reverse, mocks this tendency, the famous four Yorkshireman.
This penchant for glamorizing the past is often called the “Golden Age Syndrome.” This phenomenon is rooted in a cognitive bias known as “rosy retrospection,” where individuals recall the past more fondly than it might have been, often minimizing the difficulties and challenges encountered. Each older generation thinks the new one will send the world to hell.
In psychological terms, this bias belongs to a broader category of memory biases affecting how we recollect and interpret past events. Rosy retrospection leads individuals to highlight positive experiences while downplaying negative ones, thus creating an idealized version of history. This can result in the perception that previous generations faced greater challenges or were more resilient than contemporary ones.
Reality Check: Economic and Educational Trends
However, is there some truth beneath this nostalgia? The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that while wages have seen nominal increases, these gains frequently do not keep pace with inflation. From 2005 to 2021, real wages for private industry workers grew by only about 3.8% when adjusted for inflation. This indicates that although starting salaries in marketing have increased nominally, their purchasing power has remained relatively flat over the past 25 years. A recent study published at CNBC said that today’s average university graduate will make $10,000 less than their parents in inflation-adjusted dollars. Is this a supply issue, the market making a value judgement or a weak labour market?
Are students worse today?
It’s not a popular question, but from my perspective, yes, they are weaker- of course, there are always good ones, there is a lot in between, and there are always the few who seem utterly surprised that attending class and doing any work is expected. You never know who your best students will be.
Number one and two in one of my last marketing classes were a 25-year-old Indigenous man already running his own company and a mum who looked about 21 but shyly confessed to being 30 - she has since graduated. She is now excelling at the Schulich School of Business.
I also had a student crew from Austria, Germany, Belgium, and Spain come in. They were all on pass/fail, so it was no advantage for them to get 52% versus 95%. Yet, the European students had better attendance, were more engaged in class, and, overall, received superior grades compared to their Canadian-born colleagues. They were just better.
Several German students told me privately that they were shocked at the Canadian students. They were surprised at the Canadian student’s disinterest in class discussions, obsession with their phones, lack of dedication to group work and conviction that doing anything merited passing the class.
In my experience, there has been significant grade inflation. When I began teaching, average grades hovered in the low 60s; direction was given to hit those numbers, whereas now, I frequently see averages of 85% or more. One newly hired instructor was proud of herself when she gifted her class a 96% average; of course, the students had circulated the answer keys, yet the department did not bat an eye, and she was promoted. I took over a media course at the last minute. I gave a student a 79%, and he was in shock, so offended that he reacted like I’d slapped his grandmother.
Moreover, the prevalence of sessional hiring has grown. It’s no secret that they’re cheaper, get fewer benefits, and are vulnerable to management whims. The union cannot overcome a balance of power that has tipped so heavily in management’s favour with teaching work so precarious.
While not inherently inferior, sessional instructors—who are not often torn away by research obligations—are often confronted with uncertain income expectations; if management increases classes by ten students each, they can cut a session, and some poor sessional instructor then loses 25% of their income.
The college model liked hiring workers who worked and taught part-time to give their students a real-world focus. However, when classes run in the morning and afternoon, and sessionals have no right to adjust their schedule, the best instructors can do is try to find some side contract work. They may be accountants and can hang on to some clients. But this is rare; most sessionals have to spread out and find more teaching.
Some universities have begun hiring graduates with little or no work experience and a master's degree earned directly after undergrad. I know of a non-lawyer with a law degree from the UK (where it’s an undergrad degree and it is relatively easy to get in) who was a secretary in a law office, had taken no bridging exams, bar exams, or articling, but was hired to teach four university law courses in a justice studies program.
Such wild bargain hires may be seen as tremendous value. They might be better than the 75-year-olds, who make three times as much as their younger colleagues; as the younger instructors are often more enthusiastic and engaged. While getting the highest pay in the institution, some ancients have checked out and become experts in minimizing work and maximizing pay.
When it comes to specialized courses that focus on e-commerce, social media marketing, and consumer behaviour, the older professor must fight to stay current because someone who got a PhD 40 years ago and has had no real-world work experience for the last 30 years will have difficulty connecting with Gen Z—not to mention the material.
I took over an e-commerce marketing course. The engineer teaching the course previously taught packet data theory (I had worked for a wireless data engineering firm so it brought back memories)—how data travelled worldwide—again, it was a marketing course. And the students never pushed back. As long as it’s not too hard and the grades are high enough, peace will be maintained—grade inflation is academic fentanyl, and there is a drug abuse problem.
When instructors teach day courses, and it’s impossible to avoid this, they have made teaching their full-time job. However, they lack tenure protection; universities often resist allowing seniority and competency to influence hiring decisions. This precariousness makes it difficult for sessional staff to feel fully integrated into the university system when they are essentially re-hired each semester, receive limited benefits and often have no pension.
Sessional instructors are incentivized to maximize their course loads, teaching at multiple universities to sustain themselves. You make hay while the sun shines.
Technology, including tools like Google and ChatGPT, could steer students away from the mindlessness of rote memorization and move them toward critical thinking—yet this potential remains largely untapped. It’s easier to keep academic gears turning at regular speeds.
Most faculty and students, most humans, in fact, often seek to avoid work. Professors work as independent operators, with the only expectation being that they attend class or don’t miss too many classes and employ some method to create a grading structure. I’ve seen professors sit in the corner and read newspapers while running COVID-era lectures that had been previously taped. Others have the students teach all the material to their fellow students in presentations - and this covers the entire three-hour class block.
Junior management is usually more focused on putting out small student grumbling fires and ensuring that the framework behind forming the credential called the degree is erected; faculty soon learn that awarding a high average will soften blows from their annual student evaluations. Grade inflation, jacked up by COVID-19 accommodations at the high school level, has primed the pump for overconfident and self-entitled freshmen students; most of my students believe they are “A” students and, no matter what, they believe should be recognized as such.
It’s easy to satiate student grading hungers. Still, the problem is that the educational process has devolved into two steps, classroom activities and grading, omitting any focus on the tension, struggle, friction and effort that results in learning and education, that precious middle step, now often lost in the dense foliage of Academic Credentialism.
The Shift in Educational Priorities and Shared Guilt
Educational processes ideally involve classroom instruction and independent reading, leading to the struggle and fruition of learning and culminating in rigorous testing that accurately assesses understanding and application. However, many students now proudly complete their undergraduate degrees without opening a textbook. Many instructors say, “Read the PowerPoint, and you'll be fine”.
Publishers must bundle their textbooks with online quiz questions that count for grades to force students to purchase books.
Class attendance varies widely, with some students never attending, some showing up to 50% of the sessions, and the occasional one shining bright in the front row. Participation grading is always problematic. Students shouldn’t get a bonus for biological existence, and if you award grades based on the quality of their comments, it becomes forced and ineffectual.
But I have had some spectacular excuses for nonattendance: parents wanting their students’ exams changed because they want their children’s birthday festivities to include a full-day trip or the one student who thought that Caribana meant he didn’t have to write the final exam.
My favourite was the one student who showed up to class for the first time on the last class, claiming he could not find the Zoom link despite the course being held in person.
Moreover, many professors put little effort into developing their courses. Instead, they chase textbook material, relying on publisher-provided PowerPoints and quiz questions that primarily test definitions rather than the application of those concepts. Last I knew, marketing practitioners don’t walk around with glossaries. While safer for professors, this method facilitates cheating as students access online resources that offer the same question-answer set the professor uses.
My attempts to have cheating sites blocked on the university server were dismissed, even though similar measures are presumably taken for porn, but I’m not sure; perhaps masturbation is now a human right. Just use your own keyboard.
The Economic Reality
According to the Fraser Institute, administrative and non-teaching expenditures per student have increased by over 40% in the last eight years, but teaching expenses have not climbed at the same pace.
The marketplace has determined that the average new graduate is not worth, in inflation-adjusted dollars, what graduates received 20 years ago. Salaries, a reasonable measure of value, have not kept up. The marketplace, devoid of generational biases, suggests that graduates today are less well-prepared than those 20 years ago.
On the supply side, the percentage of individuals attending university has increased from 24% to 40%, which might explain some of the decline in graduate quality. In Canada, students are allowed entry to university with 5.5 - 6.5 IELTS scores, which isn’t university level. Some might say, “fail them.” A colleague did that and had protests and tents sent up in the courtyard.
It’s difficult in practice to fail too many; students are professional complainers and manipulators entitled to their entitlements. They don’t say their grades are too low or that they themselves are too lazy and stupid; they say that the professor gave a girl a funny look or mentioned how Israel had made the desert bloom and how that made them feel demeaned.
And remember, International students are not generally governed by the caps put on domestic student numbers, and their tuition fees are multiples of those of domestic students. You can’t fail them all and keep your job. Thus, classes tend to revert to the mean, and your class is dumbed down.
n 1961 spent an average of 40 hours per week on academic activities, including class time and studying. By 2003, this number had dropped to about 27 hours per week.
There is no straightforward answer to whether academic standards have slipped over the last 30 years. While there is evidence of grade inflation and reduced student workloads, these changes must be viewed within the broader context of evolving educational goals, increased access to education, and technology integration.
The shift in higher education reflects a complex interplay of maintaining rigorous academic standards while adapting to societal changes and preparing students for a diverse and dynamic world. Culture is always changing, and even Ontario’s excessive academic lockdowns will negatively affect student learning, expectations, and future productivity.
As companies see that critical thinking shows little growth over a four-year degree, they also have figured out that the famous stat that graduates do better financially than those who don’t attend university is simply a sampling error. The students who had the intrinsic fire to start a degree were better students, university or no university.
Is the future of post-secondary education going to test more soft skills? Will they use AI to test students on corporate campuses and not rely on the vetting of the post-secondary educational industrial complex?
There doesn’t seem to be much movement in this direction, but it only takes a few large companies to get this going, and it could spell trouble for four-year schools.
While some companies are increasingly open to hiring candidates without a formal degree, requiring only university admission without expecting degree completion is still rare.
Companies such as Google, Apple, and IBM, among others though, focus on candidates' skills, experience, and potential rather than strictly requiring a degree. These companies often provide on-the-job training and development opportunities to bridge skill gaps.
For instance, Google and IBM have been known to emphasize practical skills over formal education in their hiring processes. Similarly, companies like Chipotle and Home Depot value relevant experience and customer service skills, offering career advancement opportunities regardless of formal educational qualifications.
Could the traditional university model blow up? Could companies say they will test students to ensure they are good enough to get into a four-year school but not make them jump through all the hoops?
Universities tend to be reacting less with robotics and more with cheaper instructors.
As companies see that critical thinking grows little in a four-year degree and that the stat that graduates do better financially than those who don’t attend is simply the result of a sampling error, the students who had the intrinsic fire to start a degree were superior from the start.
Is the future of post-secondary education going to test more soft skills, use AI to test students on corporate campuses, and not rely on the vetting of the post-secondary educational industrial complex?
It doesn’t seem like a strong movement in this direction, but it only takes a few large companies to get this going, and it could spell trouble for four-year schools.
While some companies are increasingly open to hiring candidates without a formal degree, requiring only university admission without expecting degree completion is less common. Companies such as Google, Apple, and IBM, among others, focus on candidates' skills, experience, and potential rather than strictly requiring a degree. These companies often provide on-the-job training and development opportunities to bridge skill gaps.
While not a widespread practice, this trend indicates a shift towards valuing practical abilities and ongoing training, reflecting a more inclusive and flexible approach to hiring in today’s job market.
The market should focus on real value, and education has to go beyond just offering a credential and praying that companies believe it signals value without checking if the candidate is truly productive.
Suppose companies think their four-year graduates aren’t a big jump up on committed and bright high school graduates. In that case, universities might have to examine the gap between teaching and testing evaluations and determine how to create learning.
