Let's See Your Credentials

So then it seems a certain trajectory has been set, as far the lives of many of my contemporaries are concerned at least. It goes something like this: Get done with college, marry or don’t marry, if you live somewhere in Lusaka, get yourself a piece of land in Lilayi or Chongwe then start building. While doing that, you could throw in a Masters class at Unilus, ZCAS, Cavendish or Zambia Open University. Or it could be Pamodzi University situated somewhere in the armpit of a residential area. All that matters is that your eyes should light up when there is talk of Masters degrees and building. There you have it and that is Success defined right there.

Or you could be one of those who desperately simply needs a credential. You have the money and maybe even the brains, but everyone has noticed how you stutter every time small talk veers towards degrees, Masters and Phds. They notice how you fidget around and make snotty noises like a drowning pig or someone with thick porridge stuck up their throat. You don’t have a degree and it breaks your bones every time a reminder to that effect pops up. And of late the regularity, nay rapidity, with which this topic has been coming up has been enough to turn your blood into bile and on the verge of screaming “leave me alone” in voice that could wake the dead.

 Actually you are sick of all of this talk. To make matters worse, as early as the last hour, in one of your idle moments while sifting through Facebook, you discovered that a childhood friend had just completed their Masters programme to a cacophony of congratulations and pic mixes. At which point you turned a ghostly purple, rushed to the wash room and stared at your reflection in the mirror for an inordinate amount of time, while muttering under your breath “What is wrong with me?” for what seemed like a million times.

Well chances are that there is nothing wrong with you, only that you have been caught up in this sometimes unfortunate obsession with credentialism. Now before you get me wrong, education is good and necessary and its returns to the economy have never been disputed. However when this education is pursued with the sole purpose of adding an extra epithet to one’s name, it sort of defeats the purpose.

A Korean professor of mine once shared a story with me about South Korea. He said if one stood in the streets of Seoul and shouted “Dr Kim! Or Dr Lee!”, over a hundred people would turn to see who is it who was calling them. The point; an average random motley crowd will probably contain more than a hundred Phd holders per square metre in South Korea. It is true that as an economy develops and as competition for upward mobility becomes fierce, the masses resort to putting in place necessary measures to edge ahead of the competition with education being the chief of them.

It turns out that the possession or non possession of academic papers happens to be the commonest method of judging a person’s abilities and even suitability for employment. I am aware of a fledgling yet commendable movement against this practice, most famously now adopted by the professional services firm Ernst and Young, where they don’t consider degrees and even A-levels as a measure of one’s proficiency and even suitability for employment. However, the majority of places use academic attainment as a way of deciding who is better or at the very least as the first point of differentiation. Ernst and Young’s case, though laudable is clearly a departure from the norm.

What this whole thing boils down to is an increase in the demand for papers and not education. The sooner, the better, the more extravagant the better. And the market has duly responded. Seems everywhere you turn is home to some university or other while newspapers are laden with universities offering one form of credential to the next. Equally the masses have obliged. Thronging these places, some that are simply a little more than hastily assembled and modified drinking places. Before long, the erstwhile students emerge from these places having had a Phd or Masters degree conferred on them. And they will warble about their degrees with such sickening monotony you would think they are a state sponsored radio station.

Now I am not trying to say anyone who has a Phd or Masters must have obtained it from a dodgy institution, or to suggest that anyone pursuing higher academic qualifications is merely fulfilling the rather voracious appetite for credentialism. There are many who are genuinely pursuing these qualifications because they genuinely want to get educated and want more knowledge in their chosen fields. These will normally worry about the reputation and pedigree of the institution with which they pursue their studies. They will also put in a good shift and deprive themselves of hours of sleep and TV so they can earn expertise in their chosen field.

But then there is another group who will cut every corner, have their assignments written for them and never even bother about the institution offering them the credential. Interestingly they will be the first to take out three paged adverts in the papers to trumpet about their achievement and splash graduation photos all-over social media to boot. I could go on and on about them. Just to say they must be every organisations nightmare considering the inevitable gap that will appear between their credential and job performance.

That said, I don’t blame them. It is up to the regulators to ensure the education system conforms to the highest standards of integrity. Otherwise we will continue having these huge gaps between credential and job performance. But then it seems most people value credentials over competence.

So next time the conversation veers towards credentials, just remember that you run your own race and having a Masters or Phd is no indisputable indication of intelligence. And if at all you are put on the spot, just shrug it off. You don’t need third-party endorsements to be confident of your value and even if you did, you have the right to do it on your own terms.