Varieties of Credentialism in Crisis: Class Formation in German and US-American Higher Education

While economists usually see higher education as a way to enhance human capital or to select talent, sociology has often treated it as a means for the transmission of social status. This paper illuminates an even more basic function: the creation and legitimation of inequality through “certified educational merit.” The distribution of scarce income and power positions, once explored by scholars like Randall Collins, has become more important in the context of “massified” systems of higher education and rising levels of economic inequality. How these contextual changes affect the “credentializing” function of higher education strongly depends on the availability of system-specific individual education pathways. While privatized academic systems are often also stratified, with an almost class-specific hierarchy of universities and colleges, systems with a strong public tradition tend to cultivate formal distinctions, e.g., between academic and vocational education or between pure and applied sciences. US and German higher education can serve as exemplary cases for these tendencies, and comparing their recent changes can help to reconstruct different systemic answers to the dual challenge of educational expansion and rising inequality, including such aspects as: Is there a general trend towards further stratification? Do the problems of weak (class) selectivity translate into a crisis of the ‘public research university’? Do the costs of an extended competition for educational credentials necessarily lead to rising student debt crisis? This paper assesses the contemporary validity of theoretical arguments on credentialism by comparing institutional changes and analyzing recent outcome data for the economic situations of students.