This post is an essay I wrote recently and tried to publish in several different venues, without success.  So I’m publishing it here on my blog, where editorial standards are a bit more flexible.

After spending many years decrying the rampant credentialism in the modern structure of schooling, I’m beginning to think about its possible upsides.  Yes, it undercuts academic learning by focusing instead on the accumulation of grades, credits, and degrees, and it also subverts meritocracy by rewarding form over content.  

But consider some of the benefits of credentialism both for students and for society.  It helps students gain a degree of autonomy within the prison-like confines of the hyper-controlling system of schooling that they must endure for so many years of their lives.   And it also benefits society, by encouraging students to exercise creativity, develop initiative, and learn how to operate independently within a rule-bound organization without directly challenging its norms.  Credentialism offers both a jail break and a course in entrepreneurship.

See what you think.

The Upsides of Credentialism

David Labaree

            For 30 some years, I’ve been writing about the problem of rampant credentialism in the American education system. Today, however, I want to explore the upsides of this characteristic of the system. First, a little background.

            Credentialism is different from credentialing. The latter refers to the role that schools and colleges play in certifying academic achievement. To do this, these institutions assign grades to rate the quality of students’ work, credits to show their mastery of the content in a particular course, and degrees to demonstrate their level of academic attainment. Get good grades and you earn course credit; get enough course credits and you earn a degree; and each degree earns you access to the next level of the system. Ultimately these degrees serve as badges of academic merit that qualify you for a good job.

            In short, credentialing is at the heart of the meritocracy. Your educational attainment certifies that you have acquired the skills and knowledge that will make you a valued employee. This system provides that the most capable people get the best jobs. The result is a win-win situation. Individuals get what they deserve, which they earn through academic achievement, and society gets what it needs, which is to allocate the most capable people to the most critical positions. What’s not to like?

            That’s the theory of meritocratic education. Credentialism is what actually happens within the system. It all hinges on the degree to which the badges of merit – grades, credits, and degrees – really represent a solid acquisition of valuable skills and knowledge. Are these merit badges a good measure of student learning? Goodhart’s Law asserts that they are not: “When a measure becomes a target, it is no longer a valid measure.” When students are aiming to acquire the best grades, most credits, and highest degrees, they are no longer focusing on gaining a deep and rich learning experience but on gaining the tokens of learning in the most efficient manner possible. If you can earn these tokens with less effort and less learning, all the better for you. Higher levels of the education system admit you based on your degree, which they accept as a measure of your achievement without assessing what you learned. And employers hire you because of your credential, seeing no need to question its credibility.

            Under these circumstances, students have every incentive to cut corners in pursuit of gaining the most tokens with the least effort. The ways of doing this are legion. There’s always the possibility of outright cheating: plagiarize, copy, have an accomplice or AI do the work for you. And there is a much wider range of options open to you to game the system in less overtly criminal ways. You can work the refs, manipulating the teacher to telegraph the answers or give you a break. You can use strategic studying: focusing on the questions at the end of the textbook chapter, the words in boldface type, the pattern of past tests, the kinds of arguments the instructor usually looks for. Credentialism rewards efficient planning over effective learning, gamesmanship over diligence, street smarts over scholarly skills. Education is supposed to be all about learning, but with credentialism it becomes all about scoring points. Why pay full price for a degree if you can get it at a discount?

            The result is that credentialism bends education in service to the interests of students – who are trying to use the educational system as an efficient mechanism for getting ahead or staying ahead in the race for social position. Lost in all this is not only the learning process, which is supposed to be at the heart of education, but also the meritocratic process, which enables society to gain the skills and knowledge it needs for a thriving economy and a capable polity. Bad news all around.

            But maybe there are also some hidden benefits that come from this system. Maybe not all is lost after all. Let me suggest two possible benefits – one for students and another for society. For students, gaming the system is an effective mechanism for asserting agency and preserving autonomy within a highly controlling system of education – one that sentences them to sit at a desk for six hours a day, 180 days a year for 12 years, before enduring even more years in college. For society, the benefit is that the accumulation of academic learning may not be as useful to economy or polity as the skills students acquire in the process of evading this kind of learning: entrepreneurship, independence, and initiative.           

Gaming the System as a Form of Jail Break

            For years when I was at Michigan State, I taught a required class for future teachers called “School and Society.” On the first day, when there were no readings to discuss, I’d ask students to think about their own time in school, identify one strong memory each person had about this experience, and share this with each other in small groups. When we reassembled as a class, I had each group report out the strongest memories that emerged from its members while I wrote these memories on the board (remember blackboards?). A remarkable pattern emerged every time. All of these memories were about the process of schooling rather than the educational content, about what you do and see and experience as a student in school rather than about the subject matter that constitutes the purported purpose of you being there in the first place. They remembered relationships: friends, bullies, nice teachers, mean teachers. They remembered activities and inactivities: standing line, waiting to be called on, worrying about being called on, tests, worksheets, clubs, sports, recess, lunchroom. Nobody mentioned English or math or science or history. The message for future teachers was this: although you may be focused on educating, your students are focused on schooling.

             We need to remember how unnatural schooling is, how foreign it is to the children who encounter it. Ripped from their families, kids find themselves thrown into the cauldron with hundreds of other students in a large building that simply screams “institution.” They are then grouped by age into classrooms of 25 or so. No longer unique members of a small family, they suddenly become part of a group of generic first graders placed under the authority of a strange adult. There they are subjected to a standard set of rules for behavior in a crowd, ordered by buzzers, and made to walk quietly in lines when moving through the halls. And in between the buzzers they are harnessed to a standard curriculum that compels them to sit quietly in their seats for hours on end carrying out tasks they had no part in choosing. And the ordeal continues on into the evening in the form of homework. In the title of the opening chapter of his book, Life in Classrooms, Philip Jackson calls this school experience “The Daily Grind.” This process continues for a long, long time. Including preschool, K-12, college, and graduate school, I spent an astonishing 27 years in school, more than one-third of my life. How many did you spend?

            We rationalize this system as necessary to prepare young people for success in adult life, but it certainly takes an amazingly long time to get there. And what are the costs to the student who is undergoing (enduring) this whole process? First there’s the passivity. It’s estimated that students spend 90 percent of the school day sitting quietly in a seat. Is there anything more unnatural for a person at any stage of development? No wonder there’s such a burst of jubilant voices when students are released from captivity in the school yard for a few minutes of freedom and play.

            The strain this imposes on students is apparent in the data. The US Surgeon General issued an advisory in 2025 warning of the dangerous level of mental health problems among American students: stress, anxiety, depression, ADHD. And, shockingly often, these distressed states of mind turn into a self-destructive form. This can be seen in the annual pattern in which student suicides subside every June and surge again every September. Consider one example. The schools in Palo Alto (CA), where I live, were identified as having a suicide cluster by the CDC twice in recent years. I discovered this when I rode my bike to work at Stanford, passing over the train tracks next to Palo Alto High School. For a whole school year, there was a guard posted there every day, for the sole purpose of keeping high school students from throwing themselves in front of commuter trains.

            The strain of confinement and control is particularly hard on boys, and it shows in their poor educational performance. Males in the US get lower grades than females, graduate from high school less often, are much more likely to be subject to disciplinary action and assigned to special education, and less likely to enroll in and graduate from college. The hyper-controlled setting is difficult for young people in general but particularly difficult for boys, since testosterone provides an impulse toward activity and dominance makes them more likely to push back against the continual demand to sit still and follow orders.

            Under these chronically constrained circumstances, male and female students both have a strong incentive to carve out space for themselves to maneuver. Anything to provide yourself with a little relief from the relentless flow of demands on your time and energy. Outside of recess and lunch, there are few opportunities for students to gain a bit of autonomy, to exercise a smidgeon of agency. Overtly acting out – resisting teacher demands, playing hooky, cutting class, disobeying rules, getting in fights, passing notes, acting as class clown – just get you in trouble. And over time, getting in trouble, as we’ve seen in the case of boys, brings educational punishment raining down on you – detention and expulsion; low grades, delayed promotion, and denied graduation. This punishment carries on into adult life in the form of reduced life chances, lower income, and even criminal conviction.

            As a result, directly fighting the system may be valiant but it’s awfully risky, so the more effective strategy is to be sneaky. Play the part of the good, rule-following, reasonably conscientious student, while carefully working to reduce academic pressures and cut back on the time and effort you spend in being a student while still maintaining a public posture of playing the academic game. William Chambliss provides wonderful window into this approach in his study of two high school peer groups, which he titled “Saints and Roughnecks.” The Roughnecks were the “bad” working-class kids who fought the system and got hammered by it, while the “Saints” were the “good” middle-class kids who played the game. The latter earned good grades without breaking a sweat, worked to please teachers and administrators, and maneuvered their way into extracurricular activities around the school that frequently got them out of class. They often went joy-riding around town during school hours, where a favorite game was to cover the eyes of the driver while going through an intersection. The Saints got the goodies from school while still preserving their autonomy, even though their actual behavior was more dangerous. The Roughnecks got nothing but trouble.

            I can remember working the system when I was in middle school, where my position running the movie projector, which I inherited from a friend, frequently got me out of class to show films to the lower grades. I reveled in the glorious freedom. Escaping from the controlling forces of school, even for a few minutes, felt like a form of jail break.

            And this is the advantage that credentialism offers to school students. They learn early that the system’s ability to control you is more limited than it first appears to be. I can remember hearing teachers say to a student, “Don’t let me see you do that again!” At the time, it just sounded like another way of saying, “Stop it.” But when I began to study schools, I came to realize that the teacher also meant it literally. If I see you do it again, I’ll have to punish you, since you’re directly challenging my authority. But if you do it behind my back, you won’t get in trouble. She’s inadvertently revealing the weakness of the control system, which has many blind spots that students can exploit by simply being sneaky. Just don’t let me see it and you’ll be ok. What I don’t know won’t hurt you.

            And this advice clearly carries over to the way you deal with academic assignments. Credentialism presents the freedom-loving student with a wide variety of techniques for gaining the most academic benefit for the least academic investment. So you look for every way possible to cut corners, trade form for substance, and accumulate merit badges at minimal cost in learning. And every minute saved from diligent study is a minute restored to personal control. The teacher will never know if you engaged in strategic rather than comprehensive studying, got someone else to do your homework, deployed glibness as a substitute for substance in your paper, had AI summarize the reading, feigned engagement in order to suck up, or developed a good-guy persona to deflect suspicion. Credentialism can be the key that unlocks the prison of schooling.

            Not all students, however, have the same access to this key. It’s more often the Saints rather than the Roughnecks who are able to take advantage of the credentialist shortcut. You need cultural capital to know how the system of schooling works and thus how to find its blind spots and loopholes, and upper-middle-class students are more likely to have this capital. Their parents and older siblings are experts at doing school and pass along this expertise. Working class kids are left with the options of doing what they’re told or confronting the system directly. The latter option provides autonomy at the cost of future life chances, gratifying in the short run but devastating in the long run.

Preparing Hustlers Rather than Scholars

            How does society benefit from having students master the formal curriculum? In some parts of the world, unlike the credentialist US, the educational machinery in which students are caught is very good at creating good students, but how does it contribute to making good workers? I suggest that having students learn school subjects at a high level of achievement is less useful for economic productivity than having them learn how to do school. I suggest that students who become proficient at operating effectively within a credentialist school system, where they gain the most credit for the least effort, are well prepared for pursuing a career in a free-market economy. We’re better off if schools produce fewer scholars and more hustlers.

            The credentialist American school system promotes educational formalism, targeting the tokens rather than the substance of academic learning; it aims at degree accumulation. The high-scoring Asian school systems promote the mastery of school subjects much better than American schools; they aim at curriculum accumulation. But how is the second more useful than the first at preparing students for productive participation in the modern economy?

            Recall the results of my little classroom poll: the formal curriculum plays a tiny part in students’ memories of their school experience. They recall doing school much more than learning school subjects. Think of your own working life. You drew heavily on core school skills like reading and writing and analyzing and computing. But while at work you probably don’t very often find the need to draw on your expertise with quadratic equations and geometric proofs, recalling historical dates and the names of treaties, the plot of Hamlet and the meaning of iambic pentameter, how electricity works and Newton’s law of gravitation. Recall the opening to Paul Simon’s Kodachrome, “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school/ It’s a wonder I can think at all.” A bit too strong, perhaps, but not all that far off the mark. The formal school curriculum focuses on knowledge and skills that are not often applied in the workplace.

            And consider this. For many years, American students have scored in the middle of the pack in international tests of academic achievement, yet somehow the American economy has continually outperformed the rest of world. If our schools have been so consistently mediocre, how have its graduates come to constitute such consistently world-beating workforce? Maybe it’s because what they’re learning in school is more salient to economic productivity that the mastery of English, math, science, and social studies.

            Maybe this economic success is in part the result of the skills that American students picked up in the process of diligently doing school rather than diligently studying the school curriculum. What they were learning in working their way around the curriculum was capacities that had the potential to enhance their ability to contribute to society. They were picking up skills about how to function in a work environment, network, compete, lead, and juggle priorities. They were also learning how to work the system to their advantage, how to do the minimum needed to satisfy school requirements so they could pursue personal goals, how to keep in good standing with the boss while retaining a modicum of autonomy. Maybe employees are more productive if they are adept at skirting around the formal requirements for doing their jobs so they can find more efficient and effective ways to accomplish organizational goals.  Isn’t it more productive for the economy and society to produce fewer zealous students and more accomplished hustlers? Doesn’t the credentialist system do a pretty good job of preparing actors for life in a market economy, which rewards entrepreneurship over scholarship?

            Maybe the lesson from this is that it is dangerous to take school too seriously, for both individuals and societies. The result of an intensive focus on academic learning may be, at the individual level, a generation of stressed‐out students and, at the societal level, an accumulation of academic skills and knowledge that are not especially functional for modern political, social, and economic life. It may turn out to be advantageous for a society to have an American‐style educational system, which discounts academic learning and encourages students to game the system. Game-playing students are taking a broader approach to the experience of schooling than diligent scholars. They see school as an opportunity space for pursuing a variety of potentially valuable experiences that extend well beyond learning the prescribed academic curriculum. Think of the kinds of learning that goes on through student involvement in extracurricular activities – functioning as a disciplined member of an athletic team; writing for the school newspaper; playing a role in student government, the debate team, theater, or the chess club. And also saving time for peer group activities outside school and a part-time job. These activities foster the development of a wide variety of personal, social, organizational, and intellectual skills that can be a valuable resource in adult life.

            In particular, the extracurriculars reward individual initiative, creativity, activity, and personal expression that are stifled by the over-regulated and abjectly passive experience of following teachers’ orders and confining your learning to the narrow realm of school subjects. If you never have time to let your mind and your feet wander from the straight and narrow academic path, if you can’t explore the larger social and intellectual environment, if can’t try and fail at a variety of new activities, you will never develop into a well-rounded, multi-talented, self-directed and socially-mature adult. One way to think about the difference between the dutiful student and the jail-breaker is that the former is likely to end up working in a staff position within an organization founded by the latter.

            Good students are trained to be risk averse while the game-player is a risk-taker with the chops to become an entrepreneur. Recall that one key differences between the economy of the European Union and the American economic is that the latter is full of start-ups, which have driven a sharply higher rate of economic growth over the years. Much of this difference, I suggest, can be attributed to the difference in education systems.

            So maybe credentialism in American schools has an upside as well as a downside.  Maybe we take school a little too seriously.