I have a little to add to this that I think is important. I am also against credentialism, with all emphasis on the ISM, exactly as my friend Cynical Publius says here. Totally concur. I want to talk about what they took from us, though. Credentials and credentialism aren't the same thing. Credentialism is a fallacy or even a snotty ideology about holding credentials; that having credentials makes you better or even necessarily more expert, or that society should be run by people who hold credentials. The problem, and the point I want to make, is that credentials are a symbol, and that's all they are. Credentials are SUPPOSED to represent something, but they do not necessarily represent that thing. For example, Joe-Bob Corrupt might award a credential to be a professional whatsit to his nephew Joe-Bobby Corrupt even though Joe-Bobby doesn't have any of the required skills. Joe-Bobby, with that credential, can work as a whatsit, even though he isn't actually capable, which is a problem. That is, the credential can and should certify real competence, but like every other symbol, it can be corrupted from that purpose by giving credentials to people who don't actually deserve them. Direct nepotistic corruption, like Joe-Bob hooking up his nephew Joe-Bobby, is one way illegitimate credentials can be given. Other ways exist, and academia is FULL OF THEM. Some degrees and even entire fields of study shouldn't even exist, along with any jobs that will hire from them (mostly academic sinecures and nonprofit or government pseudo-jobs). Grades are padded. People are admitted, passed, and graduated who never should have been, not just because of, say, financial corruption, but because of perverse business incentives on the universities, weak administrations, and ideological idiocy like "equity grading." States have actually watered down degree requirements as well in order to produce more graduates, as though more graduates is what the economy and society needs (instead of more genuinely qualified professionals). Etc. So, in a sense, the problem of credentialism is intrinsically tied to the problem of corrupt pathways to undeserved, thus bogus, credentials. Now, this is where it gets important (and where I make my point). CREDENTIALS ARE VERY VALUABLE AND IMPORTANT. (but they only work in a high-fidelity, honest society where they represent what they claim to represent) What credentials accomplish is a kind of societal shortcut. You don't have to see if your dentist actually knows how to work on teeth or if he's just some random guy who opened a shop because the licensure (a credential) and education (another credential behind it) are supposed to validate this for you at a certain expected minimum standard. That is, the credential is supposed to indicate "the person who is doing this job is capable of it at least to a certain minimum standard." Obviously, when the credentialing systems, thus the credentials themselves, are corrupted, this whole program doesn't work. Why would we want credentials, though, and what a sane person ten years ago might have called a "good side to credentialism," abusing the language a little? Because it's a huge shortcut. It takes a TON of time and energy (that is, resources) to validate competency, especially in high-skill, specialist endeavors (e.g., dentistry, nuclear engineering, air-traffic control, piloting, surgery, etc.). The credential is the shortcut. If the only people who can get the credential are verified to be above an acceptable minimum baseline of competence, you save a TON of resources in the checking. Obviously, you still have to check, by the way, even when you do hire a credentialed person when credentials work. The person might be marginal. They might have slipped since earning their credential. Whatever. But the credential is a huge shortcut, not a guarantee. It saves tremendous amounts of resources. Because good credentials save tremendous amounts of resources when they are trustworthy and trusted, they are an enormous efficiency multiplier. We want enormous efficiency multipliers just like we don't want to find out the hard way we hired Joe-Bobby Corrupt instead of Charlie Candoit. Multiply this across millions of hires and jobs a year, and you get the idea. There's a reason we check for certified and licensed professionals on every job that matters. That reason is because the thing the credential is supposed to represent matters. The problem we find ourselves in, which Cynical Publius here is pointing at, is that we have at best medium-trust credentialing going on in our country now, no longer high-trust. One might say that this represents a fall from first-world status, and that would be right. The efficiency multiplier is already largely broken, and caveat emptor (let the buyer beware!) rules in a way it hasn't in a long time. DEI was probably one of the biggest credential murderers in our society ever, but, as I noted above, it's not alone. It's not just our universities, either. Our credentialing and accrediting agencies have been mostly conquered by DEI, ESG, and the stupid destructive ideologies and mind-rot behind them. Almost all of our accrediting bodies, many of which operate as monopolies into the professions, are captured or at least tainted. Our institutions, corporations, and best-practices are shot through with this stuff and with small armies of worse-than-useless "credentialed" political officers who aren't just a drain but a poison. Everything is tainted by this bogus credentialism problem. Everything. There's more. An additional trouble is that we all kind of have to act like this didn't happen. We don't have an alternative solution in place. We don't have alternative institutions in most cases. We don't have many, if any, alternative universities. We have few, if any, different accreditation pathways, many of these being literal, not just effective, monopolies over their professions. We have few, if any, corporations free from "corporate responsibility" programs. We have few, if any, alternative pathways to licensure. We have a contaminated workforce, contaminated educational pipeline, and contaminated certification apparatus. That is, our only practical alternative is to limp around on this broken leg and hope we can make it through the situation and maybe restore or replace what's broken along the way. In the meantime, we still need lawyers, doctors, engineers, pilots, air traffic controllers, teachers, and all manner of other professions, all of which work on the far side of credentials that are too-often dubious in their worth against the paper they're written on. The craziest part of this is that even if MOST of the credentialing system is actually still pretty effective, the problem is still unbelievably severe. Why? Because you lose the efficiency multiplier effect if even a small but sizeable minority of credentialed people are not actually competent, which necessitates checking virtually everyone by more onerous methods, qualified or not. (This isn't to be confused with the usual checking that must occur; it's much more severe.) Therefore, while I'm very much an anti-credentialist, I am a huge fan of having credentials that means something and using them like they mean what they mean. This is a societal crisis, frankly. Thank you for your time and attention. Doomsday will now progress as previously scheduled.