Charles Green over at “Trust Matters Blog” has a pretty good post titled “Credentials, Elitism and Web 2.0” that discusses the ‘credential’ problem in the world today.

Take a read of Charles’ post…it has a very interesting discussion about some ‘library traditionalists’ vs Wikipedia that is good all by itself…but the best part of the post is the following few sentences (emphasis mine):

Credentialism is a disease in academia these days. Universities brag about the number of faculty with top-school PhDs. The BA now does what the high school diploma used to do—serve mainly as the cutoff point for any meaningful job. The line of sight between education and any meaningful sense of competence is getting more obscure, not less.

If someone earns and MBA, does that automatically qualify them to run a business? Does earning a law degree automatically make someone an expert attorney? Not in my opinion it doesn’t.

Expertise and experience must accompany a credential to give it some weight. Credentials are worthwhile things to have but an overemphasis on them and underemphasis on experience and expertise can lead a person or organization down a dark path.

[tags] Education, credentials [/tags]