Mark S. (withholding the real name) worked for four years to earn his Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and then went ahead to get a Master of Arts degree in finance, which took another two years. In total, he spent $250,000, half of which he borrowed and still owes, plus the income forgone for the time he spent is at least that much.
So for his entire suite of credentials, he already blew more than a half-million dollars in direct and opportunity costs. But hey, now he’s prepared for a great career, right?
To his amazement, once he got out in the real world, he started pretty much at the bottom of the firm. No one had any respect for him. He wouldn’t advance on his degrees even from the fanciest place. He was quickly expected to gain some credentials and licenses. As it turns out, no one in the profession respects college degrees anymore. They know how academia works. It’s a flip of the coin whether the degree holder actually knows anything or can do anything at all.
There was a time perhaps 10 years ago when college degrees at least represented the determination to complete a task. But even that has been degraded over time, as university life has been nearly entirely taken over by social justice concerns and “woke” training. If people carry this nonsense into the workplace, they become an active danger to peace in the workforce and profitability. Too often, degrees aren’t something that get you in the door; they’re something to overcome in order to succeed professionally.
So what did Mark have to do? He had to hit the books again to prepare for his Securities Industry Exam, followed immediately by a Series 65 license, only to be followed by more training for industry-specific credentials such as certified financial planner (CFP), certified financial analyst (CFA), certified public accountant, and many more. You don’t need them all, but with none at all, you simply won’t last in the professional world of finance.
Mark marched through the paces with long evenings of study. He realized early on that there would be no cramming with Adderall. He had to regain the intellectual discipline that he nearly lost in the years of college when you can fake your way through just about anything. But when he finished his real exams, his colleagues changed. He was respected and advanced quickly.
Everyone knows this in industry, but college students are rarely told. Instead, the institutions pillage their six figures, hand out a piece of paper, and say bye-bye, and the only contact you get later is one urging you to donate to the institution that did you hardly any good at all and probably, on net, did harm.
Quietly but relentlessly over the past several decades, private-sector credentialing has taken the place of college degrees in most professions. In coding, you need Microsoft certification, and there are plenty of others too. In databasing for industry, you’re wise to snag your Salesforce administration certificate. In project management, there’s an exam and credentialing for that too, and so it goes for supply-chain management, human resources, and vast numbers of others.
The thing is that they’re all hard exams. You have to actually study. You have to know the stuff. The test is real, not something you can BS your way through. You have to focus, learn, and prove. These tests aren’t designed to make people feel good. They’re designed to do what they do, which is to certify that you can actually do the job well. And they’re democratic: nondiscriminatory by any of the baloney that modern academia privileges. These tests don’t care about your race, gender, intersectionality, victimization, or anything else. They’re designed to make you good at what you do and test to make sure.
Even if academia has given up standards, industry generally hasn’t. Indeed, the whole fashion for the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agendas is to get industry to behave like academia and government. But it isn’t working. There’s a growing movement that’s driving the ESG cultists out of industry. And why? Because in the end, the profit-and-loss system demands standards. No amount of blue-pilling can blot out the effects of double-entry bookkeeping.
As a result of all these private-sector credentials, academia is really being marginalized. Increasingly, the degrees academia offers are mostly only good for a career in academia. They’re credentialing for themselves only. Real life demands far more.
Daily, for example, I read writings by academic and journalistic economists that are flat-out wrong and easily corrected by the exam questions on a Series 65 exam or the CFA or CFP. Industry has the incentive to get it right. Profitability depends on it. If there’s a truth of the world out there that makes finance and economics tick and it can be discovered, it’s going to be on the exam. Academia can live forever in blissful ignorance but industry can’t.
In my fantasy scenario, I would pass out the Security Industries Exam to the economics faculty of the Ivy League and see how many passing grades would result. I estimate maybe 20 percent. For the Series 65, it would be closer to 1 percent. So if you think about it, we are in the ridiculous position of having academics who know absolutely nothing about real life pronouncing to the rest of us about how the world should work.
A huge chasm has been opened between real-world productivity and intellectual opinion. This is due to the incredible isolation of the university from the rest of life. The universities do this to their students too, but it doesn’t last. As soon as they get out in the real world, they discover that there are all sorts of licenses and certifications that they need to get anywhere in just about any profession.
That’s the way it should be. The college degree has failed, to say nothing of higher education except to the extent that it serves itself. Meanwhile, life has had to move on, which is increasingly why industries have come together to form their own methods of sorting through job skills and training people to be valuable.
What does this mean for college students? It means that you could use your time in college to actually learn something simply by signing up for the certification of your choice, studying hard, and taking the exam. Anyone who graduates and already has credentials in databasing, coding, securities, or accounting is going to have a leg up on everyone else. It’s a way to keep from wasting your precious time between the ages of 18 and 24.
I estimate that most students are completely unaware of this. What incentive does academia have to tell them? Next to none. On the other hand, an academic economist I know gives the Securities Industry Exam to his own undergraduate students as part of his curriculum. The students universally report that it was the most valuable experience they had in college.
Truly academia has passed its peak. It isn’t what it was once and likely will never be again. That’s a tragedy, but the rest of the world is making do and forming its own systems of education and testing. That’s how the collapse and rebirth happens, gradually and then all at once, and with zero fanfare.
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