The age of credentials …

… Is this really higher education’s golden age—or is it just a gold-plated age? - The Chicago Blog | The Chicago Blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

One paragraph of his essay should be displayed in full, as a case study in point of view. “As the number of tenured and tenure-track professors has not grown nearly as fast as the output of the labs and research groups they direct, the increase suggests the importance of new methods for increasing output within academe. These include labor-saving technologies, such as more-powerful computer software; the growing importance of cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional collaborations, allowing for enhanced productivity through the division of labor; the growth of the postdoctoral research staff; and the changing norms of graduate-student publication. Many new PhDs have publication records that would have been sufficient for advancement to tenure in previous generations.” And this is good why? For whom? Only for those already within the walls. What you see depends strongly on where you stand to look.