Description
Book SynopsisThe Credential Society by Randall Collins is a classic on higher education and its role in American society. Forty years later, its controversial claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient.
Trade ReviewRandall Collins's
The Credential Society is a theoretical and empirical tour de force, a brilliant study of the expansion of schooling in twentieth-century America that goes well beyond its central topic to illuminate connections between educational change and the world of work, the nature of status, and the role of knowledge and technology in modern life. Discovering it in graduate school was a transformative experience, and I'm delighted that it is available once again to inspire new generations of students and scholars as it inspired me. -- Paul DiMaggio, New York University
Forty years after its original release,
The Credential Society remains a powerful tool to renew our understanding of crucial topics as diverse as cultural reproduction, opportunity hoarding, professional monopoly and meritocracy. At a time when analyses of the knowledge society are proliferating, Collins’ analysis remains as fresh and penetrating as ever. This visionary classic will keep its place on syllabi for years to come. -- Michèle Lamont, former president of the American Sociological Association
Randall Collins is widely seen as one of the best sociologists of the last 50 years, and
The Credential Society is filled with gems and wonderful insights. It is a classic book on a pressing topic that remains deeply relevant today. -- Annette Lareau, University of Pennsylvania
This important book is an antidote to atheoretical work in contemporary studies of higher education and is a critical complement to the study of stratification. Technology has changed much about how we work. It has also changed a great deal about how our higher education institutions are organized. This book speaks to why those two domains are interrelated. Moreover, it provides a roadmap for the systematic study of higher education and inequality. -- From the foreword by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Collins’s insights are especially prescient, as the scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom notes in the new edition’s foreword, when considering how for-profit colleges have essentially preyed on the insecurities—and leeched off the loans and subsidies—of poor and working-class students. -- Hua Hsu * The New Yorker *
Table of ContentsPreface to the Legacy Edition
Foreword, by Tressie M. Cottom
Foreword, by Mitchell L. Stevens
1. The Myth of Technocracy
2. Organizational Careers
3. The Political Economy of Culture
4. The United States in Historical Time
5. The Rise of the Credential System
6. The Politics of Professions
7. The Politics of a Sinecure Society
References
Index
