OT: Degrees as barriers to entry [was Re: - E04 - Leadership! Google, Guido van Rossum, PSF]

[Steve Holden]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 08:27:39 -0800, Alex Martelli wrote:
> 
> 
>>Or some even more stringent qualification, such as the state's Bar exam
>>for lawyers -- you may not be able to sit for that exam w/o the
>>appropriate degree, but the degree by itself is not enough, you still
>>have to pass the exam.  It is that way for Engineers in Italy (I passed
>>my State Exam in the early '80s), although you only need the certificate
>>for some specific professional undertakings (e.g. design a ship, or a
>>large building, or technically supervise building operations beyond a
>>certain size -- not to write software or to design chips).
>>
>>Personally, I agree with the theory, first expressed by Adam Smith, that
>>such barriers to entry are mostly useful to grant practitioners of a
>>certain profession the "scarcity value" that lets them charge higher
>>prices, although of course they're always presented as "good for
>>society".  Note that in Europe in the Middle Ages you needed strict
>>qualifications of that kind for just about anything -- you could not
>>make hats unless you belonged to the Hatters' Guild, etc; most of those
>>restrictions have since been lifted, but a few groups (doctors, lawyers,
>>accountants, ...) have managed to keep them in place.
> 
> 
> Let's not confuse the medieval guild system with today's system. Guilds
> were more like clubs than professional bodies: it was who you knew, rather
> than what you knew, that decided whether you got in. You were forbidden
> from becoming (say) a hat maker unless the other hat makers allowed you to
> join the guild. There was no independent, or even semi-independent, body
> who decided what qualifications were needed to make hats. It was all about
> who you knew -- if your uncle's best friend was a hat maker, you could be
> apprenticed to a hat maker and join the guild, otherwise there was no exam
> to sit that got you in, no matter how talented you were.
> 
I believe you are overlooking the fact that you had to serve an 
apprenticeship that only ended when you ether produced work of master 
craftsman quality or decided you would be better employed elsewhere. 
This isn't to refute the truth of Smith's assertion that the guilds 
controlled scarcity, giving them some control over price. But today's 
world, the world of "polite incompetence" (a phrase used about Virginia 
society by a dear neighbour in the USA) where few can perform the jobs 
they are paid to, but everything is cheap.

> This system combined the worst of all outcomes: you got artificial
> scarcity with the monopoly pricing that leads to, *plus* it failed to
> enforce or even encourage minimum standards of skill and strategy.
> 
Wrong [see above]. I don't remember many mediaeval cathedrals falling 
down, but the Tacoma Narrows bridge was a practical lesson in 
engineering. So what's your real point?

> By contrast, today's professional bodies like law, medicine etc. have
> independent standards of skill that must be met. I don't wish to deny
> that knowing the right people can help smooth the procedure of becoming
> a doctor, lawyer, etc., but failing to have an uncle who is a lawyer is no
> barrier to becoming a lawyer, provided you can pass the bar exam. That is
> very different from the guild system.
> 
Well, one might equally argue that becoming a master mason in the past 
required you to produce master masonic work. Since professions and 
crafts are somewhat different, however, it's unlikely to be fruitful to 
attempt to draw direct comparisons. Maybe having an uncle helped you in 
to the trade, but it didn't cut you much slack in terms of required 
standards, hence the absence of cathedral-shaped heaps of rubble. York 
Minster was built in the 1400s, for example, and doesn't look like 
falling down any time soon.

I can't think of many modern American houses likely to survive more than 
a century. They are built to a price, not a quality. The situation is 
rather different in some other countries, where natural resources have 
been depleted for longer and are correspondingly more valued.

> In general, professional bodies like engineers, doctors, etc. do a
> reasonable job of enforcing minimum standards of skill and quality.
> Certainly there are a lot fewer building collapses in countries that
> enforce building standards than countries that allow the free market to
> decide.
> 
The major problem with professional bodies is precisely their lack of 
insistence on a practical demonstration of capability. "Paper MCSEs", 
for example, frequently make bad Windows system administrators because 
their education has been geared to the acquisition not of practical 
skills but of the qualification itself. The medical profession acquits 
itself reasonably because it does still require a good amount of 
doctoring before qualification. Why are the lawyer jokes not doctor jokes?

> Free market radicals like to sneer at "for the good of society" arguments,
> but the problem with their reasoning is that they only consider the
> monetary cost of hiring a professional, and not the other costs. Of course
> anything that makes professionals scarce will increase the cost of hiring
> that professional. But they fail to take into account the externalities
> that come from increasing the numbers of under-qualified, shoddy
> professionals.
> 
Damn socialists, when will they stop insisting that profit isn't the 
most practical measure of quality? :-)

> The free market often works well for (say) enforcing minimum standards for
> bread: anyone who can taste can recognise good bread from bad, and if you
> buy bad bread from a baker today you simply will go to another baker
> tomorrow. But dealing with accountants, lawyers, doctors etc. is very
> different. Expert opinions are not like bread: only a fellow expert can
> recognise good advice from bad advice. Most people buy bread at least once
> a week, but might only get legal advice once or twice in their life. Under
> these circumstances, Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is feeble indeed, and
> shonky rip-off merchants and incompetents thrive, harming everyone.
> 
Right. If I am wrongly executed for a murder I didn't commit it will be 
a long time before I use the same lawyer in another case.

But there are other complexities you fail to consider. For example, Java 
has been "puffed" as a desirable language for so long now (around ten 
years) that even non-technical managers who shouldn't be allowed within 
a mile of a language choice feel quite at liberty to say "all our 
applications will be written in Java".

This has the even less pleasant effect that impressionable young people 
entering the industry see "learning" Java as the way to make a living, 
and can indeed make some sort of a living without ever having to 
demonstrate competence as a programmer. Which accounts for the abysmally 
poor quality of much Java code.

> That's not to say that skilled experts can't make a living -- in an
> economy filled with snake-oil medical practitioners, good experts who
> get a good reputation can charge a high premium. People who find a
> good doctor or lawyer will recommend him to their friends. This squeezes
> out the middle: new, but skilled, experts get lost in the sea of shonkies,
> but the tiny minority that manage to get a reputation will attract
> near-monopoly pricing. That leads to a two-tier system where only the rich
> and powerful can afford good experts, be they doctors, lawyers, engineers
> or accountants, and everyone else either goes without or are forced into a
> lottery where the vast majority of experts they can afford are incompetent.
> 
Welcome to capitalism. Only six more major wars and everyone will be 
doing it.

> Another major difference between today's professional bodies and medieval
> guilds is that the scarcity is not entirely (or even mostly) caused by
> the professional body. It is the universities controlling prerequisite
> degrees that gain more from the scarcity: within reason, the fewer places
> they offer for (say) law degrees, the higher fees they can charge for
> them. In my inexpert opinion, the cause of shortages of experts is more
> the fault of the universities than of the professional bodies.
> 
> 
This unfortunately does not accord with the unseemly spectacle of the 
universities rushing a "sell" their "product" to the "market", despite 
the fact that few academics have ever had to make a living by selling 
anything, let alone justifying the price of their products by providing 
acceptable quality and a money-back guarantee.

As the degree mill becomes an industry the intake pyramid inevitably 
broadens to include those of lower intellect, and unless the standard of 
education (which should perhaps now really be called training since so 
much of the academic world appears to be vocationally focussed) improves 
radically the inevitable result is a decline in the practical abilities 
of the graduates.

When *I* was an academic, teaching was regarded as a fundamentally 
boring part of the role. That was one of the reasons I stopped being an 
academic, since it was the most interesting part from my point of view.

I don't believe much has happened to change academic perceptions (i.e. I 
suspect the average academic resume will emphasise research rather than 
teaching success), but the surrounding system incessantly demands people 
who can write mediocre software rather than genuine original thinkers, 
so the universities become degree mills to earn the capitation fees to 
fund the research they are supposed to be about.

regards
  Steve
-- 
Steve Holden       +44 150 684 7255  +1 800 494 3119
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