The Case Against Credentialism

In 1961, David McClelland, a psychologist at Harvard, published The Achieving Society, an extravagantly ambitious attempt to discover why certain cultures “worked” better than others. Why, among West African tribes, were the Ashanti and the Ibo so economically dominant? Why was so much of the commerce of Southeast Asia run by expatriate Chinese, and so little by the Malays among whom they lived? Why had Jewish immigrants to the United States risen faster than southern Italians?

McClelland's answer involved a value he called n Achievement which varied from culture to culture and gave members of different societies ways to view the working of fate. Some cultures taught that struggle was fruitless, since success or failure ultimately depended on destiny and the gods. Others conveyed to their children the view that every person could control or at least influence his outcome in life. Luck muttered, but a prudent man could make his own luck. The odds might be long but they were rarely insuperable. Indeed, in “achieving” societies people regularly underestimated the odds against them and launched ventures that on the facts seemed quite likely to fail. For indications about the n Achievement level of various cultures McClelland looked at nursery rhymes, children's stories, folktales, and other vehicles for the unconscious transmission of values.

When Americans culture was viewed through this lens, is a folktale that seemed to promote an astronomically high level of n Achievement. Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Edison, Andrew and even Dale Carnegie—these and countless other self-made men prove that hard work might well be rewarded and sights could never be set too high. Staring with Poor Richard's Almanac and running through the horatio Alger series and such inspirational business tracts as Acres of Diamonds and A Message to Garcia, the flourishing self-improvement industry reflected the American faith that each person held the keys to success in his own hands.

With their regression charts and biographical data, sociologists have demonstrated that the saga of the self-made success was partly myth. The Americans business titan of the late nineteenth century was more likely to have been born to a comfortable, educated, urban family than to have been a son of toil. Still, McClelland never claimed that the folktales he analyzed—about bad fairies and magic spiders and friendly giants—were literally true. What mattered was that they were told and heard, and that they shaped a culture's attitude. Repeated in schoolrooms and parlors, emphasized in speeches, novels, and popular magazines, the folktales of American business successes emboldened the impressionable public to try. When the sociologist Ely Chinoy studied a community of autoworkers in the 1950s, many people told him that they viewed their jobs in the factory as temporary. Their real dream was to strike out on their own, with a farm, a gas station, or a store.

McClelland's most important point was probably his initial one: that there is a deep connection between ways we hope to advance as individuals and the economic resiliency the entire culture displays. The nation's bookshelves now groan with analyses of America's productivity problems the competitive woes. Might part of what they seek to explain lie in the changing folklore of success and the private concepts of ambition?

To judge by the recent celebration of entrepreneurs, the American business folklore would seem to be robustly n Achievement-laden as ever. Not since the 1920s has there been so little cynicism and so much public piety about the person who takes a risk, goes out on his own, makes it all work. But once we move past the admiring profiles of software titans and biotechnology kings, the idea that the United States has given itself over to a resurgent entrepreneurial culture is hard to believe. In fact, we are seeing a war between two quite different cultures of achievement, with quite different implications for America's economic ability to adapt and pay its way.

One is the assortment of informal, outside-normal-channels, no-guarantee, and low-prestige activities that is glossed over and glamorized by the term entrepreneurialism. Most of the entrepreneurs who rise to public notice have, of course, already proved themselves successful. When we read the inspiring chronicles of Jack Kilby, a co-inventor of the silicon chip, or Fred Smith, who founded Federal Express, we know the early risks will eventually seem prudent and the early scoffers will have the joke turned on them. But the thousands of people who are trying to develop tomorrow's new industries have no such certainty: they can't be sure whether they're starting the next Xerox or the next Osborne Computers. Perhaps more important, the world seems to suspect the worst of entrepreneurs. The term inventor still conjures up a character with a garage full of gadgets; how much more dignified is the sound of banker, lawyer, or manager at IBM. No one brags to friends about children who have signed up for the Learn Computer Repair schools advertised on matchbook covers, even though such self-help courses epitomize the n Achievement idea that individuals can improve their standing and control their own fate.

Parents brag, instead, about the son who has finished college or the daughter who has been accepted to law school. Even as modern America honors the successful entrepreneur, it reflects the tremendous pull exerted by the security, dignity, and order of the professionalized world. The basic tenet of this culture of achievement is that he who goes further in school will go further in life. American society is often described as a meritocracy, in the sense that those who show the most pluck and academic merit will prevail. The Houston housewife who labored in obscure solitude on her first novel, picked an agent's name out of a magazine, and then sold her book last summer for $350,000 is a figure from the first culture, that of self-help; if she uses the money to send her son to Andover, Yale, and Harvard Law, he will be citizen of the second, the meritocracy.

The rise to professional status is one of the most familiar and cherished parts of the American achievement ideal. What immigrant saga would be complete without the peddler's grandson receiving his M.D.? But such an ideal is also at odds with most analyses of what the society as a whole needs if it is to continue to achieve. If everyone has the tenure and security that come with professional status, who will take the risks?

NOWHERE IS THE TENSION BETWEEN THE TWO CULTURES, the entrepreneurial and the professional, more evident at the moment than in American business. At just the time when American business is said to need the flexibility and the lack of hierarchy that an entrepreneurial climate can create, more and more businessmen seem to feel that their chances for personal success will be greatest if they become not entrepreneurs but professionals, with advanced educational degrees.

In the past twenty years enrollment in graduate business schools has increased by a factor of ten. Next spring 67,000 new M.B.A.s will take their degrees to the marketplace. Alert to the workings of supply and demand, some business-school officials have predicted a glut; already, newer, weaker schools have been retrenching, and some recent graduates have settled for less attractive jobs than they might once have hoped to get. Still, overall enrollment continues to rise, and graduates of the most prominent schools are heavily in demand. The business-school community closely studies each school's “return on investment” or “value added” ratio—how much an M.B.A. degree adds to a person's salary, compared with how much it costs to obtain. At Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School, the nation's oldest graduate business college, tuition this year is $11,000, and the average starting salary for graduates is around $43,000. “That four-to-one ratio has been constant for at least the fifteen or twenty years. I've been aware of it,” Colin Blaydon, Amos Tuck's dean, says. Harvard also reports a four-to-one ratio, down from the heady seven-to-one ratio of 1969, but not so far that Harvard has any trouble filing its admissions quotas.

The rise of the M.B.A. has occurred during precisely the era in which, as anyone who follows business magazines is aware, the content of graduate business training has come under increasing attack. “We have created a monster,” H. Edward Wrapp, of the University of Chicago's business school, wrote in 1980, in Dun's Review. “The business schools have done more to insure the success of the Japanese and West German invasion of America than any one thing I can think of.” I'd close every one of the graduate schools of business,” Michael Thomas, an investment banker and author, wrote in The New York Times.

The specific case against business schools is that they have neglected certain skills and outlooks that are essential to America's commercial renaissance while inculcating values that can do harm. The traditional strength of business education has been to provide students with a broad view of many varied business functions—marketing, finance, production, and so forth. But like sociology and political science, business training has gotten all rapped up in mathematical models and such ideas as can be boiled down to numbers. This shift has led schools to play down two fundamental but hard-to-quantify business imperatives: creating the conditions that will permit the design and production of high-quality goods, and waging the constant struggle to inspire, cajole, discipline, lead, and in general persuade employees to work in common cause.