Quote for the Day

From Randall Collins, "Credential Inflation and the Future of Universities," in The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University, ed. by Steven Brint (Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 29-30:

In principle, educational expansion and credential inflation could go on endlessly, until janitors need PhD.s, and household workers and babysitters will be required to hold advanced degrees in household appliances and childcare. Persons could be kept in school at increasing ages, up through their thirties and forties . . . It may even happen in some distant future that a species of socialism will come about in which virtually the entire population is on stipend in school, or working for the school system, while the material work of society is done by computers and robots.