It’s a common meme in media today that bachelors degrees are the new high school diploma. As the plumber/philosopher article discusses, there is a glut of degree-holding individuals out of work or under employed, and that trend certainly contributes to the notion, but as that MSNBC article states, certain roles are now requiring college degrees when previously one wasn’t requested.

There is, no doubt, some degree of societal pressure to fill roles with degree-holding individuals. Given a choice between two relatively equal people, one of which holds a degree while the other does not, no hiring manager would have a defensible position by choosing the person who doesn’t have a degree.

I suspect, though, that in some fields, particularly the STEM fields, there’s another aspect to this arms race. As a species, we have continually been pushing the limits of our knowledge, and in order to keep up, we need children to learn more, faster, and earlier than they did. I remember in kindergarten 25ish years ago that we weren’t expected to know the alphabet. Each day at the beginning of the year, we had an inflatable letter outside of the classroom that we had to go find, as a class, that we could then learn about. Earlier today, I was reading through some preschool books with my three year old nephew, who already knows most of the alphabet and the sounds that the letters make because of the daycare that he attends is functioning as what kindergarten was to me.

The science that we’re performing at the highest levels has taken, in some cases, a lifetime to master, and even that was done while standing on the shoulders of giants. The timespan needs to be shortened and the learning curve needs to accelerate if we’re to keep increasing our knowledge and expanding our capabilities.

I am sure that some of the job roles that didn’t used to require a degree now legitimately do, in part because of an increase in the sophistication of the role, and in part the increase of the body of knowledge in the field. As the applied knowledge of a role increases, the importance of structured education of the people filling that role also increases.

To put it another way, if you only ever have blacksmiths teaching new blacksmiths, you wind up with blacksmiths who are the same as the ones before them. The only changes that get passed down are the individual idiosyncrasies of the mentors. Some of these may be helpful, and some may be harmful, but in a strict mentorship model, there’s no institutional curriculum to bring the body of work up to a mutually agreed-upon level.

Contrast this to most modern professions, where the profession itself, through agencies established for this purpose, leverage their accumulated political clout to affect change on behalf of the profession. If you want to sit for the test to gain your license to practice medicine in the United States, you need to have been granted a degree from one of 2,400 medical schools worldwide that have been approved by one of two groups. You can’t just study really hard and then hope to pass the test. This isn’t completely unlike VMware’s insistence that to achieve certification, you need to sit in one of their classes, regardless of your pre-existing levels of knowledge.

Ostensibly, this is because there are gaps and holes in everyone’s knowledge, and by attending a rigorously structured training course with a curriculum that has been reviewed and approved, you are less likely to have dangerous gaps in your knowledge. Also, because of money. But ostensibly, the first one too.