Credential Society - An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification

List of contents

Preface 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

About the author

Randall Collins is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), and Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory (2008). He is a former president of the American Sociological Association.

Summary

The 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.

Additional text

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.

Product details

• Authors: Randall Collins
• Assisted by: Tressie Mcmillan Cottom (Foreword), Cottom Tressie McMillan (Foreword), Mitchell L. Stevens (Foreword), Stevens Mitchell L. (Foreword)
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.05.2019
• EAN: 9780231192347
• ISBN: 978-0-231-19234-7
• No. of pages: 328
• Series: Legacy Editions; Legacy Editions
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Education > General, dictionaries; USA, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, EDUCATION / History, History of Education, United States of America, USA, Social classes, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Higher & further education, tertiary education, Higher education, tertiary education, EDUCATION / Schools / Levels / Higher