I graduated with a degree in English literature from a decent state school seven years ago, immediately felt like a fraud because I wasn't going to grad school, and spent the better part of a decade waiting to be "found out" in whatever job I was in. Turns out that was stupid. My degree opened exactly zero doors. My ability to figure things out and do them well opened doors.
But here's the thing that still bothers me: even knowing intellectually that my degree doesn't matter, it somehow still feels like it does. I still have a little moment of pride when I'm in a room and can casually mention where I went to school. I still feel a twinge when I'm around people with advanced degrees. I still want my kids to go to a "good" college, whatever that means.
This is the real power of credentialism. It's not that the degree itself has intrinsic value. It's that we've internalized this belief so completely that it becomes self-reinforcing. We've turned "education" into "credentials" and stopped questioning whether they're actually the same thing.
The thing I actually learned in college had almost nothing to do with the classes: how to write, how to read carefully, how to argue a position coherently. I could've learned that anywhere. But because I learned it in the context of an institution with a name and a tradition and a price tag, we all act like it's worth something.
Meanwhile, people are spending enormous amounts of time and money on credentials for careers that have fundamentally changed since those credentials were designed. It's like we're all taking exams for a test nobody updated.
I don't have an answer to this. I just know I'm complicit in the same system I think is broken, and I'm not sure how to untangle that.
The thread has evolved from exploring credentialism as psychological self-deception to recognizing it as a class-access mechanism. Early responses highlighted survivorship bias and field-specificity; recent responses reframe the core tension: credentials function as equalizers for people without networks, yet simultaneously reinforce class gatekeeping. The OP's complicity is structural, not just personal - the system works because it solves a real problem (signaling competence without connections) while perpetuating inequality. No clear resolution emerges, only acknowledgment that understanding the system doesn't free you from participating in it.
12 responses
Feb 28, 2026
You're describing something I've been thinking about for years but couldn't quite articulate. The weird thing is that I can *feel* the artificiality of it - like when I catch myself name-dropping my school at a dinner party - and in that moment I hate myself for it. But I still do it. What gets me is that you're right that the actual useful skills are learnable anywhere, but the credential itself has become a proxy for "I can stick with something hard for four years." Except even that's not universal anymore because people drop out successfully all the time. I think the real power isn't the degree itself but what it signals about your family's resources. A degree from a "good" school says "my parents had enough money and stability for me to spend four years not earning." That's the real status marker. The curriculum is almost beside the point. Which is depressing because it means we've basically created an expensive way to signal class status and called it education.
Feb 28, 2026
I spent $120,000 on a graduate degree in a field that doesn't require one, largely because I felt like I needed to "prove" my intellectual worth. Ten years later, I make good money doing something I actually enjoy, and I've never once had anyone ask about my degree. But here's what really bothers me: I don't regret the degree itself. The two years I spent in graduate school were valuable. I read incredible books. I had intellectual conversations. I thought about things deeply. The degree is almost incidental to the actual experience of learning. But I can't recommend it to anyone else because you can have that experience for a lot less money if you're intentional about it. The credential part of it is a scam. The learning part is real. We just need to stop bundling them together and pretending you can only get one if you pay for the other.
Feb 28, 2026
asking: what would you do differently if you could start over? Because I'm at the beginning of this journey and I'm confused about whether I should be going to college or learning a trade or teaching myself to code or what. Everyone says something different. The credentialists say I need the degree. The anti-credentialists say I need to build a portfolio. The practical people say it depends on the field. I appreciate you being honest about the contradiction between your beliefs and your behaviors because at least it's real, but it leaves me without a clear answer. Should I be investing in credentials or in skills? And is the answer different depending on what I want to do?
Feb 28, 2026
This whole piece is making me anxious because I'm currently in that weird liminal space where I'm applying to grad school and everyone around me is telling me it'll 'open doors' and I keep thinking of your post. My undergrad degree hasn't opened any doors - it's been a credential I use when someone asks about it. I'm mostly concerned that I'm about to spend three more years and a lot of money chasing a credential that will also not open doors. But the flip side is that some careers literally require these pieces of paper. You can't be a therapist without credentials. You can't teach at a university without a PhD (usually). So what's the answer? Just opt out? But then you're locked out of entire fields. I feel like the problem isn't that credentials exist - it's that we've extended credentialism into areas where it doesn't belong. The solution can't be to just ignore credentials entirely, because that's not an option for some people.
Feb 28, 2026
Your post hits different because you have the luxury of being able to say your degree didn't matter. glad it worked out for you. But I'm someone from a working-class family where my degree was literally the first college degree anyone in my family had. That piece of paper meant something completely different to me than it does to you - it was the signal that opened the door to the professional class. My parents didn't have a network to get me an internship. They didn't know anyone in white-collar jobs who could pull strings. The degree was the thing that said "okay, you're qualified to sit at this table." I don't think that's credentialism - I think that's acknowledging that meritocracy doesn't actually work without some way to signal competence. Now, do we have too many degrees in too many fields? Absolutely. Are we charging too much for them? Absolutely. But writing off the degree as meaningless kind of ignores how it actually functions as an equalizer for people without family connections.
Feb 28, 2026
You want to know what really got me about reading this? The part about your kids. Because that's where the rubber meets the road, right? When you start thinking about what you're going to encourage them to do. And I'm sitting here realizing I'm going to push them toward good schools even though intellectually I know it's kind of ridiculous. My degree definitely didn't matter for my career. I'm in tech, and I got here through a bootcamp and just being good at what I do. Nobody cares where I went to college. But I catch myself wanting my kids to have the "full college experience" at a name-brand school, and I can't even articulate why. It's like the credentialism got into my bones. The really insidious thing is that even understanding the system intellectually doesn't free you from participating in it. Maybe that's the real lesson: understanding a broken system doesn't automatically mean you can opt out of it.
Feb 28, 2026
The thing you're missing is that credentials have become a way to filter out poor people, not to identify smart people. That's the real problem. There are plenty of brilliant people who couldn't afford four years and loans. There are plenty of idiots with degrees from fancy schools whose parents could afford to pay. When we conflate "went to college" with "is competent," we're basically saying "comes from money" = "is competent." And we've all accepted that equation so thoroughly that we don't even see it anymore. Your kid wanting to go to a good college isn't about education - it's about wanting them to have access to the kind of social networks that are locked behind college admissions offices. That's the system you're complicit in, and I'd argue it's worse than just being vain about your credentials.
Feb 28, 2026
I love the honesty here but sometimes I think we overcomplicate this. You learned valuable skills, you got a credential, you used both to build a career. That's the system working. The problem isn't degrees - it's that we've made them the only acceptable path and then blamed degrees for being gatekeepers. Blame policy and culture, not the piece of paper. Your kids going to a good college is just good sense, not you perpetuating a broken system.
Feb 28, 2026
The thing that bugs me about this take is that education and credentials aren't actually the same problem for everyone. Yeah, maybe your English degree was mostly about learning transferable skills. But try being a doctor or engineer without the 'right' credentials - we actually need some kind of standardized signal for certain fields. The issue is when we've extended that thinking to jobs where it doesn't make sense. Context matters.
Feb 28, 2026
You could untangle it by actually refusing to care about it, but you won't, and neither will I, because the incentive structure is against us individually making that choice. This is a collective action problem. We all need to simultaneously decide credentials don't matter for anything to change, which is basically impossible. So yeah, you're stuck being complicit, we all are.
Feb 28, 2026
Hard disagree on one thing: the degree absolutely opened doors for you, you just don't realize it. That state school name on your resume got your foot in the door for jobs that would've never even looked at an application from someone without it. Once you're in the room, yeah, performance matters. But getting in the room in the first place? That's what the credential does. You're experiencing survivorship bias.
Feb 28, 2026
I went to a community college and then transferred to finish my degree part-time while working full-time. Took me eight years total. Nobody's impressed by that, but I learned way more doing it that way than my friends who went straight through at fancy schools. The whole thing feels like a social club with expensive membership fees and we're all just pretending the password matters.