via the Crunchy Con: For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time by Charles Murray

Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough -- four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you're a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school.

The merits of a CPA-like certification exam apply to any college major for which the BA is now used as a job qualification. To name just some of them: criminal justice, social work, public administration and the many separate majors under the headings of business, computer science and education. Such majors accounted for almost two-thirds of the bachelor's degrees conferred in 2005. For that matter, certification tests can be used for purely academic disciplines. Why not present graduate schools with certifications in microbiology or economics -- and who cares if the applicants passed the exam after studying in the local public library?

Certification tests need not undermine the incentives to get a traditional liberal-arts education. If professional and graduate schools want students who have acquired one, all they need do is require certification scores in the appropriate disciplines. Students facing such requirements are likely to get a much better liberal education than even our most elite schools require now.

This may reward book-learning, but is there more to education than book-learning? Especially with the 'hard' sciences? What are the dangers of reducing evidence of knowledge to exams with quantifiable results?

Read what "a Thomist" has to say about liberal education with Aristotle and St. Thomas as masters:
Formal Logic as opposed to Aristotle's Logic
Thomism and the manual tradition

Do you think that such an education (with its emphasis on the acquisition of logic) is readily susceptible to the sort of certification process that Mr. Murray advocates?

Here's the reality: Everyone in every occupation starts as an apprentice. Those who are good enough become journeymen. The best become master craftsmen. This is as true of business executives and history professors as of chefs and welders. Getting rid of the BA and replacing it with evidence of competence -- treating post-secondary education as apprenticeships for everyone -- is one way to help us to recognize that common bond.

It sounds good, in so far as it recalls the way things were done in the past, but now--are all 'professions' equal? (There are plenty of negative things to say about the MBA and becoming a functionary of the corporate world.) We need the cultivation of crafts for sustainable enterprises, which will strengthen the local economy, not 'more of the same,' with just a little tweaking to produce better results.

The medieval intellectual project flourished precisely because the cultivation of reason was subordinate to authority and to Tradition. We 'moderns' reject any sort of authority in learning, even if we must rely upon them when we read our textbooks to memorize our 'facts,' sticking to the illusion that we are self-taught and that everything that we have acquired in our study is the product of 'pure reason.' How many liberal arts school would proclaim themselves to be disciples of certain masters? It is more likely that they would claim to give their students "the critical skills" needed to make up their own minds about reality. This may resonate with what we imagine philosophy to be, but it is not how it was actually practiced or passed on by the Greeks or the medievals.