By James Kwak
I just finished reading J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. I don’t feel like adding to the torrent of instanalysis of the “white working class,” however, so I’ll just comment on the description of Yale Law School—which, in the book, serves the dramatic function of introducing the author to the Elite.
There are a few details that seem unfamiliar to me—I can’t recall attending a single one of the “cocktail receptions and banquets” that Vance describes as the school’s social rituals—but then again I was thirty-nine and married with a child when I started law school. But there is one thing that Vance nails: the culture of credentialism.
Yale Law School is undeniably an elite institution, the undisputed number one school in a field that is intensely (and toxically) hierarchical. Also, because it is a law school—as opposed to other elite institutions such as West Point or the UConn women’s basketball team—it is filled with people who have never had any idea of what they wanted to do other than be successful and gain access to the best opportunities out there.
One of the curious things about Yale is that it is impossible to compete over grades; the first semester is pass/fail, and for reasons not worth going into the grading scheme is essentially meaningless after that point. I thought this was wonderful, but I’m sure at least some of my classmates experienced it as a disappointment. So what do you do if you’ve spent your life trying to prove that you’re smarter than other people? Some people use their newfound freedom to do truly great things: the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project (now International Refugee Assistance Project), for example, was founded by a few students in the class before me. Many others pour themselves into clinics that make a huge difference in people’s lives. (The challenge to the Connecticut public school system that recently won in the trial court began in a Yale clinic.) I wrote a book.
But a common reaction is to find other things compete over. And, as Vance describes, the two primary candidates are membership of the Yale Law Journal and post-graduation federal court clerkships (which is a competition that goes on and on, because it takes at least a second, and often a third year of clerking to make it to the Supreme Court). The institutional culture communicates that the most prestigious distinctions are Journal membership and federal clerkships (I’m simplifying slightly, but that’s pretty close). As Vance writes:
“No one seemed to know what value the credential actually held. We were told that the Journal was a huge career boost but that it wasn’t that important, that we shouldn’t stress about it but that it was a prerequisite for certain types of jobs.”
This is like a mind-altering drug for those twenty-somethings whose modus operandi is to accumulate badges of excellence that will open as many doors as possible. Most students come to law school with little interest in 35,000-word legal theory articles (and no interest in editing and cite-checking those articles, which is mainly what law review editors do), yet come springtime they become intensely interested in the pathologically stupid citation formatting, or “Bluebooking” test (what Vance calls “the most important test of our first year”) that represents the first step toward Journal membership.
The same goes for clerkships. I should point out that my friends who did clerkships—doing research and writing for a judge—generally thought they were a good experience (as opposed to the Journal). But that’s not why most Yale law students want them, at least not at first. It’s because they are the closest thing to graduating with honors, given that Yale doesn’t give honors at graduation. And because there are hierarchies among clerkships—appellate courts beat district courts, and within each level famous judges beat less-famous judges—a clerkship is the closest thing you can get to class rank at a school that has no class rank (or GPA, for that matter). Vance admits trying to get a clerkship with a “high-powered federal judge with deep connections to multiple Supreme Court justices” until his primary recommender—you have to have one of these to get a top-shelf clerkship, so the intermediate thing people compete for is relationships with well-connected professors—pointed out that he was doing it solely for the credential. He pulled out and got a less-prestigious clerkship where he could be close to his girlfriend. Good for him.
As you may have guessed, I didn’t apply to the Journal or to any judges. But that was because I had a family, and I didn’t want to spend any more evenings away from them to do cite checking. I also had a career and enough accomplishments behind me that I was emotionally secure enough not to pursue credentials for their own sake. But if I had been single and in my twenties, I’m sure I would have played the game. That’s what our educational system teaches smart young people: that there are universal, objective markers of achievement and ability, and that’s what you’re supposed to get.
At the end of my first year, I wrote an email to the school’s mailing list proposing that the Journal simply be opened to everyone. My basic point was that the Journal competition was an unnecessary zero-sum contest that existed solely for the purpose of having a something to compete over. If I recall correctly, the public email responses were in favor by a large margin. But the Journal gets to make its own rules, so nothing changed.
As things go, whether Yale Law School 1Ls waste dozens of hours immersing themselves in the stupidest citation system known to man (“the acme of absurdity in legal expression,” says Judge Richard Posner in Divergent Paths*) is decidedly trivial. But the broader problem of credentialism is real. For one thing, the pursuit of brass rings because they are shiny creates unnecessary stress and unhappiness. More generally, when you give out prizes based on idiosyncratic criteria, ambitious people adjust their behavior to excel at those criteria—which may not be particularly valuable in the real world.
Then there’s the cost to society. A world in which success means Rhodes/Teach for America/Goldman/McKinsey followed by Yale Law School/Harvard Business School followed by Blackstone/Bridgewater/Facebook is one in which too many talented, well-intentioned people follow the same path and end up doing the same few things. (Since I graduated from college a quarter-century ago, the only real additions to the hierarchy have been TFA and the technology behemoths.) In their famous paper, Kevin Murphy, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny found that countries with more engineering majors tend to grow faster and those with more law students tend to grow slower. A society in which smart, hard-working young people with generic ambitions tend to become hedge fund and private equity fund managers, management consultants, corporate lawyers, and strategists for technology monopolies is probably not one that is allocating talent effectively.
The reasons for credentialism go beyond any easy cure. One is the innate (personal) conservatism of people who play by the rules and excel at school. One is the high degree of inequality in contemporary society, which inflates the costs of not landing at the top end of the income distribution. One is the homogenization of culture, which means that most smart young people in the United States grow up in the same informational environment, evaluating the same set of options. Finally, for the most part, credentialism is individually rational: it’s “work for Goldman now, save the world later.” But after too many years in that environment, people come to believe that working for Goldman is saving the world (I believe the phrase is “doing God’s work“). And that’s where credentialism can lead you.
* Posner is just getting started: “The law review editors who enforce its mindless dictates are pod people. Its relentless growth threatens to lobotomize the legal profession.”
The Baseline Scenario 
Funny how all these so called smart people cant define or defend the abuses of tyranny which runs so rampant in todays society.
Tyranny is when your gvt withholds the truth (education) from the public for personal gains.
I have a list as long as your arm of these abuses, where they came from, and how to solve them.
For starters the dept of education should be renamed the dept of teaching, until they can earn the title back by correcting their prior mistakes, the old fashion way naturally.
It would lead to a draining of the swamp of todays disbelief, denial, and anger of which war, the police state, pills, stereotyping and profiling, is the solution to their problems of controlling societies.
This engineer finds your essay curious. Deserving a broad readership. But suggests the question, “how else could/should society be organized?”
Assuming that the lack of credentials (I am not even a lawyer!) is the best platform for commenting, I think you might recognize that law school and the two credentials you mention have become the graduate and post-graduate schools of the old liberal arts. For the generalist, where is there a better place to encounter close-reading, a wide variety of topics (the cases) and the application of often refined intelligence to the stuff of human experience? Law school, and especially Yale Law School, not known for preparing its newly minted lawyers to actually practice law, is the next step for a BA/BS who is not content that his or her skills for addressing the world thoughtfully are as fully refined as they might be. And, if all else fails, they can “close” residential real estate sales for a living.
You have run into the Marxist class system of our contemporary era. In pre-Revolutionary France the aristocrats justified their privileged positions by recounting the glorious deeds of their ancestors on the battlefield in their role as military servants of the Kings of France. (In other words, to their eyes, they lived in a genetic meritocracy.) Today’s aristocrats justify their privileges by recounting their glorious deeds in academia–elite institutions attended, SAT and LSAT scores and clerkships won. They, like their Ancien Régime brethren, are quite confident they live in a meritocracy. In today’s world, professionals–law, medicine, finance, lobbyists–are our aristocrats, people who earn large sums and have high social prestige without taking personal risk (unlike, say, cops or fireman or small businessmen). And in most cases their work product cannot really be objectively evaluated. Since a person’s illness or his lawsuit is unique to her, how can she actually tell if her lawyer or doctor was better or worse for her than any other? She can’t. In truth, like aristocrats of 300 years ago, their privileged positions are largely based on their close relations with governmental power which their class, what used to be known as the New Middle Class, has excelled at managing in today’s world of largely technocratic governance. But every governing class needs an ideology, and our current one is credentialism. Seriously, though, the fact that we live in an era when the New (Middle) Class is dominant explains an enormous amount about our politics, our governance, and the distribution of risk and reward in modern life–including the dysfunction that Mr. Vance records in his memoir of his childhood.
You have to think about mothers, specifically upper-middle and middle class mothers, to understand credentialism. Instead you focus on the sons (and daughters) attending the credential factories.
Slavery is no longer the “official” way to do “business” only among a very select genetic group, and only for the recent 200 years.
Now re-read the Declaration of Independence as the sum and substance of the PHILOSOPHY that finally blossomed among “Christians”, only a mere 1800 years after Jesus got hung on the cross for taking on the “credentialists” of his “Eternal Now”….different “idea” about “then this happened” now, isn’t it? A profound moment of godless evolution or the realization of Fatherhood of God, Brotherhood of Man…?
The ridiculous PRETENSE of people scratching and clawing their way to OWN, fiat-ly -through “credentialism”, what only the truly FREE were able to bring into this world has worn out “working class” PATIENCE with this kind of GOVERNMENT DIRECTED psych op abuse (speeded up with heroin epidemics) laying the LEGAL groundwork for unmitigated theft, and murder, (pre-emptive strikes against existential threats) in order to turn the producers – free men producers of a bona-fide civilization – into slaves once again!
Where is the Prime Directive when you need it? :-) Maybe someone should have studied the unintended consequences of handing a gorilla a loaded machine gun before the “elite” started paying slave labor with guns and having the “taxpayer” pay for them for the guns through bankster schemes – stealing the taxpayer’s houses/jobs/credentials – USURY.
Yea, you politicos “mis-read” the American People because you did not KNOW that we were FREE….truly you did not. Your gene pool never got there, yet….? It took “Christians” 1800 years to be convinced of the superiority of the civilization and society that arises from the honest labor of free men. So do not worry about when you get your credentials, you’ll get it if you stop murdering and stealing to get it.
The Urantia Book, Page 854 – “….It is the people who make a civilization, civilization does not make the people….”.
Nihilism, hedonism, anarchy.
Fiat issued currency, distributed to the less risky, seems to have been successful in bringing down the civilization built by FREE peoples – go figure.
So a PhD in “economics” means you are an expert at creating downfalls, or preventing the downfalls…? Who credentializes the credentialism – no conflict of interest there…? Haha
What shall we do with this moment of godless evolution, philosophically speaking, of course…Are we emerging as beautiful butterflies?
Well Annie it could be worse, you could have Ray step up and tell you you don’t understand the system and he hasn’t the energy to explain it to you.
Perhaps the system doesn’t understand the system.
I mean where’s the sense in adding mandates and then stepping back financially as you electrocute the patient and then expect miracles to occur after the shock and awe wear off.
Clearly the godless have another pitch to prevent such things, otherwise its just godless brutes who happen to missing some antennae and simply don’t understand their own system, or at least the missing parts and where to go from here.
And once Amazon Go becomes the norm, there goes the service jobs…
It appears we’ll have to keep this credential Jeannie in the bottle a couple more years and step up the war on the undercovers and PI’s of the world. Buckle your seatbelts folks, its going to be a bumpy, bloody and expensive ride home from here on out.
Quy mô làm giàu cùng quyền chọn nhị phân là hướng giúp chúng ta có thể trở nên giàu có và sang trọng an toàn, với độ rủi ro thấp.
Đăng ký ngay tại sàn :http://www.ggbinary.com/vi/BiggestInAsia/
Can anybody translate vietmanize? I know they are waiting in the wings for their day of justice, but trying to figure out this paragraph is challenging.
There is no sane way to conclude anything good from the results of the Presidential election and yet this column hints at a faint star glowing in the darkness. Candidate X Yale Law School(YLS), incumbent President(PRE) YLS, PRE before him Yale normal school, PRE before him YLS, PRE before him YLS. It used to be you had to be a high ranking Free Mason, now we have YLS to replace it.