Description: 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.
Brief description: Randall Collins is the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is, most recently, the author of Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory (2008). Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), and The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998). He was president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 - 2011.
Review Quotes: 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.--Hua Hsu "The New Yorker "