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: This important book is an antidote to atheoretical work in contemporary studies of higher education and is a critical complement to the study of stratification. Technology has changed much about how we work. It has also changed a great deal about how our higher education institutions are organized. This book speaks to why those two domains are interrelated. Moreover, it provides a roadmap for the systematic study of higher education and inequality.--From the foreword by Tressie McMillan Cottom