Here's a little example of education as credentialing being absurd. Short version: in many states, there are very strict licensing requirements for interior design. There are aspects of design for which licensing seems necessary, but there's a great deal of design that shouldn't need 4 years of schooling, 2 years of apprenticeship, and a test. The purpose of this, of course, is to keep competition out and keep wages high for the profession. The schools, of course, are more than happy to go along.

It's not just interior design. I've read of similar near-scams going on in a number of other areas.

But here's another question: to what degree is the entire education system implicitly part of the same sort of credentialing scam? I don't think the answer is "entirely", but I don't think the answer is "none", either. On a very related note, I think that as you get older, it gets more and more important to know exactly why you're going to school. But that's a post for another day.

(I haven't even touched on the other thought-provoking point of that article I linked, which is that it's hard to find so-called serious people in academia to speak out strongly against such absurdities. I don't agree too much with the author on the source of this lack, though. I think it stems more from the same source as a great many government inefficiencies -- there is a small number of huge beneficiaries and a great number of people who lose too little to put up a fuss.)