It seems we can’t trust our own credentials or those that we provide to our students. Or perhaps it would be better to say that we have so much confidence in the value of the credentials our universities provide that US institutions of higher education have rushed to create even more kinds of credentials—certificates, badges, and other specialist certifications—to affirm that our students have gained specific kinds of expertise that we no longer have confidence that our university degrees appear to provide. This push . . .
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
