Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice

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The Argument of the Diploma Disease: a summary

Ronald Dore
To cite this article: Ronald Dore (1997) The Argument of the Diploma Disease: a
summary, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 4:1, 23-32, DOI:
10.1080/0969594970040102
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Assessment in Education, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1997

The Argument of the Diploma Disease:

a summary
Ronald Dore

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London School of Economics, Centre for Economic Performance, Houghton Street,

London WC2A 2AE, UK

In the preface to the book The Diploma Disease (Dore, 1976) I see that I attributed
my convictions to having had the 'luck to see at fairly close hand how schools work
in three societies as different as Britain, Japan and Sri Lanka' (p. xi). It often helps
in understanding an author's work to know where he's coming from, so it might be
worth elaborating.

Episode 1: 1936
I take my first serious exam at the age of 11 and am offered a scholarship to the local
grammar school. Parents proud, but uncertain. Finally decide that the expense of
buying a uniform and giving up the prospect of my earning at 14 was worth it
because the extra two years would help me to 'get on'maybe get a job in a bank.

Episode 2: late 1940s

I learn Japanese on a wartime course and cut my teeth as an academic doing
graduate research on education in Japan in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuriesthe Confucian education out of which grew, in some fiefs, Japan's first
'qualification' (if one does not count certificates in swordsmanship or flower arranging). Samurai had to prove mastery of the basic Chinese classics in order to be
allowed to succeed to the headship of their family.

Episode 3: 1950-1951
Eighteen months as an apprentice sociologist in Japan; bemused both by the strong
traces of those Confucian traditions discernible in the schools I visited, and by the
fact that (also in part a Confucian legacy) the sort of serious exam which got me into
the grammar school was used in Japan for rigorous selection at all levels of the
educational systemnotably to send only the 'best' students to the 'best' universities.
0969-594X/97/010023-10 1997 Journals Oxford Ltd

24 R. Dore
Episode 4: early 1950s
As a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of
London I frequented the sociology department at LSE where the first British studies
of social mobility were being conducted. I also read and was greatly impressed by
Michael Young's Rise of the Meritocracy (Young, 1958).

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Episode 5: 1960s
Research on industrial relations in Britain and Japan. Much impressed by how much
of the differences between the two countries seemed to be due to the fact that Japan
started industrialising late and with relatively modern technology (mechanical,
chemical and organisational technology), and was not encumbered with the institutional baggage Britain had acquired in its gradual, painful, class-conflict-ridden
process of slow, small-firm industrialisation. Wrote one or two papers on patterns of
development and the 'late development effect', i.e. the various consequences of the
fact that whereas Britain industrialised through enterprise and markets, late developers 'modernise', following models of more 'advanced' countries, so that development depends much more on deliberate state action.

Episode 6: 1970
Visited Japan as one of five 'examiners' asked by the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) to write a report, for the enlightenment of
other OECD countries, on the Japanese educational system and its problems.
Found an almost universal concern with the 'backwash' effect on middle-school
education of the selection exams for high school, and on high-school education of
the university entrance examsto the point at which people were seriously considering some kind of lottery allocation of places.

Episode 7: 1971
As a member of an International Labour Organisaton (ILO) 'employment mission'
to inquire into the large-scale youth unemployment in Sri Lanka, I spent six weeks
visiting schools and talking to educational administrators. Experienced for the first
time a country with a sharp division between a modern sector offering salaries and
security far superior to life in the traditional peasant economy; and the tremendous
strains set up because that modern sector grew only slowly, while the school
system, whose certificates had hitherto acted as licenses to enter that modern
sector, expanded at a much more rapid rate. I saw this as one more 'late
development effect', vastly accelerating processes which were common to all
modern societies.
It was those 'processes common to all modern societies' that I called 'the Diploma
Disease'. One word of caution. Many people seem to understand by 'diploma

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The Argument of the Diploma Disease

25

disease' a malady that afflicts individuals, turning them into mindless paper-chasers.
A recent French author (Vimont, 1995) for instance, writing about the explosion of
upper secondary and tertiary education that has hit France as it has Britain, denies
that all the newcomers to higher education are afflicted by the maladie du diplome (p.
6). They are, he says, behaving perfectly rationally. Nothing that I say in my book
accuses people of behaving irrationally from the point of view of their own personal
self-interestnot even the politicians (in rich as well as poor societies) who respond
to popular pressures by putting resources into secondary and higher education
which might be 'better' spent on improving primary education. It is just that there
is a gap between the private cost-benefit calculations of individuals facing certain
objective situations, and the social cost-benefit calculation of 'society's wisdom' in
creating those objective situations. The 'diploma disease', in other words, is not
quite the same as the 'paper qualification syndrome' (PQS) which Cooksey &
Riedmiller (this issue, pp. 121-135) treat as a synonym. It is something that
societies, not individuals, get, through the aggregation of the (mutually interacting)
unintended consequences of what I have just called 'processes common to all
societies'.
What are those processes? They derive from the growth of modern bureaucratic
organisations which 'rationalise' their recruitment processes by using educational
recordsparticularly performance in general education subjectsin order to identify suitable recruits. In Britain this started with the selection exams by which first the
India Office and then the home civil service sought to find the 'best and the
brightest' in the 1860s. In China the process started about 2000 years earlier. In
Britain it spread to the managerial ranks of major companies, which are also
competing for the top, say, 5% of the ability range. It also spread downwards to
middle-level occupations which take the graduates of secondary schools. In 1900
you got a job in a newspaper office by convincing the editor that you were as 'bright
as a button'. By the middle of the century there was no point in applying unless you
had a 'good School Certificate' (what later became O levels) to prove it.
All very sensible and rational. The only trouble is that it makes schooling what
Hirsch (1977) was later to call a 'positional good'something whose value is not
intrinsic but which depends on how many other people have it. And this has several
consequences. The first is called alternatively 'qualification escalation' (a steady rise
in the qualifications required for any particular job), or 'qualification inflation' (a
steady fall in the job-getting value of any particular level of qualification). I explained
this process in the book as follows:
A bus company may 'normally' require a junior secondary leaving
certificate for bus conductors and a senior secondary leaving certificate for
its slightly better-paid clerks. But as the number of senior certificate
holders grows far larger than the number of clerkships that are available,
some of them decide that 5 a week as a bus conductor is better than
nothing at all. The bus company gives them preference. Soon all the
available conductor slots are filled by senior certificate holders: a senior
certificate has become a necessary qualification for the job.

26 R. Dore

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I go on to list the multiple reasons why a bus company might allow this to
happen: because they believe that education improves people, and that therefore
they will get more for their money; or because going on to senior secondary shows
that at least people have persistence; or because, if it is a society which rations
upper secondary education by the purse, it is likely to be a sign that they come from
'a better class of family'; or because, if the rationing is by academic tests in a
relatively open-opportunity setting, they are likely to be brighter and less apt to
miscount the change.
Or it might just be that, faced with fifty applicants for five bus conducting
jobs, all of whom could do the job equally well, it just simplifies the whole
process to consider only the ten people with senior certificates and
provides a clear and objective reason for saying no to the other forty. (The
last, the legitimation aspect of it, may be particularly helpful if that forty
includes a known ne'er-do-well whom some pestiferous relative is trying to
push on you.) (Dore, 1976, p. 5)
One temporary brake on the process is employers' fear that the first few 'overqualified' people hired will feel that the job is beneath them and hence they will be
dissatisfied and unenthusiastic workers. That problem disappears when their numbers increase. It certainly does not stop the process. In Britain a recent study found
that 45% of the new enlarged intake of graduates going into the financial services
sector were hired into clerical jobs at clerical pay rates and with the same limited
career prospects as their A level predecessors (Mason, 1995).
What is so pathological about this process that warrants talk of a 'disease'? It
means that people are now staying on in school primarily in order to get a job that
10 years earlier they could have got without the extra schooling. If, as a result of that
extra schooling, they do the job better, then there is no problem. But if notif they
get the job not because they are better but for one or a combination of the other
reasons listed abovebecause their completing the extra 2 years shows that they are
brighter, or more persistent, or come from a better class of home, or simply because
educational record is used as a convenient sorting devicethen, from a simple
economic efficiency point of view, those extra 2 years of education represent a
wasteful use of resources.
But, of course, the 'simple economic efficiency point of view' is not one that
anybody in education should necessarily adopt. If the extra 2 years in school,
whatever it does to their capacity as workers, improves students as peopleas
citizens, as parents, as friends, as discriminating television viewers and newspaper
readersthen excellent; education is doing what it has always been supposed to do,
civilising people, improving the quality of life.
But does it? Here I resort to a rather simple typology of learning motives: learning
for its own sake, learning to do a job, and learning to get a job. The first, and what
I personally consider one of mankind's noblest activities, is self-explanatory. The
crucial distinction is between the other two: learning to do a job, and learning to get
a job. The first is good and necessary vocational education undertaken by people
who have a reasonably clear notion of how they are going to earn their living, and

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want to learn how to do what they are going to do well. The second is learning
simply to 'fulfil requirements' without either an intrinsic interest in what is learned
or any conviction that it is necessary or even helpful knowledge for any subsequent
job, learning undertaken solely with the intention of learning enough to pass the
examination and get the qualification necessary for a job.
Apart from the waste of social resources, the second pathological consequence
of the bureaucratisation of employment and qualification inflation is that learning
to get a job tends to displace the other two motives as a driving force animating
the school system. At the very beginning of the book, after a declaration of faith
in the saving virtues of education, I set out this view in the following 'purple'
passage.
I also believe, unlike our trendy deschoolers, [the 1970s were the heyday of
Ivan Illich and the book contains a chapter denouncing his curiously elitist
views] that there is a lot to be said for doing the educating in special places
called schools and universities. Unfortunately, not all schooling is education. Much of it is mere qualification-earning. And more and more of it
becomes so. Everywhere, in Britain as well as in India, in Russia as in
Venezuela, schooling is more often qualification-earning schooling than it
was in 1920, or even in 1950. And more qualification-earning is mere
qualification earningritualistic, tedious, suffused with anxiety and boredom, destructive of curiosity and imagination; in short, anti-educational.
(Dore, 1976, p. ix)
It was after I wrote the book that I learned in Ghana the schoolboy's mantra
CPPFChew, Pore, Pass and Forget. (Or was it not 'pore' over, but 'pour' out, on
paper, in the examination room?)
Misallocation of social resources and the degradation of the teaching-learning
process were thus the two 'deplorable consequences' of the bureaucratisation of
recruitment methods which prompted me to speak of the diploma disease. (I was
originally going to call the book 'The Scourge of the Certificate', but my California
publisher pointed out that certificates were very British and diplomas had far more
universal currency.) This is what distinguished the book from two other critiques of
contemporary education which were influential in the 1970s. The first, Ivar Berg's
Great Training Robbery (1973), was about the proliferation of 'Mickey Mouse'
vocational training courses sold by high-powered advertising. The second was
Miller's (1967) critique of 'credentialism', subsequently elaborated by Collins
(1979), which was more concerned with class conflict. They argued that the growth
of the qualification system was one way in which the upper classes maintained and
legitimised their traditional dominancebecause they could ensure that it was their
offspring who got the crucial qualifications.
One other thing the book definitely is not is a tract on the wickedness of
examinationsalthough I perhaps did not say so explicitly enough in the book not
to be misunderstood. I am all in favour of examinations for vocational courses. In
fact I recently wrote a denunciation of the National Council on Vocational
Qualifications for its prejudice against written examinations and the consequent lack

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28 R. Dore
of rigour in its assessment systems (Dore, 1996). True, the form of the examination
and the quality of the teaching on vocational courses, can cause students to forget
about real life uses of the knowledge they are acquiring and concentrate exclusively
on swotting for examinations. A book called Diplomaism (Habgood, 1975), published about the same time as mine, is primarily about the quality of medical
education. There is also the problem that, whereas most of those taking a medical
examination are indeed going to be doctors, many vocational courses carry only a
very uncertain prospect of a job at all related to the subject studied. An example is
the British General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs) provided for those
who want to stay on in school beyond 16 but are not interested in, or are not
deemed bright enough for, the academic General Certificate of Education Advanced
examinations (GCE A levels). In such courses, too, passing the exam and getting the
qualification can become the student's sole objective, even if all the qualification
may signal to the employer is something about its possessor's learning ability, not
about his or her specific knowledge.
In general education as distinct from vocational education, examinations clearly
have their uses, in language and literature, maths and science. As Tony Somerset
argues in his paper in this issue the exact form of the examinations makes a big
difference to the kind of learning activity they encourage and hence to their
effectiveness. They provide useful feedback to teachers on how effective their
teaching has been. For the pupil, the prospect of the sense of achievement at
having done well in an examination can supplement the intrinsic pleasures of
learning (e.g. satisfaction of curiosity, the sense of mastery, of growing and
developing) by providing an incentive to stick at the tough slog (e.g. of puzzling
out the difficult things, of continuous practising and memorising) that much
learning entails.
The truth of Melanie Phillips' (1996) argument was not so apparent to me when
I wrote The Diploma Disease (Dore, 1976) as it is now. She holds that pedagogical
doctrines which insist that all learning should be fun and attempt to take the tough
slog out of learning so as not to show up and discourage the slow learners, in fact
discriminate against those very students who most need to make the required effort
if they are to end up with a full range of citizen competences. Exams can also serve
to define what a society counts as a 'core citizen competence'an idea long since
familiar to the French and the Japanese, if not to the liberal individualistic British
until the recent introduction of the core curriculum and national assessment tests,
ironically at the very moment of Mrs Thatcher's strident reaffirmation of liberal
individualism!
So much for diagnosis of the diploma disease; now for its epidemiology and the
'late development effect'. The chapters on Britain, Japan, Sri Lanka, and Kenya
(Chapters 2-5) were used to illustrate the thesis that the later in world history a
country starts its deliberate modernisation process, the stronger the hold of bureaucratic recruitment practices on the economy, the faster the pace of qualification
inflation, and the worse the Diploma Disease gets, and that this process is exhibited
in the comparison of the four countries. Japan started its modernisation later than
Britain which, strictly speaking, never started 'modernising' in the strict sense until

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Harold Wilson arrived on the scene; its industrialisation was a matter of entrepreneurs and markets, not a government-led drive to catch up with more
'modern' countries. Sri Lanka started later than Japan, and Kenya later than Sri
Lanka. Little, in her paper in this volume, casts doubt on the Japan/Sri Lanka
relative timing, but although, as she points out, Sri Lanka in the colonial period
showed considerable growth of non-agricultural sectors and of free enterprise
educationlike Japan in the Tokugawa periodit is still true that the appearance of
a nationalist government with the priority objective of raising the status of 'the
nation' in the world by importing the institutions of what were seen as more
'advanced' countries, came in 1868 in Japan and in 1948 in Sri Lanka.
Chapter 6 was devoted to analysing three general propositions.
Other things being equal (we'll consider what things later) the later
development starts (i.e. the later the point in world history that a country
starts on a modernisation drive):
(i) the more widely education certificates are used for occupational
selection;
(ii) the faster the rate of qualification inflation; and
(iii) the more examination-oriented schooling becomes at the expense of
genuine education. (Dore, 1976, p. 72)
The qualifications to the general propositions followed. The later a country embarks
on its drive for modernisation:

1. The greater the use of educational qualifications in selecting for all worthwhile jobs. But
that depends on how much entrepreneurial talent there is around to develop a
small scale market private sectori.e. how exclusively employment in the public
sector is the route to wealth and power.
2. Because of the sharp dualism between the rewards available inside and outside the
modern sector, the more glittering the prizes and the more the growth of school
enrolments outpaces the growth in jobs, the faster the rate of qualification inflation.
Secondary school enrolments grew by 3% a year in Britain, 1864-1893: 8% in
Japan, 1900-1910; 14% in Sri Lanka 1950-1960; and 20% in Kenya, 19601970. But the rate of expansion depends also on the firmness of government in
resisting popular pressure to expand school places at the upper levels to accommodate the graduates of lower levels whose qualifications would, until recently,
have gained them jobs but now leaves them as 'educated unemployed'. It
depends also on the diffusion of aspirations which is related to the class
structurefar more widespread diffusion in an African country where the
first-generation elite came from peasant homes and every peasant can expect to
follow in their footsteps, than in a stratified society like Japan or Britain where
the lower classes are more likely to see higher education as 'not for the likes of
us'.
3. The more examination-oriented schooling becomes, at the expense of genuine education.
But this depends very much on the strength of pre-modern educational
traditionstr

30 R. Dore

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Confucian or Christian moral rectitude, or professional competence. In this

Britain and Japan are very different from Sri Lanka and, for the Sinhalese and
Tamil elites, at least, Sri Lanka is different from Kenya.

Chapter 7 was devoted to the battle to which Alison Wolf alludes at the beginning
of her paperthe battle between rival views of the economic function of education.
'Human capital' theory seeks to explain the universal correlation between the
number of years of schooling an individual has had and his or her annual income as
being due to the way individuals' investment in their education has 'paid off by
making them more skilled, knowledgeable and productive. 'Screening' theory, most
recently, and many would say notoriously, elaborated in The Bell Curve (Herrnstein
& Murray, 1994) holds that the correlation is largely explained by the fact that it is
the naturally brightest, the people who can learn quickly on the job, who are paid
more. They also tend to be the people who stay on longer at, and do best in, school.
Hence the correlation may have little to do with the education causing their higher
productivity. It is a 'more or less' argument, the more cautious human capital
theorists usually suggesting that the investment mechanism may account for only
60% of the variance in earnings, with the rest attributable to screening effects, luck,
etc. I argued, first, that the human capital theorists probably greatly underestimated
the importance of the screening effect, even in the United States and Britain where
most of them lived. Secondly, the importance of the screening mechanism depended
on the extent of meritocracy in a societythe extent to which educational opportunity was strictly rationed by educational achievement, thus making educational
achievement a better measure of IQ. Thirdly, what is often regarded as the main
form of the 'investment effect', namely developing mental attitudes and general
mental abilities rather than implanting specific knowledge, may work less well in
developing countries precisely because of the diploma disease effect on learning
motives. It makes schooling 'less effective in this regardless effective in developing
any mental muscle except the memory muscle, and much less effective at developing
those attitudes which make people find intrinsic satisfaction in creative mental
activity' (Dore, 1976, p. 95).
Most of the rest of the book was devoted to attempts at reform. Chapters 9-11
examined attempts in Cuba, Tanzania and Sri Lanka to insist, in the teeth of
popular pressures to do otherwise, that the school system should give priority to
educating the whole nation and that it was as important to make peasants and village
carpenters more cultivated, productive and politically aware peasants and carpenters
as it was to select and train good civil servants. Nyerere's Education for SelfReliance was a crucial text. It was not difficult to find evidence to suggestparticularly in Sri Lankathat, however well-meaning, those efforts were always likely to
be thwarted by the combined resistance of parents and teachers for whom the school
was the place by which one escaped from farming, rather than learned how to be a
better farmer.
So, what alternatives were there'? I suggested a 'radical structural package of
reform'.

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1. Shift as far as possible from conventional achievement examinations to aptitude

tests or 'encapsulated achievement tests' (testing the power to absorb a special
package of information contained in a 'one-week study package' specially prepared in great secrecy every year).
2. Recruit into all public sector jobs at the age of 16 or 18, primarily using such
tests.
3. Higher education thereafter to consist of three types;
in-service training directly relevant to the jobs people are doing or are about to
do;
in-service educationsabbatical entitlements for lifelong learning;
training for self-employment, not necessarily certifiable unless there was a need
to protect the public from 'quacks' and 'cowboys'.
4. Use the resources released by cutting back on qualification-oriented upper
secondary and tertiary schooling to do a better job on universal primary education.
And did that not seem to be very much what China was supposed to be doing
after the Cultural Revolution'? The penultimate chapter gave a bemused (there was
so much contradictory information and so many local initiatives at cross-purposes)
but cautiously sympathetic account of what seemed to be happening in China.
'Sympathetic' because I found a lot to sympathise with in what I called Chairman
Mao's romantic Confucianism, and many of the changes seemed inspired by the
same perception of the ill-effects of a predominantly qualification-oriented schooling
as I had been developing in the book. 'Cautious' because the Chinese seemed to be
abolishing all tests, except tests of virtue as demonstrated by the loyal devotion with
which they studied the works of Mao'redness' as opposed to 'expertness' in the
terminology of which Lewin (in this issue) reminds us. I could not see how they
could either avoid favouritism or achieve a fair distribution of talent, or prevent
themselves being over-run by hypocrites.
The final chapter speculates on what might be the consequences of shifting from
achievement examinations to aptitude examinations. And on what it would be like
to live in a society in which the people who occupied the positions of power and
prestige were generally seen not so much as people who had earned and deserved
their high position by virtue of their effortsand could therefore legitimately claim
high salariesbut as people who were very lucky to be born with the brains and
personalities which enabled them to have interesting, prestige-carrying and powerwielding jobs, and who shouldn't, therefore, expect to compound their good fortune
by demanding large salaries too.
This is a theme of no little contemporary relevance as our modern technology
produces an occupational structure which under free labour market conditions leads
to a growing income gapleaving increasing numbers of slow learners without any
jobs at all, and giving ever greater rewards to the quick learners (see Dore, 1994).
This question, howeverwhether the possession of market power and qualifications
is more a matter of luck than of dessertsreceives little discussion today.

32 R. Dore

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