In 1976 Ronald Dorepublished a study called “The Diploma Disease” in which he argued “the ‘bureaucratization of economic life’ in all modern societies is making selection for jobs/careers by education attainment more and more universal.” From this he argued that one could predict the flow of “credentialization” throughout an economy, for which the primary indicator was the university degree. At the time he was most concerned about Associate and Bachelor degrees. In this volume in various ways we seek to extend aspects of his analyses to graduate education, arguing in some instances that for many purposes the MA is the new BA leading to most of the consequences Dore foresaw: credentialism, a lack of alignment,the privileging of the symbolic
