The Crisis of Value and the Empty Credential in the Media Sector and beyond
Jim & Jill discuss this article in their podcast here.
Let’s just be real: that university degree graduate students are grinding for does not have the same value anymore it once had when I went to film school. I’ve been in the industry, and my biggest wins weren’t about the degrees; they were secured by applied expertise—mastering problems on set and managing global film productions.
Across the EU, the economic shield of a degree is failing. The employment gap protecting graduates is tragically blurring across Europe. This massive erosion of value is fueled by two threats. One is overwhelming credential inflation:
“Credential inflation is largely supply driven, not demand driven; i.e. it is driven by the expansion of schooling, like a government printing more paper money; not from demand of the economy for an increasingly educated labor force.” (Collins, 2011)
This is worsened by a shrinking student pipeline due to the demographic drop:
“The massive erosion of value is the result of overwhelming credential inflation and a shrinking student pool due to the demographic drop.” (McKinsey, 2020)
External pressures also meet internal failures: the depersonalisation of teaching. If universities don’t fix this now, they are canceling their own future:
The Great Squeeze—Why Your Degree Is Just a Prerequisite
The data doesn’t lie, but it’s easy to misread. A degree still retains value as a core labor market prerequisite, but its historical power is collapsing. The employment rate for young EU graduates is barely higher than for those with vocational training. According to Eurostats “the EU employment rate for recent graduates aged 20-34 in the EU was 82.3%. The employment rate of recent graduates from medium vocational education in the EU was 80.0% in 2024.” – a difference of a mere 2.3% percentage points.
This tiny margin is quickly destroyed by the sheer price and effort required to get that degree. This is the crisis of credential inflation at its core. Employers demand degrees for roles that never needed them before, simply because they can. This forces graduates into a low-value “bumping down” situation: you pay tuition fees and still get pushed into generic roles that use few of your specialized skills.
Sociologists Tomlinson and Watermeyer observe: “As the credentials inflate within society their original value, and exclusionary effect, consequently declines… [consequently] the pressure escalates to achieve more and better credentials to signal the demands of increasingly discriminate labour market gate-keepers” (Tomlinson & Watermeyer, 2022).
The economic result is that the university is selling a costly prerequisite rather than a valued degree.
The Betrayal of the Expert and the AI Question
The biggest failure happens inside the university. The low market value of a degree is a direct result of the devalued expertise within the classroom.
The Administrator Trap
The popular “administrator” model is sold as student-centered and flexible, but its function is often cheap efficiency. The veteran academic and former professional working in the relevant industry sector—the one with decades of specialized, real-world experience—is reduced to an “administrator” managing rubrics and group chat participation.
Lampert et al found that teachers are “increasingly overworked ‘all-rounders’ and front-line workers, having to be everything from social workers, proxy parents to administrators and managers”. This managerial workload directly conflicts with the expert’s professional identity. Team based working models can be “perceived not only as counter-cultural, but also challenging in the way it can confront established academics’ self-understandings … Characterised by ‘loss of expertise”.
Massification, Managerial Models and loss of Expertise
Massification is the structural move toward larger student bodies which created a total logistical crisis for universities. This is where models like Team-Based Working (TBW) come in. TBW is not implemented for groundbreaking teaching; it is a managerial hack used to cope with student volume and budget cuts. Just as hot-desking depersonalises the workplace, creating the feeling that a teacher is merely an asset, just like a piece of office furniture. The consequences of this philosophy, if it even qualifies for one, are severe:
“In general, massification has led to broad concerns about the dilution of knowledge creation and the quality and type of knowledge being produced” (Hornsby & Osman, 2014).
TBW is the administrative mechanism that enacts this dilution, forcing experts into managerial roles just to process the sheer number of students quickly and efficiently.
Why Pay When Gemini Has the Notes?
This leads to the non-negotiable question: If the teacher is just organising information, why should anyone pay for a degree when on-the-job training, Gemini or ChatGPT can do that task better and faster? I used Gemini to research and help me spell-check this article – AI has become my personal assistant. AI will undoubtedly become the superior content administrator:
“AI-driven virtual assistants and chatbots will handle routine tasks, such as scheduling meetings, answering frequently asked questions, and transcribing conversations… Businesses that want to attract and retain Gen Z talent need to offer flexible, tech-savvy communication tools that align with their preferences.” (Mollick, 2024, as cited in nuacom, 2023)
Why bother going to a school run by administrators and AI? I argue that it will be precisely the human, the personal relation between student and expert mentor, that makes it attractive for a student to come to school. Not some automated, AI controlled, depersonalised work- and study place.
The only way a university can justify its price is to deliver something AI cannot: deep, specialized expertise and genuine human connection. Without the human expert, the degree becomes an obsolete service.
The Fight for Personal Value
We see the structural reality: the demographic drop across the EU is forcing universities to fight for every student. TBW is deployed to gain efficiency, turning teachers into administrators, AI and on-the-job training further lower student intake. This intense competition often pressures educationalists and teachers to lower standards in favour of generic, “marketable” programs. This race to the bottom must stop. The future of higher education lies in a dramatic re-personalization of the learning experience. This means committing to the expert mentor.
Restoring the Master Coach
The teacher must transition from a low-value “administrator” to the high-value Master Coach. This is about actively mentoring students through complex, non-routine challenges. The Master Coach is the one who uses decades of experience to design assignments, forcing students to truly “Make A Difference” (MAD), grounding their soft skills in in-depth expertise. The student is paying for the experts knowledge and wisdom, as well as the ethical context of the profession explored in this relationship. People crave to be taught by those who have achieved mastery. They don’t want to be taught by an AI or glorified adminstrator.
The Undeniable Human Value
The only way to create true, sustainable value is through genuine, relational re-personalization. This is because learning is fundamentally a human exchange, not a transaction. As educational researchers note: “The relation between mentor and mentee is personal. The learning that we focus on in relation to mentorship takes place in social interaction between mentee and mentor” (Taylor & Francis Online, 2017).
Universities need to change course and restore the Expert Mentor—the Master Coach—to student centred learning. By embracing this model, universities can:
- Future-proof the degree, ensuring it remains an investment in competence, not just a costly entry pass.
- Justify their price by delivering unique, non-scalable wisdom.
- Rebuild authentic trust with students who crave genuine connection and experiences.
Conclusion: The Call to Courage
The choice facing higher education is clear: continue the de-personalized model and become obsolete, or embrace the relational commitment that justifies the cost of the degree. The economic pressures are high, but the ultimate value of education has always been the human exchange between the expert and the novice. We must demand an education that prepares us not just for the job queue, but for a career defined by mastery, integrity, and passion. TBW, the “adminstrator” teaching model have proven ineffective to make that change.
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” — Henry Adams
References
Academic and Data Sources
- Adams, H. (n.d.). (Source for the inspirational quote “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”)
- Collins, R. (2011). Credential Inflation and the Future of Universities. Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 3(2), 11–28.
- Eurostat. (2024). Employment rates of recent graduates. European Commission.
- Hornsby, A. C., & Osman, R. (2014). Massification and Changes in Higher Education: A Critical Review of the Literature. Higher Education Journal, 67(5), 551–562.
- Lampert, J., McPherson, A., & Casanueva Baptista, A. (2025). Not the job I imagined: teachers’ expectations of their work in the context of teaching shortages. Teachers and Teaching, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2025.2502953
- McKinsey & Company. (2020). Higher education enrollment: Inevitable decline or online opportunity? (Analysis of demographic trends, including the decline in high school graduates, affecting university enrollment.)
- Mollick, E. (2024). Co-intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Portfolio/Penguin. (As cited in nuacom, 2023).
- Taylor & Francis Online. (2017). Full article: Mentorship – a pedagogical method for integration of theory and practice in higher education. Taylor & Francis Online.
- Tomlinson, M., & Watermeyer, R. (2022). When masses meet markets: Credentialism and commodification in twenty-first century Higher Education. Higher Education, 83(1), 1–17.
“Without the human expert, the degree becomes an obsolete service.”
But what is the expert actually expert in? An antiquated way of working? In some ways the expert keeps racing to keep up with the field to remain relevant and keeps repositioning their part as the ‘important’ bit. It’s McLuhan’s amateurs v. experts argument with new technologies – the amateur can afford to lose, whereas the expert has the sunken cost of their expertise.
Personally, I think we’ll move closer to curators and sensemakers than experts. People who help other people navigate information to make sense of it. The flaws of A.I. sense making is well documented, but assuming machine learning improves it (it will) then our differences will be methodological. Their advantage will be quantity, ours will be quality. Theirs will be bits, ours will be atoms. The belief is that A.I. can break the triangle of production theory (time, quality, cost – you could have two sides, not three). It will always be faster and cheaper than university – so the question is, what are the qualities we will emphasise? You make a good argument for personalisation, but it is less convincing about expertise.
Thank you for reading this and you make a good argument. And apologies for the late reply. Having said that, I will disagree with you on the importance of expertise. Perhaps we have different definition of what an expert is?
My observation is that the introduction of TBW, the constant drive for more efficiency and the idea of a curator within the context of practice based learning in media production has resulted in lower quality in teaching and output.
My view of an expert is not an antiquated way of working or the stereotypical teacher-authority – at least not in my field. It is a person that can draw from a robust body of knowledge and understands how to apply it.
When teaching, the goal is not to simply to instruct students, but to set a bar and learning goal that is challenging, questions industry practices, and that results in high quality output. It is precisely expertise that facilities the making sense of information. The lack of it -in my view- is a misunderstood form of equality that does not benefit student or teacher.
This dialectal interaction can only take place in a personal space, and I think here we have agreement on re-personalising teaching. A re-personalised teaching space is where people can work in groups, where knowledge and wisdom meet and inspires. Without it, learners might as well have AI teach them at much lower cost.