degreeism: Disease or cure?

Drawing upon recent literature on educational inflation, overeducation, and the diploma disese, this paper examines analytically both the positive and negative aspects of degreeism in developed as well as in developing nations. Some of the positive effects of degreeism found are, for example, (1) a positive employment effect, (2) a proxy information effect, and (3) ritualistic effects. Among the major negative effects of degreeism discussed are (1) economic waste, (2) imbalance between job expectations and labor market realities, and (3) consumer deceit. Finally, alternative policy suggestions are presented for addressing the problem of degreeism. Some of the policies discussed are the degree tax, incomes policy, improved labor market information services, and modified civil service procedures. The major implication of such policies is to direct attention to the real issue of competency, not diplomas.     

Roles and characteristics of department chairmen in state universities as related to level of decision-making

Academic departments and their chairmen have long been a part of colleges and universities. A tendency toward more centralization as a result of state and federal requirements could threaten the status and loci of power within departments. The present study seeks information on the outlook of departmental chairmen in order to provide background information on what motivates chairmen and their outlook on roles required to be played.This study, which has 1,198 responses from chairmen in 38 state universities, focuses on the perception of chairmen on where major decisions are made (university, college, or departmental level), characteristics of departments by academic field, and selected personal attributes of chairmen. The implication is made that goals, duties, and satisfactions of chairmen should be given serious attention before the institution responds to external or internal pressures to restrict the decision-making process.     

Managing Bibliographic Data Quality for Electronic Resources

This article presents a case study of quality management issues for electronic resource metadata to assess the support of user tasks (find, select, and obtain library resources) and potential for increased efficiencies in acquisitions and cataloging workflows. The authors evaluated the quality of existing bibliographic records (mostly vendor supplied) for e-resource collections as compared with records for the same collections in OCLC's WorldShare Collection Manager (WCM). Findings are that WCM records better support user tasks by containing more summaries and tables of contents; other checkpoints are largely comparable between the two source record groups. The transition to WCM records is discussed.