“Because the credentialing and licensing process uses input measures, mainly years of schooling, to determine who gets into the field, we end up licensing people who are good at studying law or business, which is not necessarily the same thing as being good at the job,” Boyatzis said.

“Occasionally a licensing procedure will require a demonstration of relevant skills—craft unions or accountants, for example. But even in those cases they have no way of assessing whether the skills and knowledge have atrophied in all the years afterwards. The physicians are a perfect example. They’ve agreed to a system for continuing education—which they can satisfy not by passing a test again but by showing that they’ve gone to a few courses each year.”

“Among lawyers, accountants and M.B.A.’s incompetence may be a nuisance, but in airline pilots it is a catastrophe. In the early days of commercial flight the airlines bore the responsibility for training and certifying their pilots, but they soon begged for government regulation, so as to spread the responsibility when crashes occurred…”

from The Case Against Credentialism
    by James Fallows
       ATLANTIC MAGAZINE, December, 1985

 And here our boy is 34 years later…