Tax Lawyer's Blog

The battle between theoreticians and practitioners is a very old one.

At the beginning of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello the serpentine villain Iago explains to his friend Roderigo that he hates the Moor because he chose Cassio, an academically credentialed man with little field experience, as his lieutenant over Iago who, although he lacks academic credentials, is battle tested:

I know my price, I am worth no worse a place;
But he; as loving his own pride and purposes,
Evades them, with a bombast circumstance,
Horribly stuff’d with epithets of war;
And, in conclusion,
Nonsuits my mediators for, “Certes,” says he,
“I have already chose my officer.”
And what was he?
Forsooth, a great arithmetician,
One Michael Cassio, a Florentine,
A fellow almost damn’d in a fair wife;
That never set a squadron in the field,
Nor the division of a battle knows
More than a spinster; unless the bookish theoric,
Wherein the toged consuls can propose
As masterly as he: mere prattle, without practise,
Is all his soldiership.

Iago is experienced, but informally trained; Cassio is inexperienced, but formally trained. And Othello? Othello is the man responsible for the “complete disregarding” of Iago’s on-the-job-training.

And he will pay for it dearly.

The Washington Post publishes a regular advice column written under the byline How to Deal. Saturday’s edition is titled When You Have the Chops But Don’t Have the Diploma. In it the author answers the following question posited by a frustrated reader:

I do a job that, in many organizations, requires a master’s degree. I do not have one, but I do have 25 years of experience doing this job. I’ve been at my new company about a month, and a few co-workers have made comments like, “So you’re not really a [job title]” when they find out I don’t have a master’s. It bothers me because my years on the job — and everything I’ve learned about my job during those years — are being completely disregarded. Do you have any tips to help me handle this situation without letting it get to me more than it has already?

I have reproduced the part of the author’s answer that I think is particularly relevant given the ongoing taxosphere debate about preparer regulation, tax preparer experience and academic credentials:

I would hire a person with 25 years of practical experience over a neophyte with a master’s degree any day. And maybe that is what has your co-workers so bent out of shape. They may have the framed diplomas, but they do not necessarily have the skills that led your supervisor to hire you. Although they may not realize it, your co-workers worry about the competition that you pose, and they are looking for ways to assuage their anxiety by diminishing your relative worth. Their rude and inappropriate comments are a sure sign of insecurity.

Although I don’t know what you do for a living, I can surmise from the dynamic you have described that you work in an intellectual and perhaps somewhat elitist field. In such professions, fine distinctions are often made among job applicants and employees based upon level of education, alma mater and other presumed signs of pedigree.

It is fair to assume that one does acquire valuable knowledge from attending classes and that one must demonstrate a certain amount of intellectual potential to be granted acceptance to certain schools. Especially in the absence of other strong evidence of ability, therefore, level of formal education and other academic accomplishments are perfectly valid job selection criteria. Yet, as your supervisor obviously recognizes, there is little substitute for the preparation gained from actually doing a job well.

Here’s what I think:

If I worked as an apprentice to a podiatrist for 25 years I would no doubt be a better foot doctor than a recent graduate of medical school who did not have the benefit of a similar apprenticeship. But if I were given a position as a podiatrist that was superior to the position given to the new graduate, the new graduate would have every right to be ticked off about it.

In order for the questioner to have obtained his 25 years of work experience in his chosen field some employer at some time must have given him a job in that field despite the fact that he lacked the requisite educational qualifications. It is understandable then that those individuals who spent the time and the money to obtain the prescribed qualifications for the job would feel betrayed by a system that led them to believe that those qualifications were a prerequisite to advancement in the field.

For instance, if I told you that you must spend five years and $100,000 in order to obtain an advanced degree in order to get a job in a particular field, but told everyone else that they could start working immediately in the field, bypass those 5 years of study and save the $100,000 of expenditures, you would not be a normally functioning homo sapien if you did not feel somewhat betrayed.

It is obvious that someone with 25 years of experience competently performing a particular job is better at it than someone who lacks that experience, but it’s a meaningless assertion because the same reasoning applies in the case of the experienced nurse versus the newly graduated intern and the experienced paralegal versus the first year associate lawyer. 

State medical licensing boards do not permit nurses to prescribe medications and state bar associations do not permit paralegals to try cases.

Finally, it may very well be true that the questioner’s academically credentialed co-workers feel threatened by his extensive experience, but the reverse is no doubt equally true. The questioner feels threatened by his co-workers’ academic credentials.

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