That seems like an absolutely terrible attitude. "Oh, you can clearly demonstrate knowledge in this area? Well, that's too bad, because you don't have a certificate reaffirming what we can easily tell by interviewing you."
Nearly all personnel managers don't have the knowledge to examine whether the candidate has a solid knowledge in an area or not. So in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to rather trust in institutions (in particular universities) that have.
Yes, as long as the institution is reputable this is a pretty good heuristic. Of course, determining how reputable an institution is can be a problem in its own right if there are tons of institutions offering seemingly identical certification.
> Of course, determining how reputable an institution is can be a problem in its own right if there are tons of institutions offering seemingly identical certification.
First: Compare the time you need to check an institution vs. the time you need for assessing a job candidate (in particular the former only has to be done one time, the latter for each candidate).
Second: Nearly all universities in Germany (in terms of quality of education) can be considered as rather equal. On the other hand: If you have a graduation certificate from a university in a country, where this is not the case, you will, indeed, be doubted, if it's not from a internally renowned university. Similar things hold for the German academic scholarship programs (there are only seven or so big ones in Germany and you know which focus they have on the candidates).
> Yes, as long as the institution is reputable this is a pretty good heuristic.
Third: This is why you preferably get certificates from reputable institutions (for Coursera, the fact that Stanford offered courses there gave some initial credibility; the same holds for edX - MIT).
Fourth: The fact that I got certificates on Coursera from not-so-renowned universities, too, doesn't make them worthless. They'd only be doubted to show deep knowledge in the topic of the course. They still show that I'm willing to upgrade my education on my one (something that employers, of course, love to see).
No, it isn't a good heuristic. How many Oxford graduates actually remember everything they were taught? How many cheated their way through the hard parts?
The only solution is to evaluate a candidate directly. Where or how they learned what they know is at best a mechanism to filter resumes but that itself is a bit naive since you could get candidates from famous universities that don't know anything useful.
> How many Oxford graduates actually remember everything they were taught?
Nobody remembers absolutely everything from any course of study. However, graduating with good marks from a university like Oxford shows that an individual is capable of succeeding in a rigorous environment.
> How many cheated their way through the hard parts?
Most likely more than zero, and this is something you have to take into account when addressing the reputability of an institution. Oxford in particular does have issues with cheating, but most of the discovered cases seem to come from their business school, so even different programs from the same university might have different reputability.
> The only solution is to evaluate a candidate directly
That's obviously false. That is one solution, and clearly the one you prefer, but it is not always (or even often) practical.
Even if they can, testing that is costly. So en entity providing proxy measuring of actual knowledge - the acquisition of the certificate - is valuable, and rational. There are shortcomings, obviously, in each measure or simplified model of every reality. For example old certificates lose informative value. That's why, for example, language certificated such as TOEFL are only valid for some time. There are other certificates, though, that probably have an expiration date for business purposes (e.g. GMAT is valid for 5 years, but it basically measures general IQ and analytic capabilities, which shouldn't change a lot in five years, IMHO).
