Much of formal education is about credentials - students pursuing credentials to show that they are worthy, and institutions themselves (and the educators in them) pursuing credentials to show that they are worthy.
But what is the actual need that the credential is trying to fulfill? It's a need for trust.
A potential employer wants to know if they can trust that the person being employed for a particular role is capable of that role. Students pursuing education wants to know if they can trust the institute and the educators in it to do their job well.
Does it work? Not really. There's too much faking going on - from outsourcing the writing of assignments, to favouritism in grading, to teaching to the test, to cramming / strategizing for the examination (yes, that's also a form of fakery). Although there's a lot of money to be made from selling credentials, nobody really trusts them anymore:
No employer with a HR team worth its salt would hire someone purely based on their credentials (because usually that simply means the candidate is good at writing exams, and nobody has work environments like that). Even when it comes to professions like medicine (where you have to demonstrate competency beyond the written exam), if someone is credentialed as a doctor, and especially as a consultant, they ought to be trusted to be professionally competent in their work. And yet people always ask for recommendations of a “good doctor” - we would rather trust the lived experience of people we know and trust than the certifying authority.
What if, instead, we went back to basics and tried to build trust? Of course, this must not be cheap referrals or endorsements made by the nepotistic "Old Boy" network, or the insincere recommendations that has made LinkedIn a farce - it must be trust that is built over a series of real interactions within a real community in the pursuit of shared outcomes.