While Congress has become pretty thoroughly professionalized in recent decades, state legislatures are still home to some genuinely eccentric people. Back when I was working for the Indiana General Assembly, one member (and not the member who was, no lie, a radio psychic) became convinced that it was crucially important for the state to address, via statute, the problem of rogue hypnotists travelling the land, preying upon unsuspecting Hoosiers. He wasn’t anti-hypnotist, mind you–he thought the government needed to protect people from unqualified hypnotists. If you ask me, real hypnotists are the ones we should be worried about (You want…to give me…your credit card…information…) but then I’m not a duly-elected public servant.
So the state passed a hypnotist licensing law, complete with the requisite boards, professional standards, forms to fill out, fees to pay, and so on. The law is still on the books; see here for more information on the Indiana Hypnotist Committee and its approved study guides (e.g. Hypnosis, Is it For You?, Lewis R. Wolberg, M.D., Dembner Books 1982.) If you’re interested, the next exam is scheduled for Friday, December 11th at 9:00 AM. Bring a pencil!
Then, after the law was enacted, a funny thing started happening: The state began receiving license applications from people who didn’t live in Indiana. People who lived in states (i.e. most states) that didn’t require hypnotist licensing of any kind. Some were from as far away as California. It turns out they were doing it so they could advertise in the yellow pages and on bus-stop billboards as “state-licensed.” They would just neglect to mention which state.
The point being, when the government endorses or mandates a specific process for gaining credentials that certify attainment of certain kinds of knowledge and skills, it matters. People take it seriously. Postsecondary education is the most complicated expensive thing you’ll ever buy and you’ll have it for the rest of your life. It’s really important that you be able to concisely and conclusively demonstrate it to other people.
Yet the way our government has gone about choosing what kinds of postsecondary education demand which levels of official state scrutiny doesn’t really make much sense. In certain situations–heart surgery, for example–there’s an obvious societal interest in strong regulation of the labor market. But licensing hypnotists is crazy, and the same is true for massage therapists, hearing aid dealers, cosmetologists, and auctioneers–all of whom also need to be duly licensed in Indiana. I mean, what’s the worst thing that could happen at an auction run by an unlicensed auctioneer? The guy doesn’t talk fast enough and people are late for lunch?
A more sensible approach is to create transparent, high-quality standards that people can take or leave as they wish. And this is an area where the government could arguably do more. A few months ago I wrote a story about an entrepreneur who is making a business of selling extremely inexpensive college courses on line. One of his biggest obstacles is that consumers tend to think, not without reason, that less expensive things aren’t as good as more expensive things. We do this unconscious math in our heads all the time: If private colleges charge $4,000 a course, than a $99 course must be 1/40th as good. The entrepreneur therefore has an extremely strong interest in proving otherwise–if his course is only half as good, it could be a really good value that people would want to pay for.
Yet there in no process in existence today that allows him to conclusively make his case. No state-endorsed exams, no common assessments or standards that groups of college have mutually agreed to endorse. The only real state-backed quality assurance process in higher education is accreditation, which creates standards for the elements of institutional quality, not what students are supposed to learn. Colleges are allegedly supposed to report learning outcomes under accreditation (good luck finding them!) but they’re invariably idiosyncratic and incomplete.
Instead of wasting time making sure that every man and woman with a swinging gold pocket watch has a government certificate, states would be better off investing in rock-solid processes for assessing certain domains of knowledge that are broadly shared across most college curricula. Right now this function is sub-optimally left in private hands.
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
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03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Mezmer, Freud, etc. were unlicensed hypnotists. A license is a form of control as much as a guarantee of expertise. Many, many professionally licensed people from various trades and skills have their licenses revoked. The answer is let the buyer beware. By the way, I’ve known many unlicensed plumbers who were as experienced and able as those who are licensed.
Clinical Hypnotherapy. Most medical insurance companies will allow a claim for hypnotherapy treatment sessions by a member of the Australian Hypnotherapists Association.
I was interested to read the original article. I have just completed the ‘required’ training in Indiana from the only accredited school on the planet. Mind you, it was not the one I would have chosen for myself if I had been given a choice. I also just sat for the so called ’state exam’. The exam itself was atrocious and insulting. It had typos, spelling errors, questions repeated with different answer choices, and so forth.
I do believe it is important to create standards for this profession (I can’t really speak for the other professions as I do not have experience in those areas–other than teaching). However, if the state is going to get involved and pass laws in regards to the profession the least they could do is to set up the vehicle to support the process in such a way as to produce highly qualified and effective hypnotists. As it stands now, the laws and the exam are set up to create failure and to limit the vast majority of people from entering into this profession.
If I could wave a magic wand and write the rules myself they would go something like this…
Individuals interested in becoming a professional hypnotherapist in Indiana would be required to receive a minimum of 250 classroom hours and a minimum of 150 hours in a supervised internship program. I believe that if the internship is set up properly, it should be up to the supervisor of the intern to make the recommendation for certification–not so poorly written exam that has not impact on filtering out those who are qualifed or not to work with real, live people.
The supervised internship is vital. It is one thing to learn about something in a book and another thing entirely to have the authentic situations to apply the book knowledge. Hypnosis is a very powerful mind tool (if you don’t believe that take a closer look at how effective television commercials really are). It should not be taken lightly. That said, it is also a wonderful profession and has much to offer the residents of Indiana. My greatest wish is to see the legislation come into a proper alignment for the betterment of the profession and the greater good of the residents of Indiana.
Maybe it’s just me…
[...] Carey tells a tale: While Congress has become pretty thoroughly professionalized in recent decades, state [...]
The problem with hypnosis is that there are many people who take a 40 hour course and then play at being psychologists by advertising to the public that they treat all sorts of psychological problems with hypnosis. They seek to gain legitimacy by saying they are certified. The state is too bussy trying to track down people without licenses practising medicine and dentistry to go after these hypnosis quacks. Unless someone is a member of ASCH or SECH, or are qualified to become a member of one of those two roganizations, they probably are just one of tho0se people who got 40 horus of training and is being a quack. That guild in New hampshire has no credibility among professionals in the mental health field.
It’s not funny. As a young teacher in Germany of 1971, I hypnotized a 10-year-old on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the private boarding-school yard. I took him back to his 4th or 5th birthday party, which made fun for all.
Then the nazi administration of the school (our US gummint left them in power there in 1945) tried to prosecute me for “screwing with the personality” of a person. (Eindringung in die Personlichkeit…). I was fortunate that the kids father refused to prosecute, believing that his kid might benefit from such exposure.
Sons of bitches should be shot, as some were at Nuremburg.
Marktropolis, it seems to me there’s a strong status quo bias in your comment: since these regulations are in place, you assume that they’re good. After all, why couldn’t the “slippery slope” argument run the other way? If hypnotists are licensed in Indiana, why not in every state? If auctioneers, why not ordinary salespeople? If chiropractic, why not homeopathy? Is there any profession, in your mind, that should not be licensed? It would appear not:
“You’re basically telling the world that the guy (or girl?) who cuts your hair doesn’t deserve to be called a professional.”
In other words, only by getting licensed can anyone be called a professional in anything. Why should that be the case? Doesn’t that make it harder for the person from the wrecked school system to get into the profession (any profession), not easier?
And, keep in mind, when you ask “don’t professions have some right to design the path into the profession?”, that’s not the situation Kevin is describing. Hypnotists didn’t design the path into the profession, Indiana lawmakers did.
So Kevin, where do you draw the line on licensure? You say no to massage therapists, what about chiropractors? Cosmetologists, no, so what about the folks who do Botox? I always hate to use the phrase “slippery slope,” but this is the same argument that the “innovators” keep saying about teaching. As in “if I know the content, I ought to be allowed to teach.” While I’m on the fence about hypotherapy, don’t professions have some right to design the path into the profession? Used to be anyone could be a doctor. Even after they started licensing doctors, there was little to no commonality of curriculum between the medical schools in this country (see Flexner report).
I do pick up a hint of superiority in your dismissal of some of these “lowly” professions. But I actually think that’s the same problem with teaching in this country: there’s been a pretty efficient (although perhaps not conscious or coordinated) campaign to demean the profession of teaching. Which is why these TFA folks are given such kudos – they’re treated like Peace Corp volunteers who just spent two years in Darfur. What about the folks who didn’t get a chance to go to Vassar or Yale, but came out of some wrecked urban school system, got certified through some third-rate state institution, and then committed their lives to teaching. For some reason the way person two became a teacher is somehow “less than” what that TFA grad has done.
Having spent more than a little time (way back in the day) working to strengthen the NCATE accreditation system, I do know I’m a little sensitive to the world of accreditation. No, it’s not perfect. But to imply that the only way to do this is through some measurement of outcomes is ridiculous. Unless you can tell me that you’ve identified THE way of measuring teacher performance. Last time I checked, the jury is still out on that one. Same goes for regular ol’ college grads. Maybe, maybe, once we’ve figured out a way to measure those things, we can revisit the conversation. In the interim, I think it’s short-sighted to imply that we can simply invest “in rock-solid processes for assessing certain domains of knowledge that are broadly shared across most college curricula.”
Given the sheer diversity of higher ed institutions’ missions, is that even possible? We can’t even get this straight in K-12, and that’s a significantly more monolithic enterprise. K-12 can’t figure out how to ensure that Algebra II in Cambridge, MA is the same as Algebra II in the South Bronx. Do you really think we can figure out some way of assessing that what is learned in Philosophy 101 is the same at Yale as it is at Elizabeth City State?
Sorry Kevin, I guess I expected more from you that a summary dismissal of all these professions that don’t require a BA. You’re basically telling the world that the guy (or girl?) who cuts your hair doesn’t deserve to be called a professional. Let me know when you’re building your dream house, and I’ll make sure to send an unlicensed plumber your way.
While I don’t disagree at all that excellent means of assessing domains of knowledge would be a marvelous investment for states (and maybe even the feds), I’m dubious that those domains would be adequately, much less rock-solidly, defined and measured by the entrepreneurs who’d be competing for their bite of the cash (more multiple choice exams graded by Scantron? really?). And I’m very happy to have the state licensing cosmetologists–they’re handling a lot of potentially dangerous chemicals, instruments, and processes. Likewise, state licensing is a useful way to distinguish between a real massage therapist and a “massage with happy ending” practitioner that my insurance won’t reimburse.