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> I suppose you could make the authoritarian argument that the experts know better than you and should be allowed to force you take the classes they think best.
by deong 10y ago
> I suppose you could make the authoritarian argument that the experts know better than you and should be allowed to force you take the classes they think best.
I'm not sure that's especially authoritarian rather than just practical. I have a CS PhD focused on optimization and machine learning. I trust a student to mostly decide whether they feel like computer science is a good field for them to go into, but once they've made the choice to work on machine learning, they have very few useful opinions to offer. I don't care if the student thinks statistics or linear algebra are useful, boring, whatever. Part of what that money of theirs is buying is for someone like me to make the plan that gets them from where they are now to where they want to be.
- BaronSamedi 10y agoI don't disagree with your point. I was mostly thinking of general education and the high school curricula. On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of the PhD style program. It seems old-fashioned and possibly obsolete to me. I would prefer to see it replaced by something like, in the case you mention, an advanced certification in machine learning. I don't know the field well enough to say what such a certification might entail but maybe testing and some kind of project?
- deong 10y agoI think what you're describing is a need that's filled pretty well today by a master's degree. I don't think the PhD is so much archaic as just overused. It is intended to signify that a person has demonstrated that they can contribute significant new knowledge to a field of study, and incidentally, that they can teach (graduate) university courses. Society probably needs far less of both those traits than it can supply people who want to do them.