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I think people are confused here. It is not about going to college, it is about selecting field of study. A plumber don't need to go to college he just need a v

I think people are confused here. It is not about going to college, it is about selecting field of study. A plumber don't need to go to college he just need a vocational training by doing hands on. But a mechanical engineer/scientist has to go to college to study something deeper. Udacity and coursera are filling up the gap for college courses, but you need expert professor guidance if you want to do some research.

icelancer 7y ago
>> Udacity and coursera are filling up the gap for college courses, but you need expert professor guidance if you want to do some research. This is definitely not true across the board. I have multiple peer-reviewed published papers (in pretty solid journals) in a field I never formally studied, and am a college dropout to boot.
barry-cotter 7y ago
No doubt there are marginal professors who are just barely capable of doing research by virtue of intense effort by the people who taught them, applying the techniques they learned in grad school for their entire careers. Everyone else ends up reinventing themselves and their research multiple times. Even something resembling explicit education in research is unnecessary. The average medical school teacher is a physician who never got a Ph.D. and most teachers at law schools have the same degree they end up teaching (in the US), the JD, which has no mandatory research component.