> This transition is likely to appear first in technical degree programs, where it is relatively easy for students to certify their skills online This is dange

> This transition is likely to appear first in technical degree programs, where it is relatively easy for students to certify their skills online This is dangerously false. The world isn't software engineering. Engineering disciplines are in many ways fundamentally about learning to use expensive, special-purpose equipment to design, monitor and control expensive, special-purpose, reliability-critical infrastructure. Sometimes, as in the case of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences (the topic of my undergrad degree), access to this equipment and training is regulated and restricted by the host nation-state. Perhaps some disciplines (Mechanical, maybe Civil) are democratized enough that something like a Hackerspace membership could complement an online degree program, but for others (Aerospace, NERS, Biomedical) I just don't see how you train people and verify competence without a centralized campus and training equipment. Also, it may not be a good assumption that Software Engineering will remain as democratized as it does today. Web Development, sure, that's in some sense inherently by-and-for consumer devices. But things like IaaS, Machine Learning, and physics / engineering simulation (this last is what I now the most about) increasingly occur on specialized hardware that's at best inconvenient and at worst impossible to learn on a typical consumer device. Changes in consumer devices themselves are aso in some sense de-democratizing tech learning. My wife has worked in the higher education space in operations, and still does a lot of UX research there as well, and in her experience the technical competence of students with business-standard tech platforms (mainly e-mail, but also things like spreadsheets and word processing) is regressing, and COVID-19 is exposing how poorly current university infrastructure serves students whose only device is a smart phone (common among students from lower-income backgrounds). We may have benefitted from a blip in history where a) B2B tech vendors were unusually successful at selling their budget B2B products to consumers and b) the performance requirements of a consumer product segment (i.e. games) drove the hardware innovations underlying a high-growth B2B market (ML on GPGPU)