3 ms·

I think for non-work-qualifying degrees, it's marginal. Obviously a doctor who is on the wards during his training needs that training. Or a lawyer who needs to

I think for non-work-qualifying degrees, it's marginal. Obviously a doctor who is on the wards during his training needs that training. Or a lawyer who needs to pass exams to even call himself that. I did an engineering degree. What am I competent at, that I actually learned at university? I don't think there's really anything. The whole thing was just a bunch of different introductions to various topics. Could I work in cryptography? Well, I did a course on RSA and that kind of thing, but I'm fairly sure I couldn't just do a job like that. Could I build electronics? Most of my higher level courses were EE courses, and I built a working radio in the first year, but I couldn't just walk into an EE job either. What about civil? I learned a few things about structures but it's not like I could just design a building. They're all just things that show that you're capable of learning stuff in some area, and you have some degree of interest. But none of them confers competence. This is what I call the miracle of graduation. People think that somehow you learned the things you need for a job in college. But logically it's impossible. When you're on your first job, you're learning that job 40-80 hours a week, and you're interacting with professionals in the field, learning valuable meta-competencies. At uni you split your 40 hours among dozens of topics and you're taking an academic view, not a professional one. Many of your hours are also spent learning how to pass exams, rather than anything useful.

__lbracket__ 4y ago
I struggle with this issue. I have a MSEE and PhD (EE) (from Stanford to boot !) and I'm not sure if I learned anything value creating in my school years. At least at the graduate level, I think a lot depends on your choices of courses. I biased toward Electromagnetism, and learned solution of PDEs. It taught me computational PDEs and building intuition for physical modeling of real world. It is certainly helping me in my "corporate" job. Yet I don't have a good answer when my dad asks 'what value are you creating'. My dad is also an EE and he has salt-of-the-earth understanding of systems, motors, 3-phase home wiring etc etc. He can fix those things in a crunch. I cant. Did Stanford teach me anything useful? I honestly don't know.
lelanthran 4y ago
> I think for non-work-qualifying degrees, it's marginal. Obviously a doctor who is on the wards during his training needs that training. Or a lawyer who needs to pass exams to even call himself that. My point is not that a degree makes you work-ready. It's that "it shows you can shop up, on time and perform reasonably" is too incorrect to be a useful argument. All degrees shows that, but some only show that while others show that the graduate in that specific degree will perform better than others (or graduates of other degrees). It's a popular idea that a degree only shows commitment, but it's a wrong idea. Only humanities degrees show just commitment. Financial, Medical, Engineering and Law degrees show commitment as well as indicate a level of willingness to engage with more difficult problems.

__lbracket__ 4y ago

I struggle with this issue. I have a MSEE and PhD (EE) (from Stanford to boot !) and I'm not sure if I learned anything value creating in my school years. At least at the graduate level, I think a lot depends on your choices of courses. I biased toward Electromagnetism, and learned solution of PDEs. It taught me computational PDEs and building intuition for physical modeling of real world. It is certainly helping me in my "corporate" job. Yet I don't have a good answer when my dad asks 'what value are you creating'. My dad is also an EE and he has salt-of-the-earth understanding of systems, motors, 3-phase home wiring etc etc. He can fix those things in a crunch. I cant. Did Stanford teach me anything useful? I honestly don't know.

lelanthran 4y ago

> I think for non-work-qualifying degrees, it's marginal. Obviously a doctor who is on the wards during his training needs that training. Or a lawyer who needs to pass exams to even call himself that. My point is not that a degree makes you work-ready. It's that "it shows you can shop up, on time and perform reasonably" is too incorrect to be a useful argument. All degrees shows that, but some only show that while others show that the graduate in that specific degree will perform better than others (or graduates of other degrees). It's a popular idea that a degree only shows commitment, but it's a wrong idea. Only humanities degrees show just commitment. Financial, Medical, Engineering and Law degrees show commitment as well as indicate a level of willingness to engage with more difficult problems.