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It's hard to know which way the causality goes here. It might just be that really exceptional undergrads happen to end up in grad school (because of pressure fr
by beala 14y ago
It's hard to know which way the causality goes here. It might just be that really exceptional undergrads happen to end up in grad school (because of pressure from professors or family, or simply because "it's just what smart people do"), even though they would have been exceptional engineers either way. I agree that PhDs are very knowledgable when it comes to their precise field of study, but this is often very narrow. How useful is this expert knowledge unless you're hired specifically for it (ie, as a researcher)?
- rayiner 14y agoSocially, there is a big value in getting a very bright person to intensely study a single area for many years. PhDs do usually go on to work in their field, and a vastly disproportionate amount of innovation comes from them. That's why I don't really buy the correlation argument. I don't think even very bright people are going to be able to make contributions like new speech recognition algorithms or new algorithms for wireless networking, robotics, etc, without the kind of dedicated and focused study that comes from a PhD (or an equivalent level of theoretical study outside a PhD program).