| To piggyback off of your own analogy... Learning doesn't stop after an initial degree. So, in medicine, you have situations where nurses are adopting many of the roles that physicians have stereotypically occupied, in terms of NPs and nurse anesthetists, etc. Granted, they do this with additional education, but it's still acquired gradually rather than in a single degree. PAs, which are ostensibly assistants, essentially have the same training after a certain period of time as physicians, especially with med schools shrinking their in-class curricula, and PA programs having stricter pre-degree experience requirements. I think the argument that's implicitly being made with this sort of model is that you don't need a monolithic degree to learn a given skillset, and there are multiple routes to the same outcome. Furthermore, having a monolithic degree doesn't mean you know everything there is to know in the field (especially as your degree drifts further and further into the past). My guess is a certain proportion of those non-CS graduates provide something else to corporations other than low-level fundamentals of computer science. My prediction is that medicine will crumble under its own weight as these sort of realities become too expensive to ignore. There's too much of an unmet need for health care to ignore the huge swath of people who can competently provide it. Maybe something similar is happening in IT. Your analogy is also a little interesting in that in many settings, the tasks done by nurses and physicians are not the same. I routinely have seen physicians ask nurses to complete tasks like put in IV lines and so forth because they didn't know how to do them, and didn't want to botch the job. The nurses weren't simply a substitute, they were functioning in a different role. |