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by colechristensen
3285 days ago
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I could see 3-year degrees, but that's it. Having gone through an engineering program, the first two years were prerequisites which were entirely required before anything useful was learned starting in year three. And it wasn't just extensive knowledge gained, that was the least important part. It was learning how to think. There was quite a lot of mindset change. It just isn't feasible for many kinds of engineering to babysit high schoolers for 5 years before they become useful. (undergrad graduates aren't useful when they start either). |
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Indeed. I remember when a prof introduced us to linear programming - it was literally mind expanding - suddenly a whole class of problems that I couldn't even properly think about before because I lacked both the vocabulary and the mental structures, were within my grasp. Now it would theoretically have been possible to teach myself LP... But I couldn't have in practice, because I didn't even know there was such a thing, let alone what it was called. All the googling and stack-overflowing in the world can't help you in that situation.
A sufficiently motivated student could do it via MOOC sure (I am doing one myself right now to get up to speed on ML) but for most people, most of the time, the traditional old-fashioned in-a-lecture-theatre degree is the right call.