[kermittd]

I think your view is small minded. One it's possible that you learned nothing during your PHD or more accurately you learned what paths not to go down.

Your knowledge doesn't disappear sure but your opportunities particularly the ability to put that knowledge to use does.

Not zero sum? It's been completely zero sum for he past forty years. Average incomes are stagnating, the cost of essential goods is rising. Furthermore the developing world's propsperity has increased but at what cost? The cost of much of the middle classes' prosperity in the developed world.

You are actually the anti-intellectual. You would tie the gaining and practice of knowledge to exclusionary institutions.

[elefanten]

If everyone put in the hours learning something that go into the average PhD, the population would be much more skilled in general. No it's not the only way to gain skill but what you're ignoring is that the overwhelming majority of people stop learning economically valuable skills in their teens. Even just continuing to do some of that throughout your 20's would be a big difference. Academic route isnt the only one to learn but empirically it's a good one because it involves making your life and schedule revolve around it -- something most people need in order to pull it off.

I've never heard anyone claim that "schools are the only way to learn" or that "you must have a degree to be skilled" -- I always hear it framed as "school's a great environment for learning" and "degrees are a useful heuristic for skill"

The good observations of the school-skeptics are not helped along by the ridiculous distortions and exaggerations.

[sjg007]

Huh? It's only zero sum in the sense that corporations and the top 1% are taking the gains. Technological progress has increase productivity in real terms and brought about new advances for what we can actually do. There also have been plenty of biotech and other engineering companies born out of the "glut" of PhDs.

Learning what not to do helps you discover what you should do and technology increase our resolution to discover scientific principles and put them to use. A PhD is an expert in research. Yes you can learn this on your own outside of academia but why? You have to put the time in anyway, may as well get the degree.

An undergraduate education prepares you for the job market whether that be graduate work, corporate work or something other activity. It may be bad at teaching automative repair, construction, plumbing, earth work, electrical work etc... but that's OK. There are other paths for that and those are not bad jobs. Even computer programming at some levels can be seen as a trade skill (wire X to Y), debug operating system. It can also be seen as a professional skill (hence the focus on algorithms/complexity etc... that we see in interviews).

At big research institutions in the sciences you get to see the future and you get to work on it or invent it. That's a nice place to be sometimes.