| Hmm. I think is a poor article because it lacks depth and simply makes a bunch of assertions many of which don't even follow from the premises in the article itself. I might have refrained from saying so explicitly had I thought you were actually interested in exploring the question and were gathering information, but it seemed to me that you've made up your mind and are working backwards from your conclusion. You haven't really addressed my first point. What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities? I was trying to point out that we can make all the assertions we want, but none of them might be true, so we need to guided by data not opinions or anecdotes. You seem to have missed this point. Administration costs, questionable research, credentialing, etc. That huge increase in tuition costs is going somewhere, isn't it? My understanding is that tuition is rising because of university funding being cut. In fact, some of the first few articles when you google for this are [1, 2, 3] which clearly couple tuition increases with budget cuts. Are you not aware of this? Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.? This is the unnecessary barrier. Now you have to spend money and time to get a degree just to keep up. If you can't do that, you're worse off. This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem. Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point. No, I don't think it proves your point. You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree and the existence of people who have done things of value without a degree disproves your point. Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already. yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours. You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system. That's not what I'm claiming. What I said was that given that this happened, that research has already more than paid for itself. If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting (which you haven't specified), that might or might not be true depending on what you're proposing. I'm skeptical though that a system that eschews public funding of research will work better than the current one. I think it's not a coincidence that the US is the pre-eminent leader in high-technology research and also houses some of the best graduate schools in the world. [1] http://www.highereducation.org/reports/affordability_supplem...
[2] http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/feb/01/florida-college-u...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/nyregion/cuny-board-approv... |
yummyfajitas directly counters the same claim I was referring to.
No, that is exactly what you claimed. You said, word-for-word, that it "would've been impossible [for me to publish the article] without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades". Yes, I'm claiming there is more than one way to do research. Your claim, that what was done was the only possible way to do it, is extraordinary to me. And again, that is what you're claiming when you say it "would've been impossible" for me to publish an article on the internet.