Law? Medicine? Engineering? Would you want the bridges to be designed by anyone with any degree? I realize there's lots of sillyness in degree programs, but certainly the rigor is worth something, right?
You can become a licensed Civil or Aerospace Engineer and sign off on bridges and planes without an academic degree. Inversely, a degree does not make you a licensed engineer.
You have to pass the same rigorous tests. Degree can be substituted for relevant work experience.
The biomedical engineers designing your artificial heart and gene therapy have no professional licensing requirements whatsoever. A professional license to do medical engineering doesn't even exist.
A person who had studied mathematics and physics until 18 could then over two or three years easily, consume the relevant engineering curriculum from MIT/stanford/etc. if they wanted to avoid the fee's of a university education.
A business will never let some jnr hire actually design a bridge to be actually built. Most of the relevant education comes from years on the job, in almost all jobs.
All that applicants need have is enough prior conceptual foundations to cope during that on-the-job training.
This isn’t a realistic worry. Someone about to plunk down hundreds of thousands or millions for a bridge will exercise more due diligence than random selection.
Do you think so? There are already several sad examples of political leaders who insisted on people of their favorite race or sex. The bridges collapsed.
The problem with the system is that the political leaders are spending other peoples money and they'll make decisions that don't always line up with the bridges staying up.
The advantage of degree programs is that they add another layer of bureaucracy to mix. Yeah, that's a pain but it might be necessary with the political system.
It's challenging because good architects (ones you've heard of!) weren't necessarily qualified as architects, but the person designing the thing doesn't need to be the one deciding if it's structurally sound
You do need that validation step somewhere, though, and it feels quite reasonable to have stringent standards for that.
One way to work around not knowing if something is structurally sound subject to the pressures it will be under is to over build (this is what we did before we had super accurate computer simulations)
Anyway, I found this episode of 99 percent invisible to be great, especially "Escarping Imprisonment by Kurt Kohlstedt"
You have to pass the same rigorous tests. Degree can be substituted for relevant work experience.
The biomedical engineers designing your artificial heart and gene therapy have no professional licensing requirements whatsoever. A professional license to do medical engineering doesn't even exist.
https://www.bpelsg.ca.gov/applicants/flowchart_for_fe.pdf