[ferguess_k]

I have never done any chip design work, but I have seen some hobbyists going on with HDL without a degree. It's definitely not professional level but I suspect they are hireable materials at least. This leads me to ask the two questions:

1) If chip design (or X, anything) is so vital, so important to national security, why do universities insist that a degree of X include a lot of unrelated courses? You can argue that universities are not just for employment (yeah, as if most people go to university just for fun), but by the name of God, I really hate it when my university forced me to go through all those BS selective courses to reach 120. If you ask me, it's just money grabbing.

2) Why can't students go straight to a fab or whatever after bachelor and do their masters THERE? Isn't the industry a much better place to do that? Actually, why don't the industry simply hire high school students and go from there? Companies used to do that in the 50s/60s. I don't know if they still do that but I think it's rare.

[gsf_emergency]

These are horrendously difficult questions, though a partial answer to 2) is that labor (with "Baumol" training costs factored in) was so cheap up till the early 60s that high schoolers were easily competitive with college grads..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#Education

Easier question to answer:

  Why is it so hard to scale payouts to craftspeople (designers, writers, musicians, YouTubers, actors even.)

Even easier question to answer:

  Why is the exchange rate of social status to USD so inelastic

[ferguess_k]

Ah, thanks for the link. I do hope that labor gets more share in the revenue. I kinda love the idea of "cooperative corporations" where shares are more or less evenly shared by the employees (there are ofc differences between different levels, and I'd imagine a large amount of stocks are "frozen"). I think it's going to be a lot harmonic for all employees (even the managers).

[gsf_emergency]

Note the original paper by Baumol and Bowen:

"On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems" (1965)

https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1816292

>It is largely for this reason that performing arts organizations in financial difficulty have often managed to shift part of their financial burden back to the performers--and to the managements, who also are generally very poorly paid by commercial standards.

Imho the paper continues to function after you patch it with your favorite calling, design-driven industry or organizational structure :)

[mint2]

Are you asking why college isn’t a vocational school or technical school? Or are you wondering why the USA doesn’t have apprenticeships in the way Germany and others have?

A college isn’t really meant to be a narrow tracked vocational school - but it’s fair to ask why aren’t their more vocational schools for high tech fieldss

[cityofdelusion]

For number 1, there really does need to be some wider reforms, but I fear that won't happen until the whole student loan paradigm crashes and burns. I had a couple of fully paid semesters that were 100% electives I had no interest in. I would have preferred to graduate a year earlier (and thus, a year richer) or take courses that were actually relevant. Problem is that universities talk out both sides of their mouth -- raking in huge amounts of cash like a corporation, feasting off guaranteed loans from 18 year olds, while espousing some nobler concept of education/enlightenment on the other hand.