[neo_doom]

Big swing and a miss by the author here.

The learning is the point. Learning by nature shouldn't be optimized for efficiency. You learn deeply when you have to read sources, draw conclusions, synthesize information, and connect it to your own experiences. I recall writing essays in grade school and what mattered wasn't the end product but the process to arrive at the end product. The hours of research and analysis... figuring out what was true and what was questionable. When you skip steps 1-10 and arrive at the final deliverable a la ChatGPT, you miss the entire point of the assignment. Unfortunately, students are only judged on the final deliverable.

Truly, I think the only way we get back to real learning is through paper and pencil. The problem is that we've optimized our systems for learning efficiency, not learning efficacy.

[yieldcrv]

> The learning is the point.

Execution is the point for the vast majority of the population, and academia has always been tone deaf to the raison d'etre of their enrollment base. people are there for jobs, academia is aware they are there for jobs, academia pretends they are the elite socioeconomic class there for knowledge and networking or on the path to be. they are not, they are an underclass in a world where it was temporarily beneficial for a broad population to be knowledge workers. A brief half century that caused all problems that academia faces today.

A half century that will be a footnote in the millenium of these institutions as a reversion to total class segregation returns, glasses clinking to laughs over this case study of folly.

Now, we're experiencing the industrialization of knowledge work, a segment that has been spared for 260 years of the industrial revolution. The nihilism is entirely warranted, and those validating the output of agents should remain specialized in their domain, trained by niche organizations on an adhoc basis via apprenticeships.

[em-bee]

academia is for research, not for jobs. our obsession with academic degrees is an abuse of the academic system. it is used as a tool to filter candidates, but in my opinion it should actually be illegal to require an academic degree for any job that isn't about research. that's not what academic degrees were designed for. academia isn't tone deaf, it's the industry that is misguided.

germany introduced the concept of fachhochschule, which is specifically designed to fill that gap. fachhochschule is not academia, but it is designed to teach skills for jobs. the US could do something similar by designating colleges for jobs and limiting universities to research. an institution could offer both on the same campus, and there could be overlap in the classes. it just should be clear what is a job qualification and what is a research qualification.

[yieldcrv]

my comment about apprenticeships was modeled on Germany's system too

I agree that the industry is misguided, but academia knew what it was gatekeeping and that their admitted population was not there for research, but for the industry

[em-bee]

that's true, but it's not reasonable to expect them to change that. we need academia for research. i don't want universities to change. if people don't want research then we should build other institutions for that.