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by ItsMonkk 20 days ago
It's probably cleaner to directly couple those that want it, so that those that want to decouple can be left to the academic path. It's pretty normal to hear from people that when they entered the workforce they learned way more than what they learned at college. Let's incentivize this. Governments should directly subsidize education.

Instead of getting student loans and going to college for 4 years where you don't accomplish much, companies should directly offer high school students 4 year full paid internships. At the end the student needs to go through a test from an expert in that field, possibly a professor lead examination, and to the degree that they pass the company and student share in a large prize. If they pass that test, they officially get the degree.

1 comments

Doesn't this just kind of become kind of allow companies to direct the research towards their ends and the education be damned though? I wouldn't be opposed to this sort of thing intrinsically, but I worry about the incentives here.
This aligns the incentives. Education provides positive externalities that the market will not provide.

> allow companies to direct the research towards their ends

So long as they hit the requirements to reward the prize, I don't much care what else the students are driven to do. One might ask how does this differ from when a company hires a fresh graduate? In fact, I wouldn't mind also applying this system to those that have degrees, and are trying to advance in their careers.

My only concern is that the students would then be able to be hire-able by other companies in their field. If that answer is mostly yes, the system is working as intended. If it's not, the requirements would be raised until they are.

Meh, I don't think this is the right incentives we want to be pushing. Hire-ability shouldn't be what education is about...
Keep in mind that this allows, and protects, the academic channel to do their own thing. Right now they are pulled by those that don't care about academia because they want a job and know having the credential is how they get it.

If we begin doing this, and as a result, none of the academics can get a job as they are all filled by the 'embedded' students, I don't mind seeing how that shifts everything.