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Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

> Now, it is seen as an extension of high school; the onus is on the college to mold all comers into more educated and productive citizens, even if that means re-teaching the basics.

This seems to be the case with grad programs now too: doing the teaching that undergrad should have already done. Turtles all the way down.

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There is strong financial incentive among power brokers to promote as much tuition cost and student debt as humanly possible, especially when the government underwrites it, making it zero-cost to both the lender and the school. The only losers are the taxpayers, who are abstract enough to be a non-entity, and the student, who is made to believe that he must obtain and service such debt to have a successful adult life.

In which departments have you seen that? [Not denying, genuinely curious]

i've seen some pretty shitty grad students but i don't really blame the grad school. a lot of non-cs undergrads go into cs grad programs with barely any programming experience. in my experience, the grad programs don't teach them the fundamentals (assuming they know them) but instead teach very specific niche areas. They end up never learning basic programming fundamentals.

If someone is studying computability or formal languages or algorithms or ML in a CS department, they don't really need to be programmers.

My sister is a graduate student in Neuropsychology. As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research.

Simmilarly, most research in CS will involve using programming as a tool, even if it is not the final product. The problem is that in CS, no one thinks to require the graduate students to take basic programming classes.

> As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research.

But for students focusing in complexity, they may not need to program at all, so naturally it makes sense there would not be much emphasis on programming.

in my opinion they don't need to BE programmers but they need to be ABLE to program.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=398

relevant song by scott aaronson

Obligatory coding horror reference:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

I'm in physics/chemistry/materials fields. I've been around several 'world-class' institutions in the UK and USA, and had mixed experiences -- far more mixed than you'd think looking at simple rankings. I wouldn't like to draw any hard conclusions though, because I only have anecdotes, but perhaps others can comment.

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