I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem...
Just because something may have an impact that differs based on sex doesn't make it sexist. Would we call pregnancy sexist because it works differently for each sex?
Are you making the claim that an extended education has no impact on performance?
If I require my developers to have a degree, it doesn't violate this concept even though a degree isn't required to be a good programmer.
Yes. E.g. in the U.K., you can start practicing law around age 21. In the U.S., typically it's 25 if you go straight through. Somehow the U.K. still manages to be a center of commerce and finance.
Also, which actor is the one creating the disparate impact in your view? The one requiring the degree? The one setting requirements for getting into law school? The college that requires a high school diploma? The one lowering the standard in grade school so that kids are not ready for college sooner than they could be?
https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat...
[1] Say you had to be 5'7" to vote. That would be facially gender neutral, but not gender neutral in fact, since the average women is shorter than that while the average man is taller.
Unless we start comparing apples to oranges (e.g. women who want to reproduce and abandon the child vs. men who want to reproduce, have custody over, and raise... - or vice versa) the career/family planning difficulties bear substantially equally on both men and women.
If career/family planning poses a greater burden on a sex, it's more likely men who lack the capacity to (apologies for the crudeness) "just go get knocked up." A man who wishes to have and raise a kid requires substantially more investment. He has to get a partner and keep them around for at least 9 months or indefinately. Indeed, it's that historical necessity of being able to "provide for a family" which imposed the burden of excessive career development.
So, in summary, it's not like women can't have kids in college, or at least, it's not harder for them to do so than it is for men.
In this case, women aren't actually shorter than men.
Do they emerge with the same level of training & experience? Difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
There's some perverse incentives to take less-demanding courseloads, in order to boost your GPA for graduate school admissions, and expend most of your efforts training for the MCATs or LSATs.
If you actually wanted to produce medical professionals in an efficient way, there is no way that you would do it in the way that this currently works in the US.
That is quite true. In the early 1900s the US medical system was revamped specifically to make it harder for people to become doctors. This included making a college education a prerequisite. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
Only recently have new medical schools been built, after a hiatus of decades. Most of these are still going through accreditation.
Even with more schools, the residency requirement results in the 'jaws of death'. https://physiciansnews.com/2013/02/14/this-chart-is-scaring-...
It's a bit unfair to center the blame on (liberal arts) universities for the degree programs they offer to pre-med students when it's the medical school accreditation program which makes the requirement, and does so to make an inefficient system.
If you want an efficient system, look to Cuba. ELAM has 20,000 students.
Why do we prefer to send troops to other countries instead of medical doctors?
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/w... (picked mostly arbitrarily from a DDG search for 'well-rounded education') states the usual reasons for that approach.
For example, is the goal only 'to produce medical professionals in an efficient way'? Or does education also include 'acquiring general knowledge' and 'training in citizenship' (quoting that link).
There's also a complaint about 'what Duke University professor and interdisciplinary-studies expert Cathy Davidson describes as "the duck, duck, goose model."'
I had an odd exchange once, over lunch at a UK research site with mostly European graduate students. I found out that I knew more about European history than the others. My education in the US included a European history course, while most of the Europeans had specialized in science since they were teenagers.
Not that that knowledge has really proved useful ... but then again, neither has my training in quantum mechanics.
The advice you give - "it is the gateway to a career" - has rather large built-in flaw.
The student loan industry, and the increasingly profit-oriented universities, have basically looked at the overall earnings difference of getting a degree and exclaimed "I want me some of that!"
Young adults who start life $30,000 in debt, for that is the current average outstanding student loan balance per borrower, make for a more compliant wage slave.
Your complaint does not seem to be about universities, but rather concerns the lack of a respected vocational training path. Since you appear to understand the historical context of what 'well-rounded' is supposed to mean, I think your use of 'bizarre' was facetious.
Moreover, you have changed what you are talking about. In your previous comment you were focused on students who "take less-demanding courseloads, in order to boost your GPA for graduate school admissions, and expend most of your efforts training for the MCATs or LSATs." Most people who attend a 4-year college as 'a gateway to a career' do not plan on additional post-college education. As such, they do not have the perverse inventive you described.
I wouldn't trust a 23yo lawyer or doctor, no matter how smart they appear. Some things are learned only by experience, and not just by books.
Also, a huge chunk of tech's HR issues are mostly created by startups having very young founders and young managers that don't have real life experience. (to me, young is anybody younger than 30). Half of the firing/issues I have seen in real life could have been easily avoided if the people in the room had more experience.
Consider the ages of some key figures in the American Revolution in 1776 (https://kottke.org/13/08/the-surprising-ages-of-the-founding...)
Marquis de Lafayette, 18 James Monroe, 18 Gilbert Stuart, 20 Aaron Burr, 20 Alexander Hamilton, 21 Betsy Ross, 24 James Madison, 25
You don't need to.
After finishing their education, doctors and lawyers start working, but that work is largely training (i.e. further education) except that they're also earning money because they're already somewhat useful (not as useful as full-blown doctors and lawyers, but more useful than someone without equivalent education). In many countries in Europe, doctors need aditional 4-6 years of training before they can work without supervision and carry actual responsibilities... similar for lawyers, they need at least 2-3 years of work before they can pass the bar exam.
I wouldn't trust a 26 year old or 40 year old newly graduated doctor either, for the same reasons.
There are different stages of brain development that don't finish until around 25 in women and 28 in men, but these aren't necessary to be mature. Even people who are 40 will make decisions that their 50 year old selves will view as immature. And given that much of what we consider maturity is driven by experience, delaying acquisition of experience until after maturation will result in further delaying maturation for the next generation.
You have to be 35 to run for president in many countries....
etc...
There is obviously a sliding scale, but the 25-ish age range is more physical where your prefrontal cortex is still developing, while later stages are more experience based maturity.
"Neuroscience has shown that a young person's cognitive development continues into this later stage and that their emotional maturity, self-image and judgement will be affected until the prefrontal cortex of the brain has fully developed.
Alongside brain development, hormonal activity is also continuing well into the early twenties says Antrobus.
"A number of children and young people I encounter between the age of 16 and 18, the flurry of hormonal activity in them is so great that to imagine that's going to settle down by the time they get to 18 really is a misconception," says Antrobus."
for med school, you could still have 5 years of academic training (as with the Indian model) and then do 4 years of apprenticeship (internship /residency) and be a fully qualifed doctor by 25.
for law school, 4 years of academic training and 3 years of apprenticeship and be a fully qualified lawyer by 23.
these are professional trades, so the apprenticeship piece is a crucial transition period to learn from those who came before you.
Not that everyone would become a doctor even if it were easier to attain, but to take it to the logical extreme, if everyone went through med school, doctors would have no more power than a sales clerk at Walmart. Power comes from scarcity.
This is only true if every doctor coming out of med school is exactly the same or if you can't tell the difference in skill among doctors.
But there is an expectation that med school produces doctors who are sufficiently equal in their ability (in that you should not need to worry about which doctor you end up with). That you are suggesting this is not the case is quite interesting.
If you don't think there are differences in skill between doctors just ask a friend or family member who is a doctor which doctors they would not recommend you see.
Having friends and family who work in the medical industry, I get to hear them talk about how every new patient they take on thinks their previous doctor was the worst doctor ever. And then when you talk to the people working at the practice of the previous doctor, they tell the exact same story, except about the doctor at the other practice.
You soon realize opinions don't measure much of anything.