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Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

This is a symptom they believe they're under paid. Plus, you don't need an advanced 'degree' to learn much of anything anymore. The wealth of human knowledge that is available online, for free, is astounding.

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it is called marketing and higher ed has that down pat. they have pretty much convinced more than one generation of the requirement to have college degree to have a good life and about every regulatory body of the need to have even higher tiers to be suitable for the job.

that they also got the Federal government to step in and become a loan factory on encouraged them more. it will only stop when the Federal government in turn tells them how much they can charge per course credit and which courses if not degrees warrant Federal money

As someone who has worked in higher ed, part of the degree requirements are to reduce corruption. Otherwise low tier state schools and community colleges would just be packed with the top administrator's buddies. Requiring a doctorate at least means you can't give the job to your pal Joey from Bayonne or whatever. Well, you still can, but he has to grind a mail order doctorate first.

State-level certification exams would fix this. You either pass the exam, or you don't, doesn't matter how you acquired the knowledge.

But then people will just memorize for the test. We've all seen the IT guys who crammed for some certification, but don't know anything.

That is a problem with particular certification exams, not insurmountable at all. E.g. memorizing brain dumps for Microsoft MSCE is one thing, but that trick does not work for the CCIE.

Is the CCIE one of the "hands on" exams, like the Red Hat and Kubernetes exams?

I have less familiarity with the Red Hat and Kubernetes exams, but yes -- the CCIE is a lab exam. Started out at two days but IIRC it is currently at one full eight-hour day in the lab. We have a few CCIEs where I work and the amount of studying to earn the certification is phenominal. The overall pass rate is about roughly 25%, which is notably low.

I imagine that if you're cramming for a test on how to do differential equations, and you're able to pass that test, you actually know how to solve differential equations.

"IT People" cramming for tests and memorizing the test for those certifications is a testament to the failure of those certifications, not for certifications in general.

I've done the California "Fundamentals of Engineering" Civil Engineering exam long time ago and it was no joke. Its been a while but I think they let you bring reference books or gave you one. You really had to know your stuff because you had no time to look at the reference material.

The test for e.g. programming could be "build a program to do X", where X is determined on the spot, and you have e.g. 6 hours to do it on premise...

Memorization wont help with that...

The Progressive Case for the Qing Imperial Confucian Civil Service Exam

This needs to be done for Law, Medicine and Engineering degrees. Remove the power and higher ed institutional oligopoly. In a lot of places it's regulated by "professional associations", "councils", "boards" etc. that are a horrible cross between a union and a regulatory authority. Usually due to being the first mover or through lobbying or a bit of both. They can restrict school intake numbers, set legally significant policies across the industry, dispense judgement for malpractice, sometimes even whether to allow building a new institution or not. You don't hear much about them as compared to unions because they somehow acquired regulatory powers and a fair bit of upper middle class run in their circles but they are not exactly part of the State executive/legislative hierarchy either. It's popular to complain about "cultural problems" in hospitals like massive overtime, resistance to innovation etc. You want to fix it? Move the regulatory and certification parts to under the direct oversight and control of the government and remove the limits on supply. Don't complain about talent going to work in optimizing ad consumption instead of solving human problems when most industries are rarely as flexible or easy to enter as software's.

Have you ever worked with an attorney?

You don't want Law to be run like software.

Agreed. I remember when this was frowned upon. No need to go into student loan debt for a stem job.

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