Seems like a pretty unremarkable collection of surface level observations if you ask me
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30738763
It's a poetic mission statement for an endeavor which seems to jive with Hotz’s recognition that such a school must be physical and beautiful. However, scratch away the veneer, Hotz suggests in a recent blog post, and one finds that those behind UATX “are either straight up supporters of Power or naive political children.” He points to Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen, all of whom “are very successful in the current system.”
“This is not a counter-elite!” Hotz continues. “This is a spin off of the exact same BS that’s everywhere. NGO awards and fake status signaling markers.”
I call those "liberals." /s
Though, the most surprising thing to me was needing to provide a privilege statement in order to speak at the college event.
How the hell can anyone provide any sort of nuanced insight into the privilege and challenges they faced in a "disclosure"? It reeks of enacting a miniature struggle session to undermine the speaker before they even have a chance to talk.
Maybe the Long March through Institutions was real...
Universities have been around for a long time. They're some of the oldest institutions in contemporary civilization, and they're increasing in importance. They've survived upheavals that overshadow anything in our lifetimes. So I've been skeptical of prediction of its demise.
Still, there are serious problems with modern academics and higher education, and the doomsayers have some valid points. So I've thought it's possible.
After the pandemic though I wasn't sure so much about their imminent demise anymore. Students really wanted to return due to the social value it provided. It's not like institutions started collapsing.
I think it would require holders of wealth to shift in the status markers they value. So far it's still one of the primary ones.
Good luck being able to practice engineering if you haven't got a degree! The licensing bodies for professions won't care a fig about your life experience.
People who can actually do it have done it for a lab or a business, and then get accredited.
My impression of the engineering degree is that it's basically a certificate in being able to deep dive into... something. Whether that's actual bridges or financial derivatives or trading systems, a degree basically says you haven't given up on some large pile of math-heavy topics, so an employer should bet on you being able to learn their thing. It's also the case that there isn't enough time to learn a whole business, so really it's testing that you stuck with the introductory parts of a wide variety of techie things.
I've worked as an engineering manager for both professional engineers and non-degreed technicians / technologists. My observation (such as it is) is that the degreed engineers had a stronger framework to be able to connect ideas and learn new skills. On the other hand, technologists were able to do tasks just as well as engineers but had trouble generalizing the concepts.
Importantly, the degree (combined with professional guidance) also helps you appreciate the things you don't know. For example, a geotechnical engineer may be perfectly able to assess an abutment or design a blast but they wouldn't certify a dam foundation and would reach out for help in doing so.
It's probably worth sharing that I hated my undergraduate education with a burning passion. I've only recently begun to appreciate it more -- turns out those old farts who did the accreditation might have known a thing or two about what you need to know later in your career.
I say this as someone who went to a school with highly ranked humanities programs. My business communication class taught me more about communication than any rhetoric/history/media studies class. My high school AP English Language class taught me more about persuasive writing than any writing class in college.
If undergrad humanities programs are to be taken seriously they need to drastically increase their rigor and actually instill skills in their students.
Liberal arts schools are not and never have been vocational training institutions. They are academic in nature.
I went to a school that had top ranked humanities departments across the board. There is zero desire for rigor in any humanities courses or departments. It's a way for people to show up to class and get a degree without effort so they can party all day.
In my experience at a large state school, students could sign up for rigorous humanities courses if they wanted to. (e.g. by avoiding the 'popular' courses in auditorium rooms, etc.). Although it's a bit of a shame that it's not universal, and that the student culture often demands "the easy gen-eds"
At the end of the day, I think this is a cultural problem in some humanities departments. It's not unheard of for some STEM departments to fail 50% of their incoming students. I guess the appetite to hold the same standard in other departments just isn't there?
That's not a bad thing (to a point) when the entry-level qualification takes a massive amount of time, intense effort, and money to get; it's very important that they manage it so there's no oversupply. If you don't, then you'll have disasters like US legal education has been.
Society needs a lot of doctors. It doesn't need any english lit PhDs. Not to say the latter isn't without benefit.
Parents on 3rd world countries know that education is still the safest way to a higher standard of living (not guaranteed though).
There are no shortcuts to gain knowledge (degrees, training, self-taught, etc.). It is hard to vet someone if that person has not been through accredited programs - professional scammers can even fool interviewers.
Aside from this, there is a big difference: would you trust a doctor to cure you without a medical degree? There is your answer.
It depends.
I had a recurring issue with pain and numbness in my elbow for a few years. I went to all sorts of well credentialed doctors, and every diagnosis they gave ended up being wrong. The person who cracked the case ended up being a random doctor at a hole in the wall clinic that had been the first person available to get an ear infection checked out. I mentioned my symptoms offhand while we were chatting, and he cracked it in about 3 minutes - nerve damage from leaning my elbow on my standing desk. He had a lot of practical experience with occupational related injuries, including nerve damage from poor fitting safety gear, etc. It wasn't his degree that let him find the root cause of my issue, but practical experience.
On the other hand, there's lots of diseases where doctors need to keep up on the latest advancements in research, etc. I don't really know how this works - is it trade journals? Do all doctors in fields like this regularly read them, or papers on NCBI? Does a college degree help here? I don't know. I also don't know if I fundamentally disbelieve that someone couldn't be just as effective in these areas through a more practical learning approach than a college degree, either. But I'm not sure that I believe it, either.
Medicine is a big field and not all parts of it - from my experience on the receiving end, at least - seem to require all the same skills to be successful.