That’s just CS you are talking about, getting into an emerging field that is very important like Material Informatics would be veeeery hard without an academic setting. Even with CS… honesty I still disagree that academia doesn’t have a purpose or value. Just reading a good research papers recently, one of my favorite recent topics being new ways to discover spy cameras using smartphones. Also some of our greatest minds have received a lot of benefits from an academic environments. I understand bachelor degrees from a lot of places are overpriced and I agree that those seem like a trap and the value might be questionable.
> Any degree, by the time you have it, might be deprecated or eroded to the point is pointless.
My degree cost me out of pocket about ~$5k for my tuition. I stayed in state and my state had a program that paid for tuition if you made above 2.3 GPA in high school. That gave me new friends, sports clubs to join, and understanding of subjects early on that I still use today like psychology and finance. Not to mention my CS degree has paid me back in dividends and I still use knowledge from it today. I have maaany friends in the same boat as me.
> Education has to go the tutorial way or it will continue to decline.
Sounds like a version of tutorial hell potentially but on the job training has its place. AI, ML, game theory, cryptography, quantum computing, probabilistic methods, the list goes on for sincere that would take a significant amount of dedication to match the amount of understanding that a rigorous course with problem sets can give you in self study.