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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Highly technical jobs in chemistry, physics, engineering, molecular biology require a certain kind of college education that involves a lot of hands-on experience in research labs. The traditional college coursework is not nearly as important as what amounts to vocational training working side-by-side with technicians, grad students, postdocs etc. There's no real way to acquire the needed experience without getting into a four-year research-centric university.

A private company just isn't going to invest the time and energy needed to train an apprentice in these fields from scratch, and two-year community colleges rarely have access to the latest modern technology.

Other than that, your comment seems pretty accurate.

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> a private company just isn't going to invest the time and energy needed to train an apprentice

not as long as they can force people to pay for it themselves and have the government and the tax payers subsidize it.

universities were never meant to be vocational schools though, and they do a horrible job at it.

to take computer science as an example: a 4 years bachelor degree only has about 500 hours of classroom instruction in comp sci subjects.

a 9-5 vocational training program can provide 480 hours of classroom instruction in 3 months.

the idea that students benefit by going to a university where they only spend a few hours a day learning and the rest of the time playing games, socializing, drinking and doing drugs, is absurd.

put people in a 9-5 40 hour a week program that has the same attendance and performance requirements as the job they are training for and they can be trained to the level of any bachelors degree in 3-6 months.

> to take computer science as an example: a 4 years bachelor degree only has about 500 hours of classroom instruction in comp sci subjects.

> a 9-5 vocational training program can provide 480 hours of classroom instruction in 3 months.

This feels like a disingenuous response - are you suggesting that solely 500 hours of a computer science degree confers utility to a graduate? Even then, 500 hours taken consecutively can hardly be compared to 500 hours spent over multiple years, interspersed with hands-on projects and internships.

> 500 hours taken consecutively can hardly be compared to 500 hours spent over multiple years

500 consecutive hours should be far superior because the time is focused and with fewer distractions.

training people in a professional 9-5 corporate environment as opposed to the adult daycare resort environment of universities would probably lead to better outcomes as well.

very little of what you learn in comp sci is relevant to your job as a new grad.

for software engineering a comp sci new grad still needs years of mentorship, supervision and on the job training in order to perform at a senior level in whatever specialty they end up working in.

because software engineering is so highly specialized pretty much everything you need to know for a particular job must be learned on the job.

the only thing a comp sci degree really shows is that a person has interest in the field and is capable of learning, but there are much better ways to figure that out than requiring degrees.

That's precisely how the USAF train their network troops. Monday through Friday for 8 months, they take you from transistors to routers. After that, you're given 2 weeks to study and pass Sec+. Most people pass on the first try.

It's a far superior system.

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