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Comment by carrolldunham | Hacker News Reader

This culture of degrees as attainments is not good. It's supposed to be training for a productive research career but when some unlikely person collects the degree it's treated like a medal. The professor's time was wasted.

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It is very much not meant to be training for a career. The culture of "time spent on anything that does not lead specifically to financial gain is wasted" is sad.

Maybe it isn’t meant to be, and maybe it’s not very good at it, but a bachelor’s degree is a de facto prerequisite to almost any office job.

Schools know this, which is why they can continue to charge more and more every year. But when anyone brings up the fact that maybe university is suboptimal vocational training, they retreat back into claiming they’re not. You can’t have it both ways.

That bachelors degrees should not be a prerequisite for office jobs only reinforces the argument that education is not meant to be vocational training.

And bachelors degrees are not the only form of education, nor the one being discussed here.

Completely agree. The above user seems to of taken a very utilitarian only approach to life. Personal fulfillment, and cultural literacy are other types of awards.

That seems like a very strange opinion... "the professor's time was wasted"?? The pursuit of education (and often degrees) is meaningful on a personal level. A productive research career is simply one of infinitely many paths that a person could choose to take.

Why not just think of a degree as a certification of completion of a sequence of courses and tasks, which teach skills, and whose completion can be verified?

Most of the time the professors spend 0 time specifically on a student (PhDs excluded) as postdocs/PhD students mark coursework and even (in some institutions) exams

> PhDs excluded

lol you think professors spend time on their phd students? they have postdocs for that...

edit: a typical research lab functions exactly like any other organization in the world: hierarchically. a chief executive/leadership role/head (the prof), his/her direct reports (post docs), their direct reports (phd students), and their direct reports (undergrads). if a phd student is being directly advised by the prof that's simply because the prof currently has no postdocs not because they don't desire some.

For legal reasons, the thesis supervisor has to be a professor in most unis (a non supervising advisor can be anyone with a doctorate, though), not just a random postdoc fellow.

> For legal reasons, the thesis supervisor has to be a professor in most unis

you're wrong - eg in my uni (a "top tier" uni) thesis advisor could be a RAP (research associate professor) which was not a full nor tenure track prof and thus not much more than a postdoc.

Might be different for other universities, but in my department, as well as all the PhD's I've known in other well known universities, there is no such hierarchy, they all worked directly with their professors.

Mine doesn't even have many postdocs (if any) as far as I'm aware. Similarly, while sometimes promising PhDs might be assigned to handle undergrad researchers, most of us worked directly with the professors back then.

I have a PhD and my supervisor (who was a professor) spent some time on me

In my experience as a Stanford alum, this is not true. The professors interact with undergrad students all the time.

In the US.

I would argue that Fine Arts, and many other liberal arts degrees are the perfect examples of you being wrong that degrees are solely for career development. Degrees are documents given from accredited institutions that you learned something. Nothing more. The professor's time was not wasted, their job is simply to teach, not to teach workers.

I can both see the sense in what you wrote and am icked out by it. And yet I'm not conflicted; ruthless objectivity in pursuit of productive output isn't always the best thing, and sometimes it's unethical outright.

So I believe anyone should be able to get an education if and when they want to.

Research careers. Lol. Since this is HN I’ll hit a nerve, but I bet much less than 0.1% of CS MS degree holders do research as a career.

Completely disagree, and feel like this is exactly where universities have gone wrong.

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