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Comment by Brystephor | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like an excellent thing based on that last sentence. Anecdotally, I hear people talk about trade school as being much more practical compared to the majority of traditional 4 year degrees. So I am interpreting a "move towards trade school" as an increase in practicality and therefore utility to the student.

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I just wanted to echo your comment. Most people, in my experience, pursue an undergrad program with the intention of being employable. This is my personal experience, but also a learned opinion from being a teaching assistant for some years. Places like waterloo stress co-op, it is built in to the program. IMO the average person seeking an education are served under a model that places them in or near industry related work at some point. While I understand the original post is relating to PHDs, I think most programs (or rather, participants in programs) would love to have this sort of integration despite it being a hard problem.

Interestingly enough, Kitchener, adjacent to Waterloo has a large population of German-descent. I wonder if the OP's spouse's experience in Germany has any relation.

There is no reason to assume it is “more practical” or that it will increase utility for the student. Especially at the graduate level, the deeper you are able to explore a subject and the more you can connect that subject to a broader range of topics the more utility you get from the degree. Less time to finish a degree means you are less able to do that. I would think this will decrease the likelihood of new ideas being developed which will quickly become a problem for society in general. Also no one gets a PhD because it is practical, you get it because you want to explore a topic and push the boundaries of human knowledge.

My impression is that many of the indian engineering schools are some form of trade school and it shows. A lot of people are very good at churning out things, but they vastly prefer to use well defined tools for their trade and do a lot of work impassionately. Taking the creative path or even reflecting on failures isn’t natural.

On the other side of things, you have PhDs coming out of the US with too many ideas and the inability to deal with basics such as sprint planning and CI/CD.

Not sure if this will help, but I would love it for the Colleges of Sciences peoples instead of a postdoc.

The problem is that this makes it friction-free for the student ... and the actual trade? Your wage. It takes away risk, which everybody likes, until the costs of that start accumulating. It's an excellent way to give the student a very strong reason to avoid applying anywhere else (and make applying elsewhere far less successful), and so effectively to pay them (much) less.

Get a PhD with years of experience, who knows your company, for the price of a secretary.

Practicality and utility to the student must be the reason I started getting junior software engineers that are computer illiterates out of whatever Java IDE they were taught in.

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