To be honest, we probably see an alternative to academia grow and disrupt it before we see academia reform itself – the academic institution is so old and has so much legacy at this point, that it is close to impossible.
I am curious on how these new structures would look.
hot take from someone in Europe: I have no degree and work as a software engineer. New masters graduates I have worked with still need a lot of guidance to do basic things: making pull requests, writing unit tests, structuring code, setting up CI and CD pipelines, network communication, IaC, cloud, microservices, parallelism and state management.
Most of what they do know is of limited value. They don't seem to really grasp the fundamentals of computers very well, they maybe grasp some math, but nothing more than what they could have learnt in maybe 3 months or less, and the math is pretty useless if they don't have a feeling for how to apply it to something like a stateless microservice.
I think in our industry having these people go directly to work internships would be much more valuable for them and society than what is currently happening. While I do think free education is good in principle, I am not very happy that my tax money is propping up this broken system.
On the other side, I've seen plenty of people embark on something that amounts to "given a solution to the generalized halting problem, I could build a system to do X, therefore I have a path to do X" and then proceed to do years of hack after hack to bandage over one corner case at a time, building the computer equivalent of a spaghetti bridge.
I'm not saying everyone needs a PhD in computer science to program, but there's a lot of pain incurred by people who could avoid it with a basic understanding of the fundamentals of CS.
> I'm not saying everyone needs a PhD in computer science to program, but there's a lot of pain incurred by people who could avoid it with a basic understanding of the fundamentals of CS.
I agree, but I don't think a PhD in computer science reliably instills this in anyone, or at least not on scales that you operate on in industry.
I think it is a bit too narrow to see academia as purely industry preparation. There are a number of educational tasks academia also carries out, furthermore, there is the entire reasearch area.
On the contrary, My masters in computer science from Denmark has really helped me professionally. But I had exposure to engineering aside my studies throughout all the years.
> I think it is a bit too narrow to see academia as purely industry preparation.
I agree, but to me that is somewhat the main problem. The most important thing that my tax money should be funding is industry preparation, but if you conflate that with other functions, everything gets muddled. Most of our education resources (>95%) should be exlusively for industry preparation. If we do it well, then remaining 5% will become higher.
In my opinion, tax money should mostly go towards building a prosperous society, whatever that means. But some things I see as being highly important:
1. Education in active participation in a democracy
2. Education to be able to take care of their physical and mental health
3. Education to be able to be empathetic towards their peers.
4. Education to create jobs rather than inhabit them
I don't see it as a error per se, that a lot of people in Denmark (My country of origin) do a masters degree in-order to take a normal subsistence job afterwards.
My own hopes for the future is that education does not take 5-6 years and is something that is only done in ones 20s but is something that is a lifelong companion and helps a person accelerate their careers, also later in life.
> 1. Education in active participation in a democracy 2. Education to be able to take care of their physical and mental health 3. Education to be able to be empathetic towards their peers. 4. Education to create jobs rather than inhabit them
Some of these things, or some aspects of these things, are quite heavily prescriptive, i.e. values that you think people ought to have as opposed to descriptive, i.e. facts people ought to know. And I don't think education ought to, or can meaningfully, instill values in people that is different from the society they inhabit.
And to the extent that these things are not prescriptive, but descriptive (i.e. how to take care of your own physical health), it really should be done before university, and way before post graduate education.
> I don't see it as a error per se, that a lot of people in Denmark (My country of origin) do a masters degree in-order to take a normal subsistence job afterwards.
If a masters degree implies 5-6 years, which I think it does for engineering, then I do see a problem with it, because it is not free.
Also from what I understand people do past the 1st year of higher education it really has little relation to any of the things you list. So even if it was the purpose of having people spend 5-6 years at university, I don't see it working out.
Having taken a masters myself has helped med tremendously on all of the aspects:
1. I know a thing or two about computing etc. and how we should apply that on a societal level from my masters in computer science. I use that to engage in the discussion. Someone else has studies science of religion and can chip in with insights there.
2. Having an advanced degree has taught me a thing or too about reading and understanding research and critical thinking, which has helped me understand the extremely scattered market for health advice.
3. Having lived large parts of my adult life on a sub subsistence level has helped me be empathetic towards poverty etc.
4. Having an advanced degree helps you assess new projects and ventures that might be worth pursuing entrepreneurially.
> 3. Having lived large parts of my adult life on a sub subsistence level has helped me be empathetic towards poverty etc.
It is unclear how having enough enough resources so that you could not produce anything for 6 years makes it easier for you to understand poverty than people who never had such privilege. I'm sure any person actually in poverty would much rather do nothing productive for 6 years while still having a roof over their heads, a dry place to sleep and food to eat.
I think if being empathetic towards poverty is something that is important to it may be better obtained by just sending people to an impoverished place with no resources, social support structures or accommodation for a week.
Lambda School and other JavaScript web developer bootcamps have been very successfully disrupting the "traditional CS degree" as the only route to software engineering.
Perhaps the thing to disrupt stale academia will be a wave of bootcamp PhD's coming out of Lambda University. In the short term, there may be a side effect of deflating the FAANG-style compensation, job stability, and perks of "tenured faculty." It seems obvious that there is an enormous benefit of a more mobile, agile, and adaptable academic workforce of folks who only contract to teach for a semester or two before dipping back into industry careers or trying out another institution (or maybe even working at multiple institutions at once to broaden their teaching and research skills!).
The "traditional CS degree" was never the only route to software engineering. That claim is just not true, a self learning developers, the ones who went to entirely different field or the ones who dropped out were and are ridiculously common. By "different field" I mean both people who studied physics/math similar fields and psychology/sociology further away fields.
And even now, people who came from bootcamps are rare compared to the above.
Similar to how the churches became less relevant over time, wothout disappearing. Of course, many still have religious sentiment, but it's not comparable to the complete dominance religion used to have in all aspects of life.
I am curious on how these new structures would look.