I spent 4 years pursuing a PhD at UT Austin and only abandoned it when my supervisor, who was going blind at the time, dropped my support. I was not going to start over at Stanford and spend another 4-6 years not making any money. I'd already lost $100K in income working as an RA.
While in HP Labs we occasionally pondered the what are the valid reasons for doing a PhD. The only one we could find was "because I want to". Invalid ones included better job prospects, pay etc.
Much of university is a con job, but not engineering. The fact is a BSEE is a pretty bare bones training. It really takes an MSEE to be good. There is just too much you need to learn to do it in 4-5 years. It really takes 6-8 years of *hard* work. If you're not having fun you won't be able to keep up. Yes, you will forget a lot of things because you don't do them regularly. that's life. All the MSEE says is that you have a reasonably broad exposure to the subject and you know a fair bit about your thesis project.
Basically right, but you miss a key point. You will know what you have forgotten, and can pick it up again if/when you need it.
Too many people that haven't got a degree don't realise how much they don't know - refined version of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They then make silly avoidable known errors.
Doctors sometimes observe that soem nurses think they can do a better job than the doctor. Sometimes that is right; I'd sooner have a needle inserted by a nurse than a doctor. But when it comes to diagnosing a non-trivial condition and choosing a course of treatment, I want a doctor to be involved.
I had an MS in geology and a job as a geophysicist. I went back to school to properly learn what I was doing rather than rely on teaching myself as I had been forced to do for almost 3 years because my employer failed to deliver on the promised training. I was pretty good at teaching myself after the MS, but my stint at Austin made a *big* difference. If you have the skills you can immediately tell who does and who doesn't quite independent of whether they have pieces of paper or not.
I did not miss the point. I merely did not emphasize it. I know to a very fine degree what I know and what I don't know. That is a *very* valuable piece of knowledge. It is what makes teaching yourself things you don't know possible. I've got a first order differential equation I need to solve almost 40 years after I took the course. It's shall we say, *painful*. My point was that acquiriing skills you then never use is unavoidable if you are to get a proper education. You're *not* going to do everything. In my case I spent 3.5 years learning to use a petrographic microscope and then never used that ability. But doing that I did learn the wave equation very well and that was how I survived taking a job for which I had *no* training at all. I'd never even seen a reflection seismic profile. But sound and light both conform to the wave equation.
At 65 I am astounded at how often I see the same concepts and mathematics in different contexts and with wildly different descriptions. After I had labored many times through learning XYZ only to realize it was just ABC in different dress I got to where I look first to see if some new topic is just an old topic.
College at any level for the sake of status or more money is a waste of time and money. I spent 5 years working very hard getting a fairly useless degree. It is valuable preparation for the law which is what I had intended, but otherwise all it will get you is entry to grad school or a secondary school teaching job.
I come from a 400 year old family that has included clergymen, admirals, lawyers, engineers, stone masons and farmers among other things. The focus of my undergraduate work was a classical gentleman's education in the 19th century sense. Growing up I was taught to admie skill and education, however it was acquired.
In a survey course, if I liked a book that was assigned, I'd often read 2-3 more by that author after I finished the first and before we started the class discussion of the assigned book. When I didn't feel like doing that I dropped out, got the best job I could find and did that. Nine months of that was strong motivation to go back to school.
The function and purpose of university is education. It is not job training and much of what is wrong with society today is a consequence of subverting education and selling it as job training.
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