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A comment on The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time.

Re:The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste... by naveensundar on Saturday December 18, 2010 @12:26PM (#2019779)
A PhD is all about wealth creation [1]. Also many of the technologies we take for granted were due to "lowly" PhD students toiling away. I can't even imagine how without decades of dedicated academic effort we can have semiconductor based electronics, massively layered software that work seamlessly, etc. Maybe the author can. "The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes." The "fiercest critics" don't want to and can't see or think beyond their noses.

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

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Re:The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste... by blackguardx on Saturday December 18, 2010 @02:04PM (#2020008)
Actually most semiconductor technology was developed by industry. Nowadays it is often too expensive for a university to do any cutting edge IC research without industry partnerships.
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Re:The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste... by Lewisham on Saturday December 18, 2010 @02:14PM (#2020031)
Yeah, I'm beginning to worry about some CS disciplines, especially Software Engineering. SoftEng appears to be playing catch-up to industry in a number of sub-disciplines, due to the pace of knowledge sharing across the net exponentially increasing. It feels like unit testing might be the last huge thing academic SoftEng contributes.

There's going to have to be a little bit of realignment, I think, and some disciplines are going to have to start letting go of being "we're the practical ones and you could deploy our tech tomorrow" to pushing out a little bit, maybe incorporating things like AI and stuff.

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Re:The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste... by naveensundar on Saturday December 18, 2010 @02:44PM (#2020102)
Yes. Academic research need not be done only at universities. Even industrial labs award PhD degrees and do solid research which is one of the things a PhD trains you for.
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Re:The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste... by anthuswilliams on Saturday December 18, 2010 @10:23PM (#2020982)
You've missed the point. The article readily concedes that PhDs are good for society as a whole. The argument is that they are generally a bad idea for individuals.
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