It's likely pretty easy to measure that lawyers from professional law schools win more cases than self-taught lawyers. Or that doctors from medical schools have higher patient satisfaction / produce higher average QALYs in their patient cohort than self-taught doctors.
I think a more closely analogous question to the one of CS vs SWEng might be: if a group of psychiatrists (professionals) and psychologists (academics) switch places, who performs better in the other context?
The psychiatrist is an MD who can prescribe drugs. The psychologist wouldn’t have that kind of authority, so they can’t do the job of the former. A psychologist can actually do therapy, which a psychiatrist isn’t trained for. These are very different professions.
> Conclusions and Recommendations of the Interdivisional (APA Divisions 12 & 29) Task Force on Evidence-Based Therapy Relationships
http://societyforpsychotherapy.org/evidence-based-therapy-re...
> The therapy relationship makes substantial and consistent contributions to psychotherapy outcome independent of the specific type of treatment.
> The therapy relationship accounts for why clients improve (or fail to improve) at least as much as the particular treatment method.
Prof does a 'study' where they teach a class with both hands vs with one hand tied behind his back. Each class has 200 students, and he finds that the one-handed class outperforms the two handed class with p=0.045 with N=200...
And I'm like NO! This is basically an N=1 study because the teacher is common across both classes. Have you never heard of pen-effects?!?!?!
Unfortunately, fixing the problem in the study design means convincing a bunch of your friends that one-handed teaching might be better and engaging in an experimental study together... But that's obviously way too hard.
Teachers mostly don’t think their education degree made them better teachers and there’s no evidence they do[1]. It’s widely agreed that at least the third year of USAn law school is useless[2] and there are testing providers whose entire thing is teaching graduates what their law school didn’t but should have if it was professional training [3].
Professional schools are run for the benefit of the staff, so they teach what the admins and teachers want to teach. It has to have some relationship to the field but it can be completely attenuated. People learn to do their job at work, not on a university campus.
[1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness
https://www.science-direct.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/third-year-of-law-school-is-...
https://forgottenattorney.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/the-usele...
[3] https://abovethelaw.com/2017/05/teaching-you-what-law-school...