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comment by cgod
cgod  ·  4973 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Mark Taylor: Reform the PhD system or close it down
Or reform the whole college system. Interesting article by Krugman about the value of education http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html, and a pair of interesting responses by Richard Posner http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/page/2/ , you'll find a response from Gary Becker there also, but their web page just went down so I can link it.




mk  ·  4972 days ago  ·  link  ·  
I do biomedical research. The other day, my colleague and I were joking about how easy it would be to outsource all of our experiments, -just designing the study, then writing the paper. All we need is a desk. Quickly, so much of what we do in the lab can be done by a high-throughput biotech company. That wouldn't work for work for studies where new techniques are being developed, but for a good portion of our work, it could be done. I out-source more every year it seems.

I do think that we could drop most specialist degree labels. These labels are often uninformative (cognitive neuroscience, physiological psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, etc.).

Just finished Krugman's piece. I need to return to the other two.