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Iceberg's avatar

I suspect that nothing beats apprentice-type training plus experience in many different fields, which makes it a shame that everyone expects to gain competence by going to college.

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Eric Rasmusen's avatar

A combination is generally needed. In economics, the PhD is 2 years of courses and 4 years of being a teaching assistant and trying to your your own research, which in some cases means a joint project with a professor. In science, it is more like apprenticeship, with the professor as boss, not just co-author.

We don't know what jobs undergraduates are going to taek, and we shouldn't, so there the summer internship and the first year of your new job are the apprenticeship.

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