Academia is fiercely competitive too…maybe more so than the business world. Getting work into top journals is in large part a popularity contest.
When I think about the absolute smartest people I met as a student, the majority never realized their potential later in life due to social/emotional deficits. The top math/physics people ended up teaching at tier 3/tier 4 schools because those fields attract so many smart people a ~150 IQ makes you just slightly above average.
Yeah, and it doesn’t pay that well either!!!
Sports require teamwork. PhDs only require individual excellence.
During college, you can see that many highly intelligent Professors couldn’t inspire undergraduates to do their best nor organize for excellence. Real life is all about teamwork.
Big time academics run research groups of 10, 20 in special cases even 100 PhD students/postdocs. The PI’s job essentially becomes fundraising, recruiting the best students, and hyping the work so that it gets published in the best journals, covered by NPR, NYTimes, etc.
In all but the rarest of cases it’s as much about salesmanship as science.
Yeah, though some of them are pretty bad at it. There’s some great mentors/managers, and some professors who couldn’t graduate someone to save their life. 
Competition in CS program is going insane.
Now that CS major with BS degree is sufficient to find a good job, only few people want to pursue PhD degree. Hence, colleges are struggling to hire qualified professors to meet the recent increase in demand.
My kid’s college used to accept students from other colleges within the same cosortium into its CS program but they started to limit the number strictly a couple of years ago. The other colleges are trying to set up their own CS departments but not successful yet due to limited pool on qualified CS professors/instructors.
Interestingly, one of the most notable alumni(?) in CS industry from the college is actually drop-out from physic’s major.
Welcome back!
Good points!
UW (Washington) has a 24-week coding boot camp. As far as boot camps go, it should be legit. They have a top 10 CS program.
Productivity of teaching hasn’t gone up much at all over the centuries. We still mostly have a professor stand in front of a physical whiteboard, going over scripted lectures to a roomful of students.
It’s not that we don’t have the tech. We do. MOOC like Udacity and Coursera, if supplemented with off-line support, can work really well. The problem is that scarcity is actually good for elite colleges. Stanford and Harvard could lose a big part of their prestige if they let too many people in. Their brands would get diluted.
But state colleges like UC and CSU should look for ways to drastically increase their teaching productivity. They are in the business of serving the public.
Agree with your main point but classes on coursera were very disappointing to me. I subscribed for a year to access various classes but was disappointed with most of them including the lecture of founder.
Then, I became really skeptical about cheap online classes in terms quality.
I am going over an Udemy Python class with my kid. So far I am really impressed with the quality. I think it really depends on the instructors. Most Coursera classes are taught by regular college professors. They mostly just chop their regular offline classes into chunks, upload the video and call it the day. I took a few of those as well and they do suck.
It’s like when the web first went mainstream we had all these paper magazines just uploaded pictures of their paper content. No thought was given how to take advantage of this new medium. A lot of online classes are still stuck in the old thinking.
The problem is getting people in industry to recognize the value of each class. I guess that’s why there’s accreditation. Right now, unless you’ve taken the class yourself, you’ve no idea if it’s good or not.
Seems like it’s better just to take University of Arizona online classes or some such.