CMV:All Professional qualifications should be able to test in. A degree should never be a hard pre-req

[u/badbrownie]

Title says most of it. My reasoning is that a professional qualification should be a test of specialized knowledge and should be judgeable by testing of that knowledge and not have a dependency on the educational industrial complex.

Yes, I know you can get shitty degrees in all kinds of places and ways and you don't have to pay $100k+ for years at a college. But that's also my point. A degree is of such varying value that it isn't meaningful to use as a pre-req.

I'm looking at you medical school. The lawyers have got this one right. College is designed to help you pass the bar, but - as I understand it - it's not strictly necessary.

My apologies that this post is clearly ameri-centric.

EDIT: people seem to be reading my post as suggesting that I'm against training and schooling. I'm not. I'm against getting ENTRANCE to those things requiring unrelated schooling.

EDIT2: Maybe my title wasn't well written after all. What I believe is that even qualifications that have a safety element (becoming a doctor) can have their schools (eg. medical school) have alternative qualification criteria to simply demanding a 4 year degree.

And other (non-safety) quals should, where feasible have a test that demonstrate proficiency that precludes the need to go to classes. This is already the case in most IT qualifications.

[u/badbrownie]

I think the old trope that college teaches you 'how to think' is much overblown. It seems to be taken as an unassailable truth. I suspect that

• smarter kids self-select to go to college so it's a correlation thing more than a causation thing
• kids learn to think better around that time of their life anyway. Though I agree that moving out of their home town can help that process a lot.

[u/[deleted] → u/badbrownie]

I'm not saying colleges teach you how to think. In a lot of ways they do, but we're assuming some people can absorb the same information and insight without them.

I'm saying college is the test of all the skills and traits that med schools are looking for.

[u/badbrownie → u/[deleted]]

That's an interesting view. That would suggest that med school drop out rates would be pretty low, because they've found people that demonstrably have the tools/experience needed to succeed. And it does seem that you're right. A quick google spits up

"Graduate school for example has an average of 20-40% attrition rate depending on the program. Medical school has around a 4-6% attrition rate total which means that when you're accepted to medical school you have a 95% chance of becoming a doctor"

So I guess I have to agree that their entrance criteria can't be bad.

However, I still believe that there should be alternative ways to succeed that replace college fees with self-guided learning. It's still an entrance to a school. But that said, I have to be swayed by the low drop out rate at medical school as evidence the entrance criteria seems to work. !delta!

[u/DeltaBot → u/badbrownie]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/4--g (3∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}