Re: Education and Productivity: Whats the Correlation?

[Elna Tymes <etymes -at- LTS -dot- COM>]

Matt Danda wrote some interesting observations about his experience with
PhD's and non PhD's.  Let me posit a hypothesis:

It used to be assumed that when you went to college, you learned how to
learn.  You didn't just take courses and pass tests and get the piece of
paper certifying that you'd spent seat-time doing so, somewhere along
the line you were required to take courses that required you to do some
research, come to conclusions, and defend those conclusions in
discussions among people who knew something about your subject.

Somehow in the intervening years the whole experience of going to
college has become more focused on producing people with specific sets
of skills -- not to say that this is all wrong: there is considerably
more to learn about engineering and biology and medicine and public
administration than there was some 30-50 years ago.  However, the
emphasis on learning how to learn as one major focus of the college
experience has probably diminished some over time.

One conclusion that might be drawn from Matt's experience is that PhD's
have learned how to learn, and because of that, perhaps place a higher
value on documentation than those who have spent their college years in
a narrowly focused degree program.

However, one might also draw the conclusion (and here I agree) that
learning how to learn does not mean that you've learned how to get a
product to market.

Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems

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