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"... the competent people are still competent ..."

Sadly, one could adduce many reasons this no longer remains true.



I'm trying to understand. Are you saying that the competent are being held back?


As far as I can tell, opening the universities to the masses damages the classes, standards, and student-faculty relations to the point where those who really 'ought' to be at university rather than at technical colleges don't benefit in the same way as previously. Perhaps this is just elitism, but I get the feeling that the 'bright' entering students are still the 'bright' graduating students, but gain much less deep knowledge than in the past. Of course, this applies to all disciplines, not just CS. As famous mathematician S Novikov said in 2002:

"In the West, however, there was also an abrupt fall in the level of college and school education in physics and mathematics in the last 20-25 years, and in the USA the decline in school education was apparently particularly steep. I can clearly see that contemporary education cannot produce a theoretical physicist capable of passing Landau’s theoretical minimum." (http://www.mi.ras.ru/~snovikov/cris_en.pdf)

Basically, this education crisis seems to me to be endemic to developed societies. I don't have a clear thesis on this yet, but it seems that when a society progresses from "Education is a route from poverty to paradise" to the anti-liberal "Everyone should receive fourteen years of education" that the quality of education rapidly declines.


Nice.

I see another problem. The bright are bored, school is tedious, and they go unrecognized. Then the less intelligent "excel."

Good thing AI research will need more and more intelligent people.


I could not agree more.




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