Posts Tagged value of higher education

From Technologist to Humanist: Google’s “In-House” Philosopher

Posted by Tom McDonald in Web Detritus on July 24, 2011

I had been thinking about the PEL debate on the value of higher education, and came across this compelling story by Damon Horowitz.

Did you know that Google has an “in-house philosopher”? Horowitz shares his personal story of self-transformation in this article for the Chronicle of Higher Education. With a background in software engineering, he had developed a career in the world of information technology. He had established his own business engineering “natural language processing” components for Artificial Intelligence systems. (Natural language processing is the part of AI, usually based on formal logic, that is supposed to make computers understand us).

But his challenging encounters with the limitations of AI led him to broader philosophical questions about “the nature of thought, the structure of language, [and] the grounds of meaning.” Horowitz thus left the world of IT to do a PhD in Philosophy and has today become a sort of evangelist for appreciation of the humanities in the world of technology. He makes an argument for the value of leaving technology to do a degree in the humanities (it is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed after all), but even if you are not sold on that idea, his point extends to a larger argument about importance of bringing a humanities perspective to the world of technology which is bad off for its lack:

From Technologist to Philosopher
http://chronicle.com/article/From-Technologist-to/128231/

- Tom McDonald

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Does PEL Support Entrepreneurship vs. Academia?

Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on May 7, 2011

The notion that a college degree is essentially worthless has become one of the year’s most fashionable ideas, with two prominent venture capitalists (Cornell ’89 and Stanford ’89, by the way) leading the charge.

The University Has No Clothes by Daniel B. Smith on New York Magazine

A New York Magazine article about the value of higher education, “The University Has No Clothes” is making the rounds on FB and Twitter.  It’s a decent length article that explores the issue in some depth but the thesis boils down to this:  a college or university education is a huge investment for a young person and their family.  It creates an enormous debt hole  before they even have employment.  The question is:  is the return on investment worth it?  As a staggering statistic:  student loan debt is outpacing credit card debt for the first time in history.

Not surprisingly, a number of folks, particularly entrepreneurial advocates, say ‘no’.  The argument is that the two to four years that person is paying to learn skills and gain knowledge of questionable value, they could instead be gaining real-world experience and generating entrepreneurial energy and value for themselves and others.  I see this as motivated by the same cultural forces that have seen the positioning of social entrepreneurship against traditional NGO models.

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