[ExI] If I were President...

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 4:17 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> This is an extremely well-thought-out list Adrian, all of it good.
>
Thanks.  Is this a list you might run for Congress on?  (Whoever becomes
President will just about need allies like that, set up years before the
presidential run.)


> Are there alternatives to gaining credentials than the traditional college
> degree?  I think Adrian would be the first to agree there damn well should
> be, for some talented people don’t take the usual path.
>

Less "should be" than "are already".  That said, the traditional degree -
or a vocational school equivalent - makes a handy standard, which you need
for any coordinated government approach to this sort of thing.  Lose that
(like some people are suggesting jettisoning Common Core) and don't replace
it with anything else, and the government can't do much.  (Despite any
positive-libertarian sentiment that may bring, this is usually in the bad
sense: things tend to get worse.)


> There should be alternate tickets into mainstream tech companies besides
> the usual engineering degree.  There should be things like the GRE one can
> take for credentials but not be required to have a bachelor’s degree to
> have it count as an actual credential.
>
Experience doing the job tends to be the only accepted alternate
credential.  That's not the government's fault.


> We should not rely on the name of the university we attended and the GPA
> as a credential, but rather our actual mastery of relevant materials.
>
Unfortunately, "actual mastery" is not itself a credential, and never will
be.  A credential is a way of proving you probably have actual mastery.
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