Flutterby™! :

This is being sent to a whole bunch of people, so watch your follow-ups if you reply to it. For one thing you may end up for all the world to see on http://www.flutterby.com unwittingly (If you haven't checked it out recently, it's got frequent updates of my rants and interesting stuff). I've been struggling recently with a bunch of ethical questions about our culture. It's fairly well known that I believe that the educational system we've come up with is corrupt and interested primarily in furthering its own growth, actually imparting knowledge to students is somewhere on the bottom of the list. I've been struggling over our brand of warped capitalism, where a heavily protected stock market (I hesitate to call it a capital market) exists not to fund great projects, but solely as a speculative tool for people who think they can second guess the other participants. And of course, like most people, I cringe at the complex web of rules and mores which has made "business" students more valuable to the culture than those who actually produce. In that light, may I recommend reading: http://photo.net/philg/school/tuition-free-mit.html On at least one of these forums John Deamer and I have virtually canonized Philip Greenspun, author of Travels with Samantha and host of Photo.Net. Well, he's long contended that people who go into engineering fields are fools, because they spend a lot of money for training which they could probably learn on their own, and then get jobs which don't pay terribly much when compared to finance, business or even medicine. In his own words:

In my engineering department (electrical engineering and computer science), we claim to offer special expertise in building products and services that are vital to society. If this is true, we ought to be able to find some way of getting money that does not involve shaking down middle-class families in Oklahoma. If this is not true, then we ought not to be teaching.

I have decided to stop personally participating in the system of extracting money from MIT kids and their families. On Thursday, March 12, 1998 I guest-lectured an MIT class (on db-backed Web service design). I calculated that the students were paying about $80 in tuition/lecture-hour. I withdrew a stack of $100 bills from my BayBank account and I handed one out to each undergraduate in the course. I then proceeded to give my talk, telling the students that I was happy to teach them but I was not going to take their money.

Worth reading his reasoning. Once again, one of the reasons that http://www.photo.net contains some of the best stuff on the web.