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What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

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Re: What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

#61

> VICE News accessed information about the educational backgrounds of more than 90,000 people who work in the national security domain and possess a Top Secret clearance. That's the data from the OPM breach. Interesting.

I don't think so, I believe all this information is publicly available, though anonymized.

Re: What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

#62
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty bold unsubstantiated claim you're making there.

It's purposefully exactly as bold and unsubstantiated as the claim vice makes. Ah, crap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... says 18-21.5 million. I was way off. :(

It's far more likely that many government contracts and departments have their team's qualifications on record due to government accountability guidelines. While it hasn't been proven who exactly grabbed the OPM data, the chances are pretty low that someone with the capability to undertake this sort of work would share the spoils with an organization like VICE.

Re: What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

#63
post #58
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vice runs vacuous clickbait sometimes, but they've gotten a LOT better in the last few years and they also do some excellent journalism now. In particular, their feature-length documentaries are consistently amazing, as is Vice on HBO. Shane Smith and Thomas Morton both have balls of titanium. They go places ordinary journalists would never go, figuratively and literally. Give them a second chance.

> Give them a second chance. That is exactly what compulsive liars/sociopaths like Shane Smith want: http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/03/vice-founder-famous-for-tr... The documentaries and reporting produced by Vice are entertaining, but their standards of reporting basically make them a hipster tabloid.

A Couple of things....

1) The Daily Caller isn't exactly a noted truth teller itself 2) The author of that particular piece, Charles Johnson, is well known for being utterly without scruples whatsoever. He's also one of the purveyors of the extremely offensive "cuckservative" meme that popped up recently (hint: its white supremacist) which leads to #3... 3) Gavin Mcinnes, one of the founders, left Vice under not particularly friendly circumstances and has since come out as a white nationalist and he and Chuck Johnson are pretty tight online. Just some food for thought here.

Also, to back up the parent, yes, Vice does run a great deal of clickbait, but they also run things noone else will. I've read younger authors who I discovered on more mainstream sites that have had pieces published at Vice.

Re: What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

#64
post #10

This sounds like a problem with how contracts are written. They should be requiring that any degrees cited to fill contract qualification requirements come from an accredited university. That would at least take care of the worst cases. Some accredited schools with well known and prestigious names also operate diploma mills because they know large companies will pay for students to get advanced degrees. In the wider…

Sometimes the big name schools have an accredited ungraduate program, but an unaccredited masters/phd program.

Re: What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

#65
post #46
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're all familiar with the guy who acts like his University of Phoenix degree has launched him into the academic elite, and certain programs that are notoriously bad are and perhaps should remain a large negative signal. But to that end I've heard multiple people in hiring positions whose opinion of Georgia Tech's CS program has diminished greatly because they now view them as "that school with the online Ma…

Ask around at any university. Some classes can be taken online. These are the classes the students throw on top of an already full schedule for free credits because they know they are complete bullshit and will take zero time and effort. If I had a M.S. from Georgia Tech and actually did a degree program with other students in a class and spoke with a professor many times a week and dedicated 1-2 years of full-time s…

The idea that "online classes" are the bullshit, easy-credit classes is false. When I was doing my undergrad years ago I took one class, statistics, online because of a scheduling conflict. The only way my experience differed from that of a person sitting in the classroom was how my lectures were delivered. Otherwise, it was the same homework, same quizzes, same exams, same everything. (The lectures were also the same, actually, having simply been recorded and put online a day or two later.) Moving your body to a particular physical location has a couple benefits, to be sure, and the trick to online education is to try to make that ground up. It's certainly not fatal to the educational process. Why would it be?

Re: What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

#66
post #56
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask around at any university. Some classes can be taken online. These are the classes the students throw on top of an already full schedule for free credits because they know they are complete bullshit and will take zero time and effort. If I had a M.S. from Georgia Tech and actually did a degree program with other students in a class and spoke with a professor many times a week and dedicated 1-2 years of full-time s…

I think the implication that you can get an online Master's from a reputable school (Johns Hopkins, Georgia Tech, MIT, etc) by "copy paste answers off the Internet" is pretty baseless. The posts on /r/OMSCS seem to point directly to the contrary at least. The idea that being in a physical room and speaking to a professor in person makes you more worthy of a degree is simply not accurate. A degree should be a measure…

> willingness to put ones life on hold for a predetermined amount of time.

That is almost the definition of a degree. During a degree, every class expects you to devote time and resources to learning. The degree programs we see today are structured in such a way that they expect you to drop everything else and learn (or research, in graduate studies).

If you can't 'put your life on hold' in order to study you won't be able to do it quickly or coherently enough to generate the large body of knowledge that a degree represents.

Re: What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

#68
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So (and I'm guessing here because I really can't stand to click on a Vice link) that a lot of those PhDs are in bullshit fields like "national security studies" or similar?

It seems worse than that from the article. A lot of PhDs are from non-accredited schools. Some of the PhDs are from a series of online "schools" that seem to be ran by the same man.

Why would that be a motivation to get a PhD then?

I mean, for any billing issue, if you're contracting out a person with a non-accredited PhD then they do not have an accredited PhD and representing it that way is simply fraud; and from the side of customer/government asking for data on any "PhDs" including self-proclaimed, instead of accredited degrees would be simply ridiculous.

Re: What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

#69
post #58
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vice runs vacuous clickbait sometimes, but they've gotten a LOT better in the last few years and they also do some excellent journalism now. In particular, their feature-length documentaries are consistently amazing, as is Vice on HBO. Shane Smith and Thomas Morton both have balls of titanium. They go places ordinary journalists would never go, figuratively and literally. Give them a second chance.

> Give them a second chance. That is exactly what compulsive liars/sociopaths like Shane Smith want: http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/03/vice-founder-famous-for-tr... The documentaries and reporting produced by Vice are entertaining, but their standards of reporting basically make them a hipster tabloid.

You're smearing someone while citing the notorious author that Politico dubbed a "misinformation monger."

Please stop wasting our time.

Re: What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

#70
post #46
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're all familiar with the guy who acts like his University of Phoenix degree has launched him into the academic elite, and certain programs that are notoriously bad are and perhaps should remain a large negative signal. But to that end I've heard multiple people in hiring positions whose opinion of Georgia Tech's CS program has diminished greatly because they now view them as "that school with the online Ma…

Ask around at any university. Some classes can be taken online. These are the classes the students throw on top of an already full schedule for free credits because they know they are complete bullshit and will take zero time and effort. If I had a M.S. from Georgia Tech and actually did a degree program with other students in a class and spoke with a professor many times a week and dedicated 1-2 years of full-time s…

I am enrolled in the Georgia Tech online computer science masters (OMSCS). The rigour and the grading is the same as for internal students for many classes. Some classes even posted comparison results for exams between online and internal students (results are very close in every statistical measure, even the number of failures is similar). There is a substantial workload required to pass courses and I have taken leave from work in order to complete assignments. Saying a masters is at least a dedicated full time job is delusional and out of whack with many students today. I worked the whole way through my undergrad because my parents were not wealthy and I needed to live in another city to go to university, I was not alone in this.

Cheating is cracked down upon and students have been expelled for collusion. Exams are proctored by humans or AIs (it is easy to do eye tracking and screen scraping, it even detected me trying to open the exam from a VM and refused to open). These (Georgia Tech's, MIT's, Standford's, etc) online programs are going to eat the middle out of the rest of the university sector as the content is substantially better than most midrange universities for a fraction of the price. You may be prejudiced against online programs for whatever reason but they are here to stay at the top end and the bottom end and it is important to be able to distinguish between the two.

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