About 20 years ago, I engaged a senior faculty member and one of his graduate students to handle the documentation and design as well as first-pass prototyping of a project for one of my clients.

They seemed to be progressing adequately, based on their discusisons, but, upon reaching the first milestone, a completed objective specification, it became apparent that they had no idea at all of how one should proceed to get from one end of a job, any job, to the other.

After paying them and telling them the job had changed in character and their help was no longer needed, I hired a high-school studen some 15 years old to do the job, and he completed it admirably, including the paperwork in three days of a long weekend.

Since then I've been suspicious of academia, as the "lofty premise" oft-discussed there, seems to be a counterproductive medium in the real world. I once mentioned that I recently was disappointed in my effort to hire two guys, and having interviewed six guys who demonstrated that they could, despite their extensive credentials, neither read adequately to comprehend a magazine article, nor write down what they'd seen when the process described in the article was demonstrated to them, ended up doing my own work and that of the two guys we never hired for about a year.

The problem is that many of the professors now in the hallowed halls of academia have no experience in the "real" world at all.

When I went to school, both undergraduate and graduate, my professors and instructors, as well as laboratory supervisors, librarians, and, probably, janitors and cooks, were all experienced in the world of industry, having numerous accomplishments to their credit. That's no longer the case. In our public school system, teachers advance, not by learning something relevant to real-life experiences, but only by taking more courses in education. As a result, our young are taught to be teachers, and little else.

RE