There may be issues with the implementation, but masters only programmes are absolutely commonplace in Europe. Some are better, some are worse, but good ones are genuinely helpful for people to, e.g., upskill before going into industry or decide whether they want to do a PhD.
Master's programs in Europe are commonly the pathway/requirement to applying for a PhD position. This supports why they might be commonplace there, but it also means the same reason would not justify the master's only programs in the US in the same way.
In many places, there is a distinction between "master's through research" (a gateway to PhD) and "master's through study" (more coursework, less independent research, a gateway to r-n-d-level positions in the industry).
Yeah but as a European I think we took the wrong route. I am from Italy, and until 2001 we had 5 years undergraduate programs only. We then chose to do 3 + 2, but we should have gone with 4 + 1 years instead.
I have a BSc in Computer Engineering and I'm finishing a MSc in Computer Science. The MSc has been useless other than for being able to start doing research. I could have learned additional things in 1 more year, without repeating most of the knowledge in the other year, and then start the PhD directly.
Instead I did a MSc where for 1 year I mostly repeated old topics before starting working on really new things.
I think Masters should be highly specialized for people that after a Bachelor start to work but want additional knowledge for their position.
TLDR: 4 years Bachelors -> 4 years PhD is the correct route in my opinion. We messed up in Europe
But nobody has 4 + 4? The traditional system was in Europe 5 + 3, now we mostly have 3/4 + 2 + 3 (Europe) or 3 + 1 + 3 (UK/Ireland).
I don't have a lot of experience with the US system, but from my experience after 3/4 years newly minted postgrads are probably not yet ready to knowingly commit to 5 years of specialised training. European-style MA/MSc's often feel "useless" because they actually help people switch course and find a new footing. However, good master's programmes are either flexible enough for advanced students to take more specialised modules or have high demands to begin with.
It doesn't really matter if the model cannot make a good educated guess about calories in the food if it cannot give a consistent response given the same input.
Matt Levine: "Which honestly is a little bit cool? I mean, bad, whatever, correlated and predictable and manipulable. But also, like, everyone who runs the big frontier artificial intelligence labs is going around saying that in a few years they will build a superintelligence. What if one good use of superintelligence is deciding how to allocate capital throughout the economy? What if Claude becomes all-wise and all-knowing? What if we just delegated all economic decisions to Claude; what if it wisely decided what projects to fund and what businesses to pursue? How would that happen? How would “we,” collectively, delegate all our economic decisions to Claude? Maybe like this? Maybe all the retail investors will delegate their investing decisions to Claude."
Years ago I ordered Ninja 2 from Japan and was sadly expecting to pay another 20% or so in customs fees, but the price was given in yen, and the customs probably couldn’t figure it out, so they released it to me for free. It’s still going strong.
reply