Make School Hard Again
I find the tone and tenor of the article to be closed-minded and exceptionally naive, almost as though the author had never really left the confines of the academy.<p>I disagree with the belief that schoolwork performs a valuable filter function when it is "rigorous". I agree that rigorous coursework that emphasizes book smarts selects for something, but I don't value that something outside a set of very narrowly defined circumstances.<p>Having completed both a masters in philosophy and an M.S. in computer science, I'll go as far as to say that I don't think college matters at all any more, in tech, and that's fine. My career path in tech went from Amazon, which didn't care about my "pedigree" to being self-employed, to my current job which just valued the evidence that I could get shit done. I don't like hiring new grads, but when I do what I look for is exclusively accomplishment outside the classroom. Sure, a B student from an MIT csci program will have a degree of algorithmic agility that j-rando web dev who's been hacking away for a decade won't, but I can think of exactly zero times that's mattered.<p>So I think the "academy" 
 should be an opportunity to climb,  to make things happen, to go above and beyond, but I don't think it fulfills its primary purpose by insisting upon harder coursework.  In fact,  de-emphasizing coursework in favor of making or doing things in the world of research/business/politics/etc. seems preferable to me.