What I mean in this thread* is all the way up **through *PhD. Bachelor’s, master’s, then PhD.
Time was, at least at some universities (Berkeley for one), most of the academic libraries had open stacks and any schmoe could wander in off the street, browse through the reference material and all the indexes (these were long pre-Internet daze), and then go into the stacks and read academic journals and books and what-not to your heart’s content. I used to do that when I was interested in certain topics (dolphins, for one).
I’ve been away a long time, so I don’t know how that works now. I’ll bet you can’t do that any more.
I doubt very much that a university professor or grad students would spend hundreds of hours discussing research methods or other topics with some random person who contacted them by email.
Even when I was a grad student in the 1970s I think you needed a student ID to access the stacks. Grad students would have a stack pass, undergrads would need to request books.
I worked in the campus library of my undergrad uni in West Texas, pre-Internet. No ID needed except to check out books. It was open to everyone in the community.
At the U of Hawaii, I can’t remember if we had to show a student ID for the grad library. I think the undergrad library, which was in a different building, it was open to all.
As for a zero-dollar Internet PhD, well, I think this is a case of you’ll get what you paid for.
Access to stacks isn’t so much of an issue. It was rare for me to physically go to the library. But no electronic access would have been crippling.
Most PhDs in sciences and engineering involve only two semesters of classes on top of ~5 years in the lab. Not going to do that on the internet.
A PhD is not about learning existing knowledge; it’s about making a new contribution.
Aye a PhD is about making a small contribution to your field.
Also, a lot of master’s degrees also receive funding and stipend. Only in the postgrad “professional” degrees (in the US) are large debts possible (law, med, vetmed, pharm, maybe MBA?)
The vast majority of university libraries are open stack. E.g., every one I was a student or professor at. During those years, ID was only required to check out materials and such, technically. One place, for example, had a guard at the door supposedly to check for ID upon entering. (And people from other area colleges were also allowed in as well as people with certificates granting access.) But ID was rarely checked. It was mainly used to have a legal way of keeping the homeless and such out. If you could look like a person who had a legit purpose at the library, no problem.
But certain items and categories would be in locked rooms. Rare/valuable or routinely stolen items (reference books for certain classes) would be kept separately. Also things like personal papers that people donate to a college are kept apart.
Some libraries are closed stack. E.g., certain libraries (but not usually all) at Ivy League schools.
You could be as well educated in a field as well as someone with a PhD in some areas, but still not exactly the same as actual going through a doctoral program, unless it’s a degree that really doesn’t speak well of the field and/or institution granting it. Having a PhD is kind of like being a rabbi, you are a doctor because 10 other doctors say you are. If you haven’t interacted with others at that level you haven’t done the part of demonstrating your knowledge. So it’s all about what is ‘equivalent’ to a PhD, for smaller values of ‘PhD’ it can be done.
Yes for someone who can learn on their own.
And also if “internet” includes ordering books/papers from the internet. There is some information which is not free - you have to pay for a book or a technical paper.
Note there are many people who do better in a classroom/instructor situation - are not capable of learning on their own.
Again, classroom instruction is a very small part of a PhD education. No doubt much of that can be replaced. What about the rest?
Indeed, we had a rare Book Room at the campus library I said I worked at. Only staff were allowed in there. I recall there was some pretty neat stuff, among them a collection of Playboy magazines going back to at least near the beginning if not the very beginning, bound by year. They kept them in the Rare Book Room, along with the unbound newer issues, to prevent them from disappearing. However, this being West Texas some of the earlier issues had had all of their photos snipped out by prudish old-lady librarians.
When I was a student, the stacks were open and you could go and read journals. Now virtually all the jou rnals are online and you need a student ID to access them. But there is a more serious problem. The main requirement for a PhD is original research and this has to be judged by a committee. Here at McGill, there is a committee of five plus and outside examiner, all of whom are expected to have read it and have questions. How can this be done without the involvement of a university? What does a degree even mean without a university involved?
In my experience only for students on the way to a PhD. I know of several universities where the Masters program is a source of revenue. And that is in engineering.
I assure you, any successful PhD student knows damn well how to learn on his or her own. Do you think a professor holds your hand during your literature search?
Absolutely. Especially given the state of the job market in most fields.
The whole point of accreditation seems to me to answer the last question to some extent: The person knows, and has done, these things up to an acceptable level. Doesn’t matter where. Doesn’t matter how much they spent or who their parents are. They know this and have the requisite experience, so they can be trusted to do certain things.
Now, that mainly works at the undergraduate level. It completely suffices for a Bachelor’s, for example. Beyond that, you need to engage with practitioners in the field, which means location matters and money matters and parental lineage matters, because you can’t fake access and you can’t fake connections. That’s why Ph.Ds come with lineages: who studied with who, who studied with who, back to Knuth or some similar Adamic equivalent.
So, no, you can’t get a Ph.D online for free. You can, perhaps, learn as much as a doctor in the field knows, but you don’t get the access and, therefore, don’t get the influence.
At my undergraduate alma mater, the science-for-jocks classes had labs that were done entirely via computer simulation, and similar simulations can be found online. So a very determined student who’s serious about an education on the Internet could get the same quality of education as a standard university student who’s just breezing through the easy classes for a bachelor’s. The same might even be true for a master’s, but you’re going to find far fewer master’s students who are just coasting.
For a PhD, though, no way. The closest I can think is that an absolute genius at math (think Ramanujan) just might be able to teach himself enough to come up with a thesis-worthy advance on his own. But even there, that genius is still going to be lacking the continual feedback and exchange of ideas with other mathematicians.
Oh, and at my university, the astronomy department maintained its own extensive library of all of the major astronomy journals, open to anyone who was able to find the astronomy department (it was pretty well-hidden), but most of the journals for other fields were in the university’s library, and not accessible to anyone but the library’s own staff. If you needed an article, you had to tell a staffer exactly what you wanted, and they’d go back into the caverns and take that out, limit one at a time. I can’t imagine how anyone in the other departments got any research done at all.
The wife, who was a fellow grad student when we met, has assured me both libraries at UH were open to all, no student ID needed to enter. This was decades ago though. Dunno about nowadays.
This pertains to a master’s degree and not a doctorate, but it still illustrates the importance of working with your committee. The wife recently retired after 30 years as an assistant professor at Chulalongkorn University. She told me of one case where this lady entered the graduate program. This lady had obtained a job that required her to obtain this master’s degree. If she failed to get the degree, she would lose the job. It was a research track, I’m not sure if there were even any classes to take. But whether there were or weren’t, shortly after she started the program, she up and disappeared. They never heard a word from her again … until two years later, when she showed back up and said: “Well, here’s my master’s thesis, it’s all finished.” This was extreme even for Thailand. They told her that’s not how it worked, and there was no way she was going to be awarded a master’s degree. They’d even thought she had dropped out of the program. So then her employer started calling up and bugging them to bestow the degree, because they couldn’t lose her. In the end, she was finally rejected of course.
Maybe it’s because my graduate degree is in math, but I don’t find it inconceivable that a modern-day Ramanujan could get into contact with a modern-day Hardy.