Community college tuition is free in many places.
So, an online experience does not count as "teach themselves"? I think online learning is more difficult and requires more discipline than sitting in a chair and getting credit. In any case, educational experience is irrelevant. End result is the same; a diploma. My diploma is exactly the same as a "resident" student's (minus the nail polish).
From a CP at one major airline and a friend working in hiring at another. All the majors as I mention track applicant performance and feed that back into their hiring preferences.
Major airlines are generally not that focused on time and ratings. If you meet the mins they assume you have some flying ability. What they are looking for is what the overall quality of the individual is and how will they fit managing a flight. Managing is what you do these days. Poor decision making can cost an airline big dollars. Decide as an example to cancel or divert a flight from Europe when maybe there was another option can cost an airline 500,000. They also want you to be able to talk and deal with passengers intelligently.
Yep. I know they track data. Not just the majors. Regionals do as well.
This may have been true 10 years ago... now a days on-line is very common.
I meant for subjects outside of pure aviation training like mech/electrical/aerospace/chemical engineering, materials science, chemistry, physics etc.
Alright. Not sure how a class with people all over the country can have a hands on component that isn’t incredibly cursory at some local community college or something but if you say so.
Okay. You try and learn machine shop skills or experimental procedure skills in VR and then do it in real life. Tell me how well that works out for you.
Isn't that supposedly one of the things that got us here; that everyone should get a college degree.
I got my 2 year degree at a Junior College (3.8GPA) before transferring to Ga. Tech. But even though they accepted most of my credits, I quickly found out I was way under prepared for the level of course work at the Junior level at GT. But yeah, I made it through and my Diploma says "Georgia Institute of Technology" for which I am still very proud 48 years later.
He's not getting a 4 year degree to be a shop monkey.....
Sometimes a smaller school can kick a**. My AE undergrad way back in the day was at the University of Texas at Arlington. The graduating class was only 10 students. However...most of my professors had extensive industry experience at what were then LTV, General Dynamics, and Bell Helicopter. They even had undergraduate and graduate flight test courses with rented aircraft. I took both, and both us rated pilots in the courses got to fly. The instructor was the chief FAA test pilot for the Southwest Region. Shop wisely, and consider certain metro areas for technical talent in faculty.
He should get a degree in this context. I'm sure he'd rather have a desk job with the airlines, or Boeing, or Bell, or Lockheed Martin, in case he can't fly anymore. I doubt someone would like to become a truck driver, or plumber, or machinist, after not being able to be a pilot. They pay well, but I don't think the standards of living compare.
Undergrad was 12 years ago for me, no issues remembering. I had plenty of hands on work in both. My first undergraduate research project as a sophomore in my later graduate lab had me in the machine shop building wind tunnel setups some 10 hours a week for a whole semester. Invaluable experience. My entire academic career was a mixture of experimental and numerical/theoretical work. Like I said, you need a decent grasp on both to really be effective IMO.I think maybe you are conflating grad school into undergrad, if you can remember that long ago
When I did my BS ME we didn't really have the technology to do it from home, in terms of the various programs you might need to get familiarity with. I dabbled a tiny bit in CFD during my senior year, but most of that was just the senior engineering project. Which would have been more difficult remote, but probably could have largely been done off campus in hindsight. I imagine grad school would have been a lot different though, even now. I do agree that hands on is great and probably even imperative from a professional engineering perspective, but we are talking here about airlines. They never asked me to solve a Laplace transform during my interview with my major :_
Well I have no first hand experience with the "more prestigious institutions" so my earlier post is theory of course
FWIW, I’ve never stated full-time in residence programs have no benefit.
That’s a cute phrase but mostly wrong, especially at a research institution. Being a professor or a research scientist (most of whom will teach at some point) at a research university is fundamentally a different kind of “doing”. They are doing research, very often sponsored by industry. They are doing the research that industry doesn’t have the time or willpower to do initially. It’s not inferior, it’s just different.
