[arkano]

> It can also take significantly less time.

Strong opinion, but I think that if you want to learn facts, you can learn them faster on your own. If you want to learn a new skill, you need somebody to check your ideas until you can get to a level where you can self-correct yourself.

> II'm not sure the traditional lecture in front of a blackboard approach is relevant nowadays.

Sure, and I agree, most of the time I would prefer to study on my own instead of going to the lecture. However, it was incredibly useful to have an expert that could align my understanding whenever I was off to the wrong path; I think those were the opportunities for learning, not reading facts of off the board.

> There's no guarantee of that in any case.

Let's say that it's significantly more likely that you have practised on a variety of easy to hard problems in your field of interest if you have taken good courses from a university versus doing your own work. I believe that when you pick your own homework, it's natural to cherry-pick problems that seem simple.

> I think the main value of the PhD is being in general proximity to, and collaborating with people interested in the same field.

That would (and does) describe research divisions in industry too.

[mam2]

It's not a soo strong opinion. There are definitely people who learn a lot from lectures, I've seen a lot of them, but there are also a lot of people who don't like lectures and feel they learn nothing in it and learn quite fast alone at home. The last one is mostly me. (for context, i have a PhD in AI).

[SantalBlush]

Completely agree. Intelligence alone is not sufficient (perhaps not even always necessary) to learn a new field. People really need experts to let them know when they're wrong until they develop the discipline to recognize it for themselves.

[TheOtherHobbes]

This is very domain-specific. It makes total sense in STEM, but is more debatable in the arts and humanities - where it seems you learn whatever specific style of writing, practice, and critical analysis is popular in academia at the time, and you're going to have a bad time if you try to step out of that.