Raw LLM Responses

Okay, I'm a professional optical system design and engineering consultant. Sometimes, I provide my client/s with advise on who to hire for an optical engineering job, if they ask my opinion. Generally, I would prefer it that job seekers possess a college degree in their field of engineering, even in the age of AI (and perhaps especially so). It is not about the grades or exam scores. Rather, it is about an indication of having been exposed to a certain depth of thinking and having resilience to "survive" the hardships of college. For the types of things we do in optical system design and engineering, it is very unlikely that an individual can be an effective engineer without having gone through college. Ok -- of course, in theory, you can learn all of the college level stuff without going through college. But two things: (1) How would you prove it? (2) You would be missing the college experience -- making friends (in person, not online), having deep meaningful conversations with a professor, deriving formulas at the whiteboard, etc. On the first point, I don't enjoy testing candidates. But in this case, I would need to if the job seeker does not have a college degree. I would need to spend more effort and time to do this. And if a candidate says he/she uses AI or Wikipedia for all tasks and research, then that's already an indication to me of a candidate who will not be wholly effective as an engineer (however, he/she would be quite resourceful -- but then so is everyone who uses AI and Wikipedia). To differentiate yourself in the era of AI, I think you'd need to show that you can still function effectively on specific engineering and design tasks without AI, even if it means deriving the simplest formula for specific topics in your field. On the second point, you would really be mssing out on a lot experiences from college by not going through college. Of course, there is the money concern. That is, paying for college is hard and it can incur debt. In this case, I think that colleges and universities should start to seriously consider reducing the number of required years for a degree. Make the degree more focused, and forget about electives (or perhaps, make electives be ungraded and let it be a better experience by letting students sit-in, listen, contribute to the conversations on the subject and so on). In my opinion and in my field, AI will not make