At Yale 40 years ago my brother took a seminar with 10 students taught by Peter Gay (My German Question, Freud Jews and Other Germans) that was transformative.

While a student at Hampshire College from 1974-78 I spent all of 1976 in Spain watching the country's peaceful transition out of fascist dictatorship while doing archival research for my BA thesis on the Spanish Civil War, interviewing several exiled veterans of that war. I did the same research again in Barcelona as a grad student with two scholarships from UCLA in 1980-81 and 1986-87. One of my UCLA classmates spent 1983 in Soviet archives in Leningrad studying the Stalin party purges on a Social Science Research Council grant. I never would have understood the truly murderous mafia with a flag nature of the Soviet regime without exposure to his research and experience there.

The skill set of digging deep and filtering through hundreds of sources with critical thinking, careful distinctions and nuance was transformative and most definitely not buyable with a $100 online course. It was invaluable when doing channel check research on stocks for a hedge fund client, due diligence on startup investments as an angel investor and shorting 20m JPY in the forex market in 2013-15, the best trade of my life, which came from knowing the history of the grandson of a war criminal and nationalist PM Shinzo Abe. This one trade paid for my MBA twice.

Acquiring this skill set is not fast food and totally dependent on repeated exposure to high level intellects like the profs I had at Hampshire and UCLA and met in Barcelona. The idea that all this can be replaced by a $100 online course is utter idiocy.