Having been witness to a lot of dialog recently on the subject, I have observed that there is in the broadcast engineering community a lack of agreement about the purpose of FCC examinations for Amateur Radio licenses. To that aging demographic, there is an attitude heard often that there is no value any longer to an Amateur license because the questions are too simple, an in-depth understanding of the technology is not required, schematic drawings are no longer required of an examinee, etc. and therefore holding an Amateur license is not an indication of any scholarly understanding of the medium at all.
On the other side are those who, I think correctly, argue that the purpose of Amateur licensing, perhaps especially entry level licensing, is to enable matriculation, not graduation. It is not a measure of achievement in technical self-training, but is the "ante up" that allows the self-training to start. It seems to me that the supporters of our Tech Enhancement proposal apply this metric, and the opponents hold the other one.
73, Chris W3KD