In patch due out sometime in December, developer CCP are planning to eliminate the ‘learning skills’ completely from the game.
Learning Skills are a particular sub-branch of the overall skill tree, its soul purpose being to provide stat boosts and help you learn other skills faster.
The community has been asking for this change for a while, as if one were to take the game seriously you would have to spend several months just learning these skills before you could play the game properly. Their usefulness in the long term was out-weighed by the sheer time-sink needed to obtain this edge, thus rendering the whole process rather erroneous.
CCP are compensating by reimbursing any skill-points that have already been spent on learning skills (which can be re-distributed at will), as well as some limited monetary reimbursement within certain conditions. Everyone will also be receiving 12 additional base points to each of the base attributes a character has.
You can read about the change in more detail here.
EVE Online will be getting it’s 14th major update, Incursion, in several stage, the first of which is due to launch tomorrow. The learning skills change will occur in the second phase, with a final phase due in January 2011.