MIT's free online classes can now lead to MicroMaster's degree
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
In fact, with most even Ivy League Universities, if you don't get in, but can move into town, and arrange to take a hard class or two, and ace them, you would find your next application would be much more favorably received.
MIT is laying out a different path for these graduate students; essentially: "Let's not have to take you at your word for how successful you can be...Show me you can pass this degree program upfront by doing half of it."
I don't think it's in MIT's interests to dilute their brand by issuing shitty substandard degrees; instead, it seems much more likely that they are looking for ways to on-board many more quality students and keep their recruitment / admissions cost-to-successful-graduate ratio as low as possible. Hence the "We have 40 grads a year, industry wants thousands" quote.
It looks like the first master's program this is available for is Supply Chain Management, which from what I've seen[2] is one of the harder parts of manufacturing
1. http://micromasters.mit.edu/ 2. General Motors Assembly Plant (IT though, not supply chain)
I doubt that a person would be hired fresh out of school for this kind of job, which implies that the 33K USD would be paid for by an employer, perhaps for someone who is showing promise in a related field or at a lower level.
Then again, I have to admit I never ran into one of the infamous asshole recruiters...
"As part of the pilot project, students who perform well in the online half can take an exam to apply for the second semester on campus. Those who get in would pay $33,000, about half the cost of the yearlong program."
Would be nice to see them eventually offer affordable online courses & exams for 8 semesters.
And in essence I guess it is a sort of freemium structure.
If more people have access to quality education, and they are eventually given a degree based on how they perform in the course, we should not be bothered about brand value. Educational institutions should cater to as many students as possible without compromising on quality.
But always cool, with more options.
Agreed: more options is more better (I failed my paid English requirements, btw).
It is very different depending on degree and also university. Medicine is very expensive and half the money goes into educating doctors.
The cost per year per student ranges between 5930 € and 12,170€ over the Bundesländer (counties), maybe depending on the degrees offered? [1]
I found a number for the average cost in the US at US$36,564 per year [2], which today is 32,199 €. So, for Germany, it's about a third per year on average.
edit: Is the US tuition the full cost?
[1]http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/grossbild-263275-28...
[2]http://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/...
The actual cost is probably still substantially smaller in Germany -- IMO higher ed is one of those areas where markets create lots of inefficiences that a mostly or completely socialized system doesn't have (e.g., spending tens of millions on fancy new buildings and other amenities designed to attract people).
...that victors write the history books.
Seriously, the notion that there was a single cause for the decline of the USSR -- and that this cause corresponds exactly to the ideologies at the heart of its antagonistic relationship with its enemies -- is prime facia suspicious. There were a myriad of economic, structural, political, environmental, geopolitical, and military reasons for the collapse of the USSR. Boiling all of that down to "Socialism Bad" is a nice rallying cry, but not exactly a helpful analysis (or at all likely to be very accurate).
>... because the inefficient universities would be out competed by the efficient ones
What does this even mean? What does it mean for a university to be "efficient"?
I think you're confusing what ideology claims should happen with observable reality; namely, that higher education in the US is 1) closer to a free market than peer nations; and 2) horrendously more expensive than peer nations.
>... because universities are not a perfectly free market
It's one thing to say "we don't know what works, so let's try the thing that one particular ideology prescribes."
It's another thing to say "Those people over there don't have our problem. I bet the reason is because we're not doubled down on the exact opposite of what they're doing."
In any case, I think I answered above why a free market won't fix higher education: brand names / flashy stadiums / dorms / academic buildings sell better than good instruction and solid research.
Free higher education is a good idea, but the cost is prohibitive. There's a difficult balance to strike between keeping the amount of money required affordable and opening up as many places as possible.
No they don't. [0]
What are you implying here. Make it more expensive, more people will come? That's a bit silly and just looking at the UK as an example ignores that educational attainment has grown everywhere. You could say the same for other countries where fees didn't become so expensive. The German Abitur (sort of A-levels that is a decent proxy for higher education) grew by sevenfold (as a portion of the population) in the last few decades. That's just the economy, political and educational system at work, improving.
Now does money impact education, obviously. A free school in a traditional form would definitely be crap. But there's a difference between free and costless to the student. That's the difference between the UK and most other EU countries. Take this chart for example, dark-blue is higher education expenses:
http://www.cbs.nl/NR/rdonlyres/0416FFB3-62FD-42AD-B3F2-074AD...
You'll find Denmark at the very top spending more than the UK per student (which makes sense, they're much richer). It's no surprise then that Denmark offers solid education and that Danes make ample use of it.
It's not that the UK spends more per student on education than everyone else, it's simply that the percentage of revenue sources is more from tuition fees and grants, than the public, than pretty much anyone else in the EU. At best it lowers educational attainment because you end up with the same funding for universities as before and the same as other countries, only the barrier to entry is now higher for students.
Some fees make sense to create incentives to do well in school, actually graduate and take it seriously. Like say in the Netherlands where you'll pay something between $7k and $10k generally in tuition for a degree. (supplemented by tens of thousands of funding from the government per student to the educational institution). But again, the notion that increasing fees in these countries makes educational attainment skyrocket is myopic.
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/201...
No. I was saying that providing education isn't free so someone has to pay, and individuals paying for their own places will provide more places because there's a very obvious risk/reward connection (risking borrowing money for the reward of a better job) than society paying for places (higher tax liability for societal benefit).
[1] Here, tuition fees in public higher education are around € 1k/yr.
Many Coursera courses move very slowly (not their fault since they're taking thousands of students), or move too fast and have too much "homework" for a 9-5er. What's worse, some don't let you get ahead! With OCW I can set my own times and pace myself for my kind of learning.
I also prefer college lectures and books to Coursera lectures. Like you said, Coursera content can be too simple.
I would say, if we are able to show what we have built, or talk and convince intellectually as to what we are capable to build should matter more than any piece of paper. I do agree, there would be a problem of filtering the right ones for a job in lieu of a "paper degree", but I hope there comes a better way in the world to judge and educate people to be more innovative and building real incremental things rather than just getting 'paper degrees'"
Most of the good programmers I know just go to school mostly for the credentials and to socialize with other programmers there, and then go home and self-teach for actual skill. School centers around getting a job. But it's starting to become not the only way to get a job. (Leaving out startups, of course; you don't really need credentials there except to impress VCs.)
Some companies are recognizing that formal education in programming is not very effective, and are paying more attention to StackOverflow and GitHub accounts and that sort of thing. Our work and expertise is becoming more visible through the Internet. That suggests that maybe we're not going to have to worry so much about credentials.
My older brother is doing very well for himself as a developer, without any formal training past some classes in high school back in the 90s. As for myself, I'm leaving for Kansas City once I'm done with my Associate's degree, and I'm going to UMKC there... for a few semesters, until I find a job and/or a cofounder. I don't intend to finish the degree I'm going to sign up for. They let slip during my visit there that they're already having issues convincing students to finish their degrees rather than let themselves be hired out.
But I do intend to go, in order to meet other programmers. That's the real power of universities: they collect bright, ambitious people and let them work together. Online classes don't have that power, and the credential problem is already being solved better, so I don't think this is going to go very far. But maybe it'll help accelerate the current solution by giving more credence to self-teaching and online study. Good try, but it'll probably be irrelevant in the end.
Kind of begs the question of whether one could recreate the social aspect of universities and leave out the expense of formal classes as they are now? For instance, whether you could make a sort of hackerspace-modelled university where all the "classes" were projects that one student was looking for help with? I'd attend that.
Hmm... sounds familiar, doesn't it? ;)
Sounds kind of like Make School [1]. Will be interesting to see the outcomes for their first real 'class' of students.
FYI also sounds like Holberton School[1] - 100% project-based.
Michael Dell almost folded Dell early days over a supply chain problem in fact; he was pre-buying inventory for his computers, and got bitten by a technology change leaving him holding enough worthless inventory that it could have easily ended the company.
At any rate, if you're Dell, you want people thoroughly trained in this before they get to go muck up your new laptop deployment schedule; even a small screw up in a small part could mean major revenue problems.
MOST startup developer screwups aren't on that scale, which is one reason it can work well to just jump in like you are planning on doing.
If nothing else, this restricts the set of people who end up paying for that second half to those who have already demonstrated they can handle the work.
For example Georgia Tech has online master's degrees but no undergraduate courses.
If the trial fee is $1500, I'm not sure they'd go right back to $150
So, sounds like $150 up front for each course, and then $800 to tie it all up with the exam, for $1500 total.
Honestly, it's surprising this took so long to happen.
The video embedded in the article talks about Tsinghua University beating MIT in rankings. This is a quantity vs quality since Tsinghua University churns out more research papers than MIT [1] because of the vast amount of students.
[1] - http://qz.com/522471/the-real-reason-chinese-universities-ar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_clique
I suppose it's a bit like if MIT grads were ~40% of the US cabinet or Senate committee chairs – rather than so many Ivy League lawyers.
As far as I know, the prestige university you go to if you want a specifically technical education is Shanghai Jiao Tong Daxue. (Don't take that as particularly authoritative; I'm mostly familiar with it as a contrast to Fudan.) But I don't believe Tsinghua is technically focused in the manner of MIT. It's very much part of China's Ivy League.
Tsinghua University and Beijing University are both regarded as the best university in China, with different people ranking different one first. But in the area of CS, Tsinghua University is undeniably the first.