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Comment by trogdor3000 | Hacker News Reader

The sad thing is that no one cares abou the quality of the degree outside of academia. All they care about is seeing the BS on your resume.

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Most employers aren't going to see someone with a degree from "Western Governors University" any different than someone with a degree "Central Ohio University" or "University of Wisconsin - Stout". Even though one of these allows you to get a degree in 6 months for $3,500 and the other two are full 4-5 year degrees that total $60,000.

Yes if you have MIT or Harvard on your resume it will be memorable and stand out, but other than that... they are all basically looked at equally.

This is overly simplistic.

There are tiers to everything. If you think it's MIT or Harvard, and then everyone else is a tossup, I've got some very bad news for you.

That only proves GP's point. What the author of the blog-post did in 3 months does not meet the expectations of a CS program from even a half decent school (think bottom of the top-100 list).

You know what also doesn't meet those expectations? a degree from a diploma mill.

So what you're saying is that, since outside of academia no one cares about quality of education, employers don't mind (or maybe shouldn't mind, according to your opinion) degrees from diploma mills.

When I say that the quality of the degree is not good, it is somewhat implied that the quality of the work of the person who did the degree is also questionable.. :/

Unfortunately you get this with students at every school. Many are just there to skate by and get a degree. The OP could also just know the material already and had no issue being able to pass as quickly as possible. This is something that is a huge benefit of WGU.

Also for what it's worth I took 8 weeks doing about 10 hours of work a week on Discrete math 1 and found it very interesting. My discrete math notes is a 1300 line org file that translates to a 29 page word doc. This doesn't include the many proofs and problems I practiced on a white board or on my iPad. I completed Operating systems in 5 weeks with about 15-20 hours of work a week. I used Georgia Techs Udacity course on operating systems to supplement my learning.

> I completed Operating systems in 5 weeks with about 15-20 hours of work a week. I used Georgia Techs Udacity course on operating systems to supplement my learning.

Which gives ~75h-100h, way more credible than the 15h the author mentions in the post..

My students have 3h/week of Lecture, 2h/week of labs which is about 75h of classes (15 weeks). If we add ~60h estimated time for two projects, it's 135h. It means to me that you had enough time to learn the concepts and may have internalized some/most of them..

Here you say that the time spent is "way more credible" than the authors. I think it's worth noting though, that it's the same course.

Im not a native english speaker, what I mean by more credible is the outcome, not the degree itself. In other words, this guy that took 100 hours, I would say that it seems more credible to have learned more than the other that says he took only 15 hours...

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