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Comment by AviationAtom | Hacker News Reader

So, former WGU student here, though I hadn't completed my degree.

Many WGU students HATE these types of articles, because they undermine the legitimacy of WGU.

WGU was not designed for traditional students, it was 100% designed for working professionals, where WGU will only admit you with a reasonable amount of experience in your field.

WGU is regionally accredited, not nationally, and it's a non-profit. So it cannot be compared to University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, DeVry, etc.

It was founded by a group of governors out west, hence the name. They realized that there were many working adults who possessed a great depth of knowledge, from long working in their fields, yet they had no paper credentials to show for that knowledge.

Their model is competency-based, so you must demonstrate you posses knowledge in any given domain. If you can prove you do then you can test out right away, if you fail to then they offer a variety of resources to allow you to get up to par. In many cases classes are tied to obtaining industry certifications.

It's not for everyone, but it is a far cry from a "degree mill." Does it really matter if a person that has knowledge got it from sitting in a seat, paying ungodly amounts of tuition, or if they got it from life experience? As long as a bar is set, and you can meet it, then that should be what really matters.

Just my personal experience, from having attended the university. Unfortunately life sidetracked my completion, but I hope to return one day soon, and complete my program.

View on HN

I didn't read the article that way (although it's clear many posters did).

The author learned a lot independently. There's a question of what to do with that knowledge. A system like WGU does a few things:

1) Identify gaps and help fill them. Independent learners almost always develop gaps. One benefits from bringing that knowledge to a uniform "undergrad CS degree" level

2) Provide a certification once that's done.

A traditional university degree takes 4 years, costs $200k, and has mixed quality. Being able to do 75% of that independently, and having an institution gap-fill for a few grand? That sounds awesome.

For brand recognition, I don't see WGU as any better or worse than the 4500+ other random universities and colleges in the US. It doesn't match the top few hundred, but that's okay. Most don't.

I'm not sure who would compare it to Phoenix, ITT Tech, DeVry, or other scams like that.

I'd much more place WGU as more a competitor to ASU. ASU is awesome, and is really trying to pioneer models of innovative, quality, low-cost, scalable education.

I hope one of them succeeds.

By the way, yourself being a former WGU student, would you recommend WGU to a super-gifted kid? E.g. having someone start college there at e.g. age 13? That, plus CMU OMSCS, seems like something they could finish by age 17. Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early. Academically, middle / high school seems like a waste of time.

Doesn’t starting someone at 13 fly in the face of the whole “prerequisite experience learned on the job” bit?

"on the job"? Most likely. But I spent a lot of time and money getting a degree from an accredited university, where I was bored the whole time and maxing out the number of credit hours they would let me take while also working as much as I could. Why? Because I could've aced the first 2 years of CS classes by the time I was 13. I would imagine that's not uncommon among people who grew up with a hacker mindset and had the resources to explore it. I surely had gaps in my knowledge - not saying I didn't learn anything from the college experience. But I would love to live in a world where I didn't feel like I would, at some point, be better off with an accredited 4-year degree just to get or keep a job in the first place.

13 seems low, but I had 3 years of full time programming experience by the time I was 17.

It's really important to note that I'm not particularly gifted. I was required to work "real jobs" over the summer starting at 15 and the only way to convince my parents that programming was a "real job" was to make as much as I could working at the community pool. After the first summer I kept working over the semesters nearly full time. I was doing freelance Perl CGI and PHP+HTML+JS junk. my main advantages were:

1) I could do piece work for $8/hr,

(2) I presented professionally because I was usually the only native English speaker bidding on the project,

(3) I was a single person doing full stack + sales/bidding (the competing offshore outfits mostly sliced up labor between backend, frontend, and sales due to language barriers and extremely low-skilled programming labor. For projects of the size I was bidding on this introduced a lot of expenses/overhead without any real advantages), and

(4) I was available in US time zones when bidding on these projects. Even during the school year my after-school availability was way better than the offshore shops could usually offer, and I could answer emails during the school day.

To reiterate: not a genius! Just a kid slinging super simple HTML+JS+SQL+PHP/Perl. I didn't even know SQL for real; I knew CREATE, SELECT (without joins), UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE. Joins were implemented using multiple queries and for loops. Didn't matter for my clients, who just wanted cheap CMSes/ordering systems/etc. for random folks' .com get rich quick schemes, pizza shops who thought they really needed a customer website, etc. I'm pretty sure grubhub/slice/google maps/social media destroyed my old market a decade ago ;)

So a real genius getting there by 13 seems like an extreme outlier but not at all impossible.

I think that is a pretty fair and accurate assessment of it. For me, with a lot of experience, the credential + filling in some gaps were what I really needed and the WGU degree was a great way to take care of both.

As for recommending it to a super-gifted kid - I don't think the program is setup to allow that. You have to have a high-school diploma and at least a bit of work experience to even be admitted. I also think that one drawback of the program is that you can graduate without having written a ton of code, which is fine for someone who's been doing it for a long time, but less ideal for someone who hasn't?

As two points:

1) A GED would be trivial for this kid. So the high school diploma, I'm not worried about.

2) Kid started doing (real, not Scratch) programming in 1st grade. I'm not worried about coding experience or computer science background. I am worried about software engineering background, but that could come later.

Challenge where appropriate and allow them to practice self teaching. It's better to have accreditation from a top university than a one off. And if the child is capable they should be able to move through the material and jump the artificial hoops.

As at the end of the day. The reality is it's about who you know. And if your more concerned about the degree. Your missing the point.

I’d be more worried about social development. Of the small sample size of gifted people who didn’t want to be with their peers, how many have formed last relationships, friendships etc.

We had obviously gifted kids in my school and they came across as arrogant and entitled. 15 years later, most of them went on to get graduate degrees but don’t seem to be progressing socially (i.e. absent from reunions, weddings, small town bar run-ins)

I'm not sure attending traditional school with chronological peers does all that much to improve that situation. I know very few people who are still friends with anyone from high school, for example. I only have two friends from high school that I even talk to anymore, and only one that I'm close with. I don't feel like attending a traditional school did much of anything to help me develop social skills, as I still struggle with those quite a bit even now.

> 1) A GED would be trivial for this kid. So the high school diploma, I'm not worried about.

The test might be trivial, but being able to take it isn't trivial if you don't meet the age requirements.

Point.

I just did a web search. I didn't realize they had age requirements. Thank you.

I wonder when and why they added those in?

My mother dropped out at 14 and got a GED by 15 back in the 70s because she was so bored. (Parents didn't believe university was for girls, so that wasn't an option).

Seems like a way to screw over a particular subset of kids.

I dunno about why. But it was set at least in the late 90s. I took the California High School Proficiency Exam back then because it had a lower age requirement (and I was in California).

Any community colleges around that teach college level courses? That’s what I did when I ran out of options for math at my high school.

I was your kid.

My parents took the middle approach: skipping grades and doing gifted and talented programs. It still wasn’t nearly fast enough. Socially it was still tough for me.

My only advice is don’t ignore the social aspect. Still there has to be a better way than sticking them in public school for 12 years. After-school activities like athletics might be helpful.

Good luck!

Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early.

Speaking as someone who went to university at 13: Socially I fit in better with my intellectual peers than my chronological peers. Which isn't to say that I fit in well... but at least there was a level of mutual respect. Few educators appreciate the social distance created by a large IQ gap, probably because they haven't experienced it themselves.

I think you nailed the key with "mutual respect." That to me is what distinguishes children from adults. Some people achieve it at age 12, others maybe never in life. I'd rather be around a mutually respectful 12 year old than a same-aged person who still thinks and acts like a child.

Speaking as someone whose school administrators wanted me to start university by 13 but whose parents objected and held me back, being the same age as my chronological peers was meaningless and did not help me relate to them.

The odds that an 18-22yo traditional college student will overlook a 5-9 year age gap because you share a lot of interests and can have interesting conversations are much higher than the odds that another 13yo will overlook the fact that you have no shared interests at all because hey, you're the same age.

I found it extremely difficult to make friends until I got out from under the limiting influence of my parents who didn't want their kid to be "weird."

Now I have a whole bunch of weird friends who are fascinating, joyful dorks, so it's not hopeless either way, but I'd have loved to experience this much sooner.

Grass is always greener. You don't know the counterfactual and you would have likely been disappointed in your parents had they sent you to college early as well.

I'll let other people, like the parent comment, speak to their experiences. He, at least, doesn't seem to think my grass was greener.

I do think listening to any of the professional educators who unanimously and repeatedly told my parents it would have been better to accelerate my path through school would have been a good idea.

First of all, neither do /you/ know the counterfactual and so you have no bearing on whether or not this person "would have likely been disappointed in your parents had they sent you to college early as well."

Do you have any experience with folks who went to secondary education early? Because I was miserable in high school bored out of my mind and left 1 year only and my only regret was not leaving even earlier like some of my peers did. Speaking platitudes like "the grass is always greener" may make you feel better but it doesn't line up with 25% of the profiles of students I've seen go to secondary education early (and I know a lot of them).

I had a similar experience: I started college at 17 and with little effort could have started at 16.

I did hang out with a 15-year-old at college and he seemed to have a relatively normal college experience.

Genuine question, cause I don't live in the US, is starting college at 17 unusual? Over here half of the cohort finishing high school are 17, so I expect a similar proportion starting college here are 17.

Personally I had a 2 year gap between high school and university, so I went from being one of the youngest in my year to one of the oldest,which was kinda nice. Plus the time away taught me some self reliance so college was pretty easy to adjust to.

Canadian here, but I think the US follows the same age-grade mapping. Kids usually enter Kindergarten in September of the calendar year in which they turn 5, i.e. those born January-August are 5 years old and those born September-December are still 4 years old. After that, grades 1-12 follow with a majority of post-secondary-education-bound students entering a few months later.

So yes, in the modal case (advancing with the cohort) a student entering college will start at 17 years old if their birthday is late in the year.

In most US areas, grade cutoff is around August, so before college starts. Most students start college at 18.

> The odds that an 18-22yo traditional college student will overlook a 5-9 year age gap because you share a lot of interests and can have interesting conversations are much higher than the odds that another 13yo will overlook the fact that you have no shared interests at all because hey, you're the same age.

I see both as same odds - mainly zero.

A lot of people ITT who are like, “I’m so high IQ - I went to college when I was 13” like many of us out here didn’t have that option. (Rubs very much the same way of r/iamverysmart) It’s not as difficult as people make it sound. Most of your education growing up is a complete joke - it’s just babysitting. Exclaiming that you were some version of detective Conan is also quite cringe.

It's always a bit cringe worthy when a person talks about how smart he is. But that doesn't make it wrong.

You seem to have read it as some kind of bragging, but I see no reason to interpret it that way.

Usually, it’s some moron on the Internet saying he was a “gifted kid” like it’s an achievement but you have independent verification that Colin Percival (cperciva - this topic starter) is smart. He’s a multi-time Putnam winner and the founder of Tarsnap.

Also the source of one of those amusing HN exchanges where people think everyone else is run of the mill. You know the one.

multi-time Putnam winner

Alas, only once.

He himself said he couldn’t associate with people who were lower than his IQ. I don’t give a shit what his accomplishments are - he clearly still has the same asinine mentality that any 13-year old has when they think they’re smart.

Idk why people on HN assume this is the first time I’ve had to deal with a Putnam winner (or a fields medalist), a celebrity, a billionaire, etc. I live in SV after all. I’ve talked to all of these folks many times. I talk to this person no different than any of the other people I’ve talked to. They deserve no different when they say such things. I judge what they say and are actively doing - not what past accomplishments they have made in some unrelated field.

It's not about the achievement or the title of being a whatever. It's just that if you're the kind of kid really interested in math competitions and you're really good at it, then you've got a small set of people with whom you can really enjoy sharing your view of the world through your favourite lens.

Whatever. Essentially, I like this guy's software and he seems fairly personable, so I'm inclined to not really believe he's "I'm so much smarter than you"ing a bunch of people.

He himself said he couldn’t associate with people who were lower than his IQ

That's not really what he said at all. He said he fit in somewhat better with his intellectual peers than with his age cohort. There's nothing really controversial about that at all. Most people prefer the company of those with whom they share common intellectual pursuits and viewpoint over those for whom their only common factor is age. Often physical and mental age councide but when they don't, it doesn't seem unreasonable that common mentality would be a stronger bond.

And even if the sentiment were elitist (which I dispute) I don't think I'm the context of this discussion, it deserves a hostile response. I appreciate the individual sharing his personal experience, even if I wouldn't qualify as the type of person he'd share a beer with.

You sound like you have an inferiority complex, you probably were not blessed with a comparable IQ to the people you describe and resent them for it because in SV that's your most important asset.

I'm not that smart compared to the other people you replied to but smart is relative. I chose to go to the 3rd best high school in my mediocre Romanian town and had the highest entry grade in the entire high school. When it came to math I would grok the concepts by simply reading on my own 30 minutes before class while my peers would need tutors and still not get it.

Do you think I had a good time in high school? What my peers lacked in math skill they gained in ego preservation. They saw intelligence as a threat that must be neutralized. I doubt my story is that different. I'm telling you this because it's pretty obvious you did not live it so you might gain some empathy and let go of your resentment

Please be less hostile. Writing like this is not in accordance with the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My comment was primarily to give the opposite side of the same coin as the parent comment. It sounded like we were probably similar children whose parents made dissimilar choices.

He seems to think his parents made the right choice. I wanted to confirm that I thought the choice my parents made was the wrong one.

You can read bragging into it if you really want, but it's extrinsic to the conversation.

All I can advise is a little bit of empathy. There are plenty of people who are nerdy, and have horrible social skills. For every bit of how obnoxious “I’m so high IQ - I went to college when I was 13” sounds to you, the flip side is that the person saying that probably:

1) Doesn't have very many friends

2) Which doesn't give many opportunities to practice social interactions

Which sort of cycles back on itself. It's hurting them a lot more than it's hurting you.

Society could use a lot more empathy.

>The odds that an 18-22yo traditional college student will overlook a 5-9 year age gap because you share a lot of interests and can have interesting conversations are much higher than the odds that another 13yo will overlook the fact that you have no shared interests at all because hey, you're the same age.

I think the odds are honestly in better favor of the 13YO. if only because a 5 year age gap for an 18 YO is a magnitude different than a 5 year age gap for a 30 year old, or even a 24 year old.

It may even be a legal risk depending on the profiling of each peer for the former. Of no fault of either party, just of the fault of decades of bad actors and a culture highlighting them.

I have a lot of friends and coulleages like that now, but I can't imagine them even giving me the time of day if we met a decade prior and somehow all had identical interests.

Looks at your profile.

*Thinks of course the creator of Tarsnap was a child prodigy.

You might like this classic HN moment. Don’t miss the follow up down the bottom: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

> creator of Tarsnap

I am much more a fan of their work on diffing

> social distance created by a large IQ gap

A few genuine questions.

Have you found the gap to be self-imposed (the kind where you struggle to keep a conversation going with a stupid person) or is the result of projection by your peers (where they feel uncomfortable having you around because you are smarter, and that makes them insecure about themselves)?

Is the social distance visible only in domains where you have devoted time to excelling in, or do you experience it in domains outside your expertise / in random conversions too ?

Do you think you benefitted from jumping to university so soon in life ?

There was definitely insecurity-related bullying. More so in elementary school because the teacher encouraged and participated in it; moving from class to class in high school also helped to minimize bullying compared to being in a room with the same kids all day long.

A lot of the difficulty came down to a lack of shared concepts. To me, partial derivatives are very natural concepts and I would get a few sentences into describing something in terms of partials before I remembered that I was talking to people who didn't even know what those were. (Ditto for differential equations, vector spaces, orthogonality...). Over the years I've learned to a limited extent how to convey ideas without drawing on terminology which most people aren't familiar with, but that has taken decades of practice.

I absolutely benefited from going to university early -- and I also benefited from staying in school. I only finished high school a year early, but spent 4 years taking high school and university courses concurrently. While I gained very little socially from high school, I had a couple excellent teachers there and learned some useful material in other subjects. I've met people who dropped out of high school to attend university full time who struck me as shockingly ignorant of e.g. history.

> I've met people who dropped out of high school to attend university full time who struck me as shockingly ignorant of e.g. history.

This is an interesting complaint. I would argue that everyone whose knowledge of history consists of the entirety of their high school curriculum, with nothing forgotten, is shockingly ignorant of history.

After reading one relatively short book on the history of China, ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465015808/ ), I had a Chinese high school student remark to me on how unusual it was for her to find someone who could talk about Chinese history. But I was meeting only the lowest possible bar.

If someone is shockingly ignorant of history, that's not because they missed high school; it's a problem that high school doesn't try to address and isn't intended to.

I'm not saying that high school gives people a great education about history. But I would expect anyone graduating high school to be able to give general answers to questions like "which countries were we fighting against in world war 2" and "where was the Roman empire".

>But I was meeting only the lowest possible bar.

A low bar but certainly not the lowest possible bar.

If you can only speak in terms of partials/other-math-lingo - it speaks more to your own limits than the limits of others.

This is something you should - uh - think about.

I mean this honestly. Being able to convey ideas to many people of different backgrounds is a skill and an intellectual pursuit. If you’re incapable of talking to people except in nerd shit - you’re not really any smarter or whatnot than them. You’re just insular.

OP was nice enough to answer a pretty intimate question.

    You’re just insular

We don't know this person personally, so it would be wrong to make assumptions about their communication.

    you’re not really any smarter

You are using their innocuous comment, to project your insecurity onto OP. Well done on proving their point. Yeah, some people are better at tasks that are traditionally considered to signify intelligence. The kind who go to study difficult majors at university at 13, are very very likely to be smarter within that definition than the majority of the people they run into. It is fine to accept that. It is not like OP is going around taping 'stupid signs' on people's foreheads.

Gatekeeping math at its finest. Only the most intelligent can go and study math! Only the most bright of us can ever do it!

God damn. So cringe. I say this as someone who also studied math and got his degree in it. Incredibly cringe.

> it speaks more to your own limits than the limits of others.

Indeed, and that is totally okay for a 13 year old to have limits. You can't expect a kid to have any real maturity. People only really get good at communicating with age, and even then it is hard.

I agree to some extent. I have forgiveness for pre-teens and early-teens going through these phases. After all - it’s a phase. It is no different than when a kid is obsessed with Minecraft or some other shit. (Which is see as less intellectual than mathematics - eyeroll) It’s when that goes from “it was a phase” to “I was better than everyone else” is where I clearly draw the line.

You're absolutely right -- as a 13 year old I was quite limited. I was mature enough to carry a conversation with 20 year olds, but not mature enough to carry a conversation with a 13 year old. (I like to think that I've grown up since; and while I don't talk to teenagers very often, when the situation arises I do manage better now than I did back then.)

This is exactly my point, and why University was a far better social experience for me than high school.

>Over the years I've learned to a limited extent how to convey ideas without drawing on terminology which most people aren't familiar with, but that has taken decades of practice.

I think this is one of the most remarkable lifeskills to have. Personally, I feel stupid when I find myself between a jargon laced conversation. On the other hand, I respond very well to clearly communicated (not ELI5, but simple) ideas.

Putting things across as simply as possible is very difficult to master IMO.

Reading this thread made me realise I developed this as a defence mechanism and have honed it over many years, but as you say it's a great social skill as well.

It's amazing how many conversations you can have about interesting subjects (and thereby dodge smalltalk) by simply rewording them into something everybody at the table can understand.

I don't think the gap I experienced was self-imposed. I was genuinely interested in the nuances of chess openings and my classmates were struggling to figure out what to do when their Candyland card had two squares on it instead of one. (This isn't a criticism; the game is meant to pose just such a challenge to children the age we were.)

We just weren't thinking on the same planes. My mind made most connections so quickly and automatically that I didn't realize other people's didn't. I didn't know why I couldn't have a conversation with other children. I just knew it didn't work. They would just stare at me and then leave. I knew I could talk to adults fine, but I didn't have enough life experience to realize the other kids couldn't make mental connections like I could.

It was actually when my younger sister started school that it clicked. I knew she was a smart girl, but academic subjects were surprisingly hard for her. That was when I realized someone could be smart, but have to take time to learn certain things, or at least in certain contexts, and that the things they learned might have to be layered on top of each other slowly.

Prior to that, my only experience had been of someone's presenting an idea to me and my immediately understanding it. It's hard to relate to other people, especially children, when you don't have that conceptual framework.

Indeed. I was completely miserable in high school, instead getting my dose of social interaction by visiting a hackerspace. Genuinely believe that was the only thing that kept me from going insane at that point in life.

Now of course interacting with people that are twice my age during my teens has produced some bonus problems in my social skills, but the alternative here is feeling completely isolated, not somehow magically learning to be normal™ person™ as many educators seem to think.

A lot of these depends on personality. Personally, I didn't relate to my peers at all, and did a lot better with an older crowd.

This child does great with his peers. They relate around activities like soccer or other normal kid stuff. It hasn't been a problem yet. He's bored out of his wits in class, but the social stuff is fine.

I also don't think he has the maturity to do well with kids much older than him. College students can interact around intellectual interests just fine, but to be blunt, he'd just come off as super-obnoxious to college-age kids (not in a snooty way, but in the same way as most other kids his age). I don't think he'd make many friends there.

Even as someone who's gifted, how do you manage to get into a university at 13? I'm assuming you're non-American? Is it just a matter of taking entrance exams, showcasing aptitude at the college level, then matriculating?

I'm Canadian. I finished Grade 12 mathematics (and took the "school leaving" exam in that subject) when I was in Grade 7. Simon Fraser University (where I attended) has a special entrance category for "secondary student with superior academic standing" to take "one or two courses" while still attending secondary school.

I was admitted under this category, and when my "one or two" courses ended up stretching into half a degree... well, as long as I was getting mostly A+ grades, nobody was going to step in to say that I wasn't allowed to take any more courses.

As a practical matter, I'm sure it helped that my father was a Professor of Chemistry and a widely-respected member of the University Senate. When my admission required approval from the Dean of Science, his response was "no problem, I'll see him at lunch tomorrow". I like to think that I could have gotten in without that connection, but having someone on the inside who knew how the system worked absolutely made things run more smoothly.

> Few educators appreciate the social distance created by a large IQ gap

Large social gaps are hard to bridge too, and I’d imagine that age is one of those things.

Maybe, but I'd argue that age is mostly relevant to the extent that older people generally know more -- an effect which is balanced if the younger person is more intelligent.

Agree, and that large IQ gap can be even more brutal in children/adolescents. In elementary school, I compared my 'peers' to chimpanzees. That's not exactly conducive to learning things like empathy or teamwork. How well would the average adult work in teams if it were them and 5 8-year olds? There are multiple important life skills that require some form of peer group to learn.

People like genius children/prodigies that don't have a natural peer group require trade offs find them one or else they lose out on important non-intellectual skills.

> Independent learners almost always develop gaps.

I think that goes for any leanrer, independent or traditional. Ask a random sample of college graduates to lecture for an hour on their degree focus and you will see the evidence of this.

The purpose of national college accreditation standards (as ABET does for engineering) is to avoid those gaps. This is accomplished publicly by their specifying core courses and syllabi that span the competencies expected from anyone earning a given degree (BS, BA, etc). Accreditation leaves schools little wiggle room when creating compliant courses and content. By delivering on a base set of cores that span essential theory and skills, students and employers are assured that anyone who earns that degree in an accredited school will indeed possess a standard set of core skills and thus will not suffer from gaps.

Accreditation is important, especially if the school is not well known nationally.

I've seen far more incompetence out of college educated engineers than autodidacts. I've seen far more time spent unteaching bad habits and bad ways of thinking for juniors. Computer science theory is mostly useless and only midwits who are wooed by theory would think otherwise. Big O notate the $80k on a degree you didn't need.

A university doesn't cost 200K. Even in the US residents pay less than that and if you take into account community college for the first 2 years it's not really as absurdly expensive as it's made out to be. Please don't spread half-baked misinformation.

>That, plus CMU OMSCS, seems like something they could finish by age 17. Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early. Academically, middle / high school seems like a waste of time.

Apparently even high school is a waste of time. What's not a waste of time for you? Are you to be put directly as head of engineering at Tesla so that someone as gifted as you doesn't "waste" their precious time?

Average 4-year private school would cost 200k, if not more if you're going to any private T100. Average person in this community also wouldn't go to CC.

Why wouldn't an average person in this community go to a CC?

I understand there's some stigma for community colleges but you can get a great education without getting anywhere near 200K. Won't be Ivy League though.

For example, Stony Brooks costs 10K in tuition per year for in-state residents.

Stony Brook isn't a community college. It is a 4 year university. I do agree though that there are many great universities where you can get an education for a fraction of the $200k bill that top private colleges have.

4 years at a random WI university as a resident sets you back $60k.

Swap that for a random CA university and we're at $150k (using their numbers!)

If you focus on tuition alone it's cheaper, but room and board do add up, and if you come from out-of-state you're even worse off.

My tuition at a prominent UC in the late 90s (per quarter)... was $1200. Books probably added another $600 to that.

That's nice. State schools now cost a minimum of $10,000 in state tuition per year excluding room and board. That's the cheapest you can get. Out of state tuition is $16,000-$20,000. It's not that cheap anymore.

> That's nice. State schools now cost a minimum of $10,000 in state tuition per year excluding room and board. That's the cheapest you can get. Out of state tuition is $16,000-$20,000. It's not that cheap anymore.

People under-estimate the total cost of school: housing is going to be the biggest expense in CA.

It's insane to think that only a few decades prior, the CSU/UC system was almost entirely covered with pell-grants and student aid if you were from CA, a UC you could cover with just a PT job, or working FT in the Summer.

Now it's entirely impossible to walk out without high 5 to low 6 digits worth of debt even if you live with your parents.

We took the envy of the University system in the US and turned it over to the administrative cronies that came from banks and hedge-funds who monetized it 20 ways from Sunday in order to bleed the students dry and wasted it on bloarted salaries form themselves and more needless things to attract foreign money into the the campuses while gutting the academic programs where ever possible--we used such crappy lab equipment in most of my undergrad it was astonishing where all the money went in student and lab fees.

I went to several CSUs, as well as did summer school or took extra elective at Community colleges to expedite my graduation date and to make up for a lost semester due to a severe car accident, and the level of BS I went through only to see how these leeches operated still makes my blood boil.

I was in an impacted major, Biology, in one of the major 'party schools' in the CSU system and these bastards prioritized admission into the department based on out of state and non-US based tuition rates.

They didn't even hide it, either: they only offered a class you needed to graduate once a year and instead of opening up the section for more students they capped it unless you were from out-of state or out of US and could ten petetion for it based on an 'urgency' basis.

I'm glad they went to Zoom school model, because it shows just how unnecessary 99% of the expenses are and we're re-thinking how we actually educate and accredit degrees.

I got into a well-known University in Europe with a strong AI and ML CompSci program after having founded a fintech startup and my work experience working for a megacorp.

And to be honest, I now realize that my actual worth was way higher even back then (an honors student with letters of recommendation) but I put up with a lot of it because of the 2008 financial crisis that hit me/my family really hard economically as well as the CSUs particularly bad (they cut the budgets hard) and made us all scramble for the doors in order to graduate and try to get into the horrible job market for the few jobs left over.

In short, I will laugh on the grave of traditional academia, which cannot come soon enough.

Just as a data point, I did just this

2 years community college: 4 semesters, ~$1,400

2 years university: 9 quarters (took 1 summer), ~$12,500

These are early 2010's numbers in California, not a private university.

I look back and I am pleased with the education I received for the most part, especially in my major (CS)

I did the same in California and graduated with a CS last year from Cal State East Bay. I think the grand total for my degree was about $25,000.

It's totally doable to end up debt free with a part time job while living at home. Or easily payable after graduation.

Housing, food, books... parking?

I know very few graduates of schools outside the "top few hundred" in the US who received thorough grounding in core skills unless they took the personal initiative to fill those gaps through self study. That's hardly a rousing endorsement for that track, if the student has to later plug the holes that a poor school left in their education.

I have no personal experience with WGU or Phoenix or other online unis. But I've met a few folks who graduated from lesser schools (outside the top 200) on traditional campuses. Unless those kids were preternaturally bright and took the initiative to teach themselves (fill the gaps), they often face an uphill battle to recover from the poor preparation that an undemanding and incomplete academic program can inflict on 1) their ability to compete in those skills on the open market and 2) their passion for learning. IMHO, that's a high price to pay.

My advice: don't cheap out on your education.

> costs $200k

Jesus. Is this how much CS degrees cost in America? I thought that price was only for Medicine :headexplode:

For what it’s worth, many people reached out to me after reading the article to thank me for introducing them to the idea that they could earn their missing degree in less than 4 years and/or without student debt. Many of them are self-taught developers with decades of experience that can’t move up the corporate ladder, work abroad, or pursue graduate studies because they lack this important piece of paper.

>> or pursue graduate studies because they lack this important piece of paper.

It's pretty disingenious to imply the only thing traditional degree-holding grad students have over somebody with only industry is a "piece of paper". I say this as a former grad student who (with a degree) came out of industry. There are plenty of underwhelming students with only academic experience, but if you had industry-credit and a few terms, where would you get the other skills that I'd argue are far more important than practical experience?

They did not imply that. They just said the piece of paper was a barrier to other things they wanted to do.

That's the situation I'm in, and somebody recently suggested I check out WGU. I was thinking of doing a Master's degree, and it is an absolute bedrock requirement everywhere I've looked that you have a Bachelor's to apply to the Master's program. Would I get more out of spending 8 years doing a BS part time in the traditional way? I'm sure. Am I going to do that just so I can do a Master's? Fuck no. But if I can get the piece of paper in 6 months, that's starting to seem doable.

Look, I'm not here to judge, but the Coursera + UC Boulder Electrical Engineering OR Computer Science Masters will take anyone, regardless of degree status. There are also some UK universities that will as well, notable Oxford's Software Engineering. Just my 2 cents doing the research.

Can you share which CS Masters you mean?

Could you provide a reference for the UC Boulder option? I've had professor pals look into this on my behalf, and the confident answer they got back is that all US accrediting bodies require a Bachelor's before entering a Master's program.

The UK option is interesting. For those curious, here's the bit explaining that they normally expect a Bachelor's but will consider experience: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/study/index.html

And the total cost is ~$50k: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/study/Fees_2022-23.pdf

As well as the options willhslade mentioned you can also do individual Master’s modules as distance learning with the University of London International Programme and then transfer to the Master’s programme proper.

No, he said you can't pursue graduate studies unless you have an undergrad degree. Let's be real, most undergrad programs are trash, and only exist to satisfy industry filters. Wow you learned all these topics on your own but do not have a paper? Too bad!!!! . I respect graduate studies, but I have zero respect for undergrad.

You took it the wrong way--and I get why you did. There is definitely a lot more to university than "a piece of paper."

But there is not more to being locked out of working abroad, high-level corporate jobs, and certain fields than a piece of paper. A seriously below average traditional student has access to all of these things, while a high performing, high knowledge person doesn't, simply because they took a different life path.

I disagree. I have worked with great developers who could not be promoted or hired due to missing a few credits in a communications class.

They assumed they could just continue working, as they started without a degree and made a career out of it.

Then they hit hard walls. Because they never finished out a couple credits in nonsense courses.

I don't feel that he's being disingenuous. He just doesn't have the experience or the context. University prestige and your uni social circle can dramatically improve your professional life, but you're not going to know that if you haven't experienced it yourself or personally know anyone who's had the privilege.

For a school-leaving person, sure. The social aspect and (for me) the iron-sharpens-iron part are valuable. For some the network connections are very valuable.

But I belive the author was returning to school to get an official qualification after some years of work-experience. (or did I read that wrong?) in that context the ancillaries are less valuable.

Certainly I think a place that tests knowledge for the purpose of recognizing levels achieved already through work experience is a really valuable part of the education chain.

> Certainly I think a place that tests knowledge for the purpose of recognizing levels achieved already through work experience is a really valuable part of the education chain.

I don't disagree with that. I just disagree with the author for discounting the value of both the social status and network connections that traditional, elite universities offer.

I checked the admission page but it doesn't mention whether people outside of US/EU can apply or not

Correction: it doesn't mention whether people outside of US/*Canada* can apply or not

You cannot study outside of the US or enroll as a non-US citizen at WGU.

> WGU is regionally accredited, not nationally, and it's a non-profit. So it cannot be compared to University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, DeVry, etc.

Just want to point out for those that may not know, 85% of universities in the U.S. are regionally accredited [1]. Regional accreditation, which WGU has, is the most prestigious and widely-recognized [1]. Some folks may mistake that nationally is "better", but, as you'll see from the link below, that simply is not the case.

[1] https://www.online.drexel.edu/news/national-vs-regional-accr...

> Many WGU students HATE these types of articles, because they undermine the legitimacy of WGU.

What is "these types of articles"? How does this one "undermine the legitimacy of WGU"? Even a cursory skim-through of the article would show that the author worked hard and learned all of the material that they then passed exams on at WGU. They don't make it out to be a "degree mill" in any way whatsoever.

A headline stating that a 4-year degree can be earned in 3-months? That alone is a huge red flag suggesting a degree mill. Lack of national accreditation is red flag #2. I don't mean to say that this is a degree mill, but the nature of the article does raise reasonable suspicions. Alumni are rightly critical of such articles that make their school sound like something it probably is not.

Read about national accreditation elsewhere in the comments. It is not what you think. Regional accreditation is more desirable.

Only in the USA. The word "University" means absolutely nothing there.

Yes, well the school in question is in the USA, so the specifics of USA's accreditation system are clearly what's relevant...

The speed at which you can get a degree can look like a red flag, but you are mistaken about the accreditation. Regional accreditation is actually what you want, not national. Most universities you think of are regionally accredited, whereas the for-profit ones that you can't transfer credit from are nationally accredited. Ie, Stanford = regionally accredited, DeVry = nationally acccredited.

WGU is accredited by NWCCU, which is the same as the University of Utah, University of Washington, etc.. See: https://nwccu.org/member-institutions/directory/

Thanks. My knowledge of accreditation is mostly from law schools, for which national v. regional is a huge deal.

How about the gold standard for engineering and computer science(s), a program accredited by ABET?

Is WGU?

At the bottom, the article says they are not ABET accredited.

It is not, but I didn't think ABET accreditation was a big thing for CS and was more common in engineering? CMU and Stanford, for example, do not have ABET-accredited CS programs, although MIT does.

A lot of CS programs are ABET accredited.

CMU and Stanford don't need anyone or any organization to tell the world they do a good job educating CS students. Not so clear if the CS dept is at the Small Town Liberal Arts College and Seminary.

But the other 4,999 schools CS programs, like the one being discussed at WGU, the source of the accreditation is a valuable signal.

> Lack of national accreditation is red flag #2.

No, having national accreditation would be a red flag.

Regional is the gold standard. (Yes, the names make it sound backwards; it is what it is.)

More pointing to the clickbait title they chose. It implies that WGU is a cakewalk, that can be breezed through. Very few people complete their degree there in a very small timeframe. It takes great dedication to complete it rapidly.

That said, those that have ample available time, and are driven, can benefit greatly from the flexibility of the model. You only pay for the amount of credits you enrolled in for the semester, but when you complete those classes you can accelerate your other classes, without paying extra. It must be done with care though, as you could find yourself with all the classes you were versed in already knocked out for the next semester, and only tougher classes left over. I found that out the hard way.

These types of article that show how shallow the education at WGU is.

It is a degree mill.

The difficulty and material of the courses does not in any way compare to what you would get at a real university.

Haha, a real university? Unless you mean a handful like MIT and Stanford, most no name colleges are not going to be any better.

Some perspectives still hold that degrees are critical, but unless it's from less than a handful of the top programs in a field, the degree is barely worth the paper it's printed on. Degrees are useful to get into corporate work, but having industry experience, a competent body of work, recognition from your peers, and a demonstrated work ethic can get you into almost any type of job at a competitive rate of pay.

In some cases, degrees can be harmful by elevating incompetent, ignorant, entitled graduates to positions they shouldn't have, particularly in middle management. Getting a degree is not paying your dues or putting in time toward something useful. It can be, but it depends on the individual, so degrees fail as a shibboleth for utility.

Always construction workers feel smarter than architects and civil engineers. Nurses feel smarter than doctors. YouTube watchers feel smarter than PhDs in physics.

If you're referring to Dunning-Kruger, it doesn't work like that. Go read the paper. More educated people feel they know more than less educated people, they just underestimate the degree.

And it's possible to acquire the equivalent of a PhD through the vast wealth of information and literal college courses online. Degrees don't mean what they used to.

The dilution of quality caused by profit based perverse incentives, the cultural issues grounded in grievance studies, and the enormous wealth of high quality material and alternatives to formal education have radically changed what academia means to society going forward.

Gatekeeping for profit and not discriminating between the value of a degree in mathematics and a degree in underwater basket weaving, eliminating political, ideological, and epistemic diversity have resulted in a world where degrees increasingly mean you simply paid money to exist in the presence of other folks with paper over a sufficient length of time that all parties involved felt satisfied with the kabuki show.

Accreditation through a legitimate culture of intellectual peers in which institutional academia has earned the respect and dedication of its members approaches the ideal case. Few, if any, American institutions pass muster. They're not without value, and some departments are world class, but they exist in relation to near total institutional failure, and they are infecting the rest of the world.

Academic journals, outdated pedagogy, DIE gatekeeping, woke babysitting and infantilized students are just the most obvious rot.

American academia has a lot of soul searching and hard work to do, or it's going to be displaced by something better that serves the need for legitimate accreditation in society. I personally don't want that to be private corporations, and I'm rooting for the professors and alumni who want to preserve the integrity of their institutions.

It might have to do with the title. "I got a Computer Science degree in 3 months" makes it sound like it isn't serious. As you note, reading the article shows that the author worked hard, learned the material, already had an associates degree in the field, already did a semester in CS at a major university, and took 4 study.com CS/IT courses and 3 Sophia Learning CS/IT.

So the headline makes it sound like "look, here's an easy way to get a piece of paper that says you have a CS degree" when the reality is that they'd already done a lot of the work before enrolling and as AviationAtom notes, WGU works off demonstrating that you have the knowledge.

This isn't "go from zero to CS degree in 3 months". This is "if you already know a lot of your CS stuff, you can work really hard filling in the remaining gaps and showing that you know what you're doing and get a degree in 3 months." Between the associate's degree, a semester at Concordia, and the pre-WGU online courses, they'd probably spent 2-3 years learning.

I think the issue is that the title makes it seem like it's easy. It probably isn't the hardest program, but a decent amount of the author's ease comes from the fact that they had already filled most of the requirements - and just needed to demonstrate their competency. Which seems like it's part of the point according to AviationAtom.

Random data point - my first thought reading the title was "what sort of scam is this?"

That's exactly the sort of reaction folks at WGU would want to avoid. I'm sure.

> Many WGU students HATE these types of articles, because they undermine the legitimacy of WGU.

> Their model is competency-based, so you must demonstrate you posses knowledge in any given domain.

The guy took courses at college, online, and worked in the field for over a decade before speedrunning WGU. It seems to me he’s the exact model of “demonstrating competence” that you mention - I don’t see how that makes WGU out to be a degree mill.

This sounds like a surprisingly good idea, something I hope we see more of (but of course I'll remain pessimistic).

What's crazy to me is that it wasn't always the case that you had to go through the formal process of school to achieve credentialing. If you were truly exceptional, and could prove that, you could then get the required credential.

For example it used to be the case that you didn't need to go to law school to take the bar exam. You still don't in a few US states. Law school might make it a million times easier to learn the law and pass, but if you already know it why not go straight to the test?

Another, admittedly extreme, case was Ludwig Wittgenstein getting his PhD from Trinity College. He had already written the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on his own, then basically showed up and presented it as his dissertation, defended it, mocked his friend Bertrand Russel during defense and got the PhD.

What's crazy to me is that if Wittgenstein was alive today he would not be able to achieve this anywhere. There are plenty of people out there who have done ground breaking work in their field, but because of the orthodoxy today, have zero chance of getting a PhD without going through the entire process.

There's such a huge difference between schools saying "you technically don't need us to get the credential, but it's going to be much, much harder to go it your own way" than "it doesn't matter what you do, if you don't sit here and play by our rules you will never be recognized".

This is where it's hard not to get pretty cynical about the state of higher education today.

> Another, admittedly extreme, case was Ludwig Wittgenstein getting his PhD from Trinity College. He had already written the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on his own, then basically showed up and presented it as his dissertation, defended it, mocked his friend Bertrand Russel during defense and got the PhD.

> What's crazy to me is that if Wittgenstein was alive today he would not be able to achieve this anywhere.

Not so. Cambridge still does it, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey in 2000.

Hey, does this exist for video game animation? I was extremely disappointed with an online school I recently went to for video game animation (the classes were way too spread apart and while the modeling sections were interesting, I really just need to work on animation for the models I purchased).

I know this is tangentially related, but this was so demoralizing I kind of gave up on game dev altogether.

>As long as a bar is set

that's a big problem in software TBF. The bar is all over which ways and changes dramatically based on the domain. If we can't agree on a bar, there's not much point in the endless arguments that result while pointing to our own interpretations

> Does it really matter if a person that has knowledge got it from sitting in a seat, paying ungodly amounts of tuition, or if they got it from life experience?

well, the real life experience is much more preferable. But the general model of professional industries unfortunately require sitting in a seat for years and getting a piece of paper before resetting 80% of what you learned with imperfect realities.

I'm glad there is an option like this for a developer thrown out of the market without a degree to fast track their way to that piece of paper, but it's a shame that piece of paper is held in such high regards

Is it accepted overseas? I read most degrees from wgu are not recognized in europe.

Don't see how, because the accreditation system is setup as such that they should see them as any other university that is regionally accredited.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WGU/comments/pjisyd/any_idea_why_mo...

There seems to be some discussion how european country like to have a stronger accreditation, so that is why I am asking what really is the case.

I guess what do you mean by “recognize”? I’ve reviewed hundreds of resumes, and never dug into the regional vs national accreditation for a degree. You recognize the big names, and otherwise just generally say “seems they have a CS degree”

Is that different in Europe?

They do check if you're applying for a certain VISA based on your skills or job. Some companies do also check when they need an "accredited" engineer for some compliance reasons.

I think for EU blue card you need to find your degree from your varsity in some database, to successfully apply.

Glad to see somebody mentioned this, I asked about this in another comment regarding georgia tech online master https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31182962

I had a look. Germany has this database: https://anabin.kmk.org/no_cache/filter/institutionen.html

So Georgia Tech is rated H+ which usually means all recognized (but a lot of text one should read, to check if online degrees are ok)

WGU is H+/- with a warning for online degrees which recognize life experience. One should expect to get the recognition application rejected.

Georgia Tech doesn’t make a distinction between the online and on campus degrees. You don’t get an online degree from GA Tech, you just get a degree from GA Tech.

Not directly related to the post but I am almost certain the Georgia Tech OMSCS would be accepted for EU blue visa. So will UT Austin OMSCS.

I don't believe so because it is not nationally accredited. If the college are not nationally accredited, then it is highly likely that universities in Europe will not recognize WGU. Unless the institution have a formal agreement (Articulation Agreement) with WGU to transfer.

As I recall national accreditation is the weaker of the two, and regional is preferred, but someone correct me if I am mistaken.

Regional accreditation is the stronger accreditation.

This is an example of a federal accreditation group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnational_Association_of_C...

That said, WGU does not do traditional GPAs, as I recall, which can cause issues with transfers. It's more of a pass/fail. Trying to transfer credits is generally not advised, as I recall, instead you would want to complete your degree with WGU.

They have a policy for anyone seeking your transcriptions of just marking everything as a "B" (3.0 GPA) on everything.

That's ok for transfers, but a 3.0 GPA would make it difficult to go to graduate school.

That has not been the experience of my peers so far, granted I don't know anyone who went to Harvard intimately enough, but I know quite a few people who went to well regarded masters programs after graduating WGU

About to finish the WGU BSCS program myself and have made a lot of friends in the program along the way. Many, including myself, that choose to go to grad school look at Georgia Techs OMSCS program, which is a very solid/reputable program.

I'd defer to no_wizard's comment, as I'm just not really sure how various overseas institutions go about recognizing/giving equivalency.

I know American institutions can be very picky about what they accept, so they could be similar. Unless the standards are drastically different I feel any institution failing to recognize an education from another seems wrong, but that's a whole different rant.

I think the education system everywhere has much catching up to do with modern society. It used to be that much professional knowledge could really only be obtained in the classroom, now anyone with a desire and access to the Internet can learn much outside a classroom environment.

> Unless the standards are drastically different

Kinda seems like my 4 years’ bachelor degree and whatever this ‘uni’ in the article is have radically different standards of what constitutes a degree.

So the key difference you’re describing between this and a degree mill is that you’re expected to already possess the knowledge. And maybe organize it a little bit or fill in the blanks. As opposed to cramming it, or blowing through it too fast for it to amount to anything. This makes sense. I can imagine traditional universities offering this sort of thing everywhere.

I have to ask: what mechanisms are in place to thwart cheating? Specifically, paying for someone to take all those tests in your stead. Though it's possible to cheat at traditional universities in individual courses, it becomes increasingly hard over the duration demanded for attendance even on an accelerated schedule for lots of small reasons that add up.

Every exam is proctored:

- A live human proctor watches your screen and webcam the whole time.

- You need to show a 360 degree view of your room, walls, ceiling, table, floor, ears, scratch paper, etc.

- You must use an external webcam elevated on a stand that can see both you and your screen at all times.

- You must show your face and your passport or ID card before each exam.

- You can’t talk, stand up, get out of view, or take a break during the exam.

Although I’m sure some people could find a way to cheat, they make it extremely difficult. I have taken over 30 online proctored exams from WGU, Study.com, Sophia.org, Saylor.org, TOEFL, and Georgia Tech’s OMSCS, and I can confidently say that WGU’s proctoring process was by far the strictest.

Oh hell no. Too bad, was considering it until this.

>So, former WGU student here, though I hadn't completed my degree.

You also hadn't completed reading the article. The author covers all of your points in a positive way that in no way describes the institution as a "degree mill".

> Many WGU students HATE these types of articles, because they undermine the legitimacy of WGU.

New headline incoming:

> WGU graduates HATE this! Learn their SECRET, how YOU TOO could GRADUATE IN LESS THAN 3 MONTHS FOR ONLY $5,000

Reply on news.ycombinator.com