I'm just not sure this makes sense. While tuition has gone way up at Berkeley, most science and engineering degrees are considered academic, rather than professional degrees, so the fees are considerably lower.
http://registrar.berkeley.edu/Default.aspx?PageID=feesched.h...
So yeah, law or business school tuition+fees (professional program) are between $50-$60 a year, but academic programs (which includes engineering) is less than half that. A lot of this comes down to whether data science will really be a "professional" degree with high earnings.
Truth is, it might, I'm not ruling it out. I got an MS in Industrial Engineering from Berkeley after a math degree, hoping I could get something practical. I had some good experiences, but I also spent what was to me a depressing amount doing proofs about convex sets and stochastic processes. I probably shouldn't complain, that's what an academic degree program is. Maybe something like a professional program would have been much better for me.
Another question is whether holding this degree is valuable independent of what you learn. I know that may sound silly, but it makes a difference. Suppose you were allowed to study law courses on coursera. How much would it be worth it to get to say your degree was officially from Harvard and now qualify for the bar, even if all you did was quietly watch the videos and do the homework? More than $60k, I'd say.
Could the same be said for data science? You've watched the identical videos and done the homework... how much of a premium would it be worth to say you got an MS degree online from Berkeley? It would be worth something sure, but not as much as the law scenario. There's no "data science bar" that can prevent you from practicing, and there are so many different acceptable degree paths to becoming a data scientist. And while some may reasonably dispute this, I have found high tech to be more concerned with what you know than where you learned it.
All in all... sounds like a great degree, but 60K definitely gives me pause.
Its funny to me that state schools, including Berkeley, used to have reasonable tuition up until the early 1980's, until the baby boomer voters in each respective state demanded lower taxes and the politicians obliged by cutting state tuition assistance year after year. When the state paid 90% of a student's tuition, the colleges didn't have the option of constantly jacking their price up. Suddenly, when it was student debt paying the bills, the colleges stopped doing anything to cut the bloat.
Thank you Berkeley for again reminding me what a scam the academic institutions have become.
I think you make a crucial point. Even if you were eligible in both situations to sit for the bar (say by virtue of California's looser education requirements), the Harvard name would be worth a heck of a lot more than $60k, at least assuming you were curved against other Harvard students in your examinations. The value of a law degree, at least in many circles of the legal profession, is 50% name brand, 40% sorting within the class, and maybe 10% education.
A few fields take this trait of education to a counterproductive extent (banking, consulting, law), but I think the unfortunate truth is that for most fields, the value of a degree is more than 50% in branding and sorting, rather than education. Even in engineering, outside some progressive places, I wouldn't put it much below 50%.
Part of the thing with Harvard, is getting in is so hard that if i'm interviewing a candidate half the job is already done. But if anyone is allowed into the program (and why not?) then that filter is gone... so the name while still having value as a great program loses the value as a filter.
They may need better data science behind their marketing.
I'm sure some firms will really like these degrees, but if you're a company (like Google, for example) insisting on a specialized degree, why not aim for PhD level? The income differential is marginal. In Chicago, PhD quants for funds generally start out around $140-150k. I'd argue those ppl are going to be more productive researchers/data scientists than what can be produced by an online program, due largely to value of a research oriented degree versus a skills oriented degree like this one. Even if there is a project component, it isn't the same as writing a thesis. I did an M.Eng way back, trust me: it just isn't the same as banging your head against a research topic for a couple years.
Also, for what it is worth, I found the target audience for one-year financial engineering degrees (Goldman Sach, etc) didn't respect the degrees as much as PhDs & MS w/thesis. They generally regarded it as a 5th year of university.
Criticism aside, I'm sure this is a great skill builder and ML is fun thing to learn. Not for $60k, though.
I like how they're still marketing that McK data science report. "Hadoop everything"
I do disagree with this snark, though:
> This was back when "financial engineering" was the buzzword... that worked out well, didn't it?
My M.Eng (Cornell ORIE) was not in FE, though my department offered it. Their (admittedly biased) response to this line of thinking: if we had more financial engineers, we would have had people who actually understand the instruments that were being traded.
No doubt the people who created exotic Mortgage-Backed Securities were FE types... if only Moody's and S&P employed some as well, perhaps they wouldn't have been rated AAA. Then again, I'm assuming incompetence rather than malice; the ratings agencies did have incentives to lie.
EDIT: I did mine at CU back in 2003 in applied, not FE. I had many friends in FE, most all went into credit. I worked in trading for six years before quitting for a PhD. I do not place any value on an FE degree; looking back at the curriculum they offered, it is obvious that they were thinking the wrong way (the credit models they were teaching were complete shit and they had no concept of micro-structure; ironic given Maureen O'Hara teaches at the Johnson School).
EDIT2: The non-FE profs were and still are very awesome and remain good friends. Did you have Henderson?
Henderson is one of my favorites; I just went back for my 5-year and he was just so wonderful to talk to.
The FE curriculum never really interested me; I took OR methods in FE as an undergrad and the professor (a surfer-dude postdoc from UCLA, Will Anderson) convinced me that the efficient market hypothesis was mostly right.
After that, FE seemed a little... well, in the words of my classmate Ryan, "like looking at the surface of the waves to see if there are whales humping."
IMO, continuous time finance is a flawed model. Academics always rattle off theorems based on assumptions that do not hold across all time scales. I've worked with traders lacking any formal education that have a better understanding of the market than someone like Protter will ever have. Trading isn't about investing; it is about capital flows.
That said, I don't miss the job (only the $).
narenl 5 hours ago | link [dead]
IMO This is not targeted towards individuals applying on their own.
I went to a walkabout of a similar online education company's office and asked them about the high cost for an online degree. The answer I received was
1. there is demand for this and
2. Most of the demand comes from people in the military serving in remote locations or people working inside other large organizations which foot the cost. and
3. They provide online infrastructure to courses of schools like UC-B, UNC etc and the colleges set the price so as not to dilute their "brand" because the online degree does not mention the fact that the degree was obtained online (this could have changed).
All in all, my initial shock was a bit tempered after hearing the realities involving all 3 parties : the school, the student and the online enabler.
The $60,000 price tag must come with a guarantee that you'll be making the proposed $110,000 - $130,000 salary range for at least 5 years. Otherwise, wow.
The best way to learn these things is to just dive right in. If one need's human interaction, the community is easily within reach (at a much lower cost).
Maybe one could argue that the "networking" is worth the price tag. Still, I get these "data meetup" emails about 5 times a day, which I could easily go to for networking.