Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

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It sounds like a great degree program, and I'm encouraged to see it go on-line, but the $60K price tag seems over the top to me. Didn't Georgia Tech just announce an online MS for $7,000?

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.

You are being incredibly nice and understanding, and you shouldn't be. $60k for an online class is just plain robbery. I'm sick and tired of this bullshit that higher education has been ramming down our collective throats courtesy of a system in which easily available, seemingly infinite credit on the part of the students allows colleges to continuously seek out new revenue by burdening students with ever increasing debt.

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 agree. I desperately want to go back to school (didn't attend college in my youth, and feel I am hitting the limits of self-education), but I'm not willing to put half the value of a house on a 4 year program.

Half the value of a house? That's barely a down payment in the SF Bay area, where Berkeley is.

a) My house is a 10 minute bus ride from UC Berkeley, b) I am plenty familiar with house prices and down payments as it took us two years to find this one, and c) I was talking specifically about a 4-year degree, which is likely to cost more than $60k.

Yeah, they did; however, the Udacity program doesn't begin to accept new outside students until next year, and I think the program is closer to $8000. Anyways, it's such a steal, and I think the MS in comp sci is more flexible than a niche degree like data science. You could teach comp sci at a 2 year college, for example; whereas, a data science masters will just get you a job in the industry.

> 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?

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%.

Still less than 60k. Unless it has the same bar the Harvard of today has, its not the same brand.

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.

I'm assuming the online nature doesn't change the admissions standards. That's 90% of the point of going to Harvard.

Looks like I can't edit... but I shouldn't have said that academic fees are "less than half" the professional fees. That's true, but doesn't indicate just how much lower academic fees are. Total in-state tuition and fees for an academic graduate program is just under $16,000.

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