Super-cheap online master’s degree could change American higher education | Hacker News Reader

Super-cheap online master’s degree could change American higher education

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51 pointsmarkcmyers57 comments

More details on the main site: http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/#np-855

Self-taught computer scientists should also note:

Formal admission into the OMS CS program will require a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from an accredited institution, or a related Bachelor of Science degree with a possible need to take and pass remedial courses

Personally, I have benefited more from the human interaction and relationships formed while attending university, in person, than from many of the classes themselves. The people I got to know helps me more than the formulas I learned. I believe the people is what you're paying for when you attend an ivy league school. The math is the same.

Actually, the math seems to be quite different: $6,600 vs however many multiples that Ivy League school charges.

This sort of thing, if it produces quality people, lowers the education bar and that's never a bad thing.

I think by math he means the actual lessons, not the cost. Calculus is the same everywhere, but you meet different people.

Calling it calculus is disingenuous. This is a computer science master, offered by one of the premier institutions on the subject.

Not all CS masters are equal. Not all CS instruction is equal.

Depending on these outcomes, the cheap masters in CS could be superior to a local, more expensive, in-person community college masters.

Sure, the faculty at an Ivy League can make all the difference. So can the faculty at a top-tier school like GT.

But will the faculty at Ye Old Community College make all the difference and warrant the 2-4X higher cost?

Take the best course - package it for online distribution - feed the world high quality education for very low cost.

Then the politicians say "look, we're educating the whole world with free high quality online courses", they dismantle the universities, people never leave their parents' house, and everybody in the world learns exactly the same thing.

Nevermind, I see now that high quality online education is a bad idea.

I'm glad we cleared that up.

yeah, of course, sorry I just said calculus because it was the first math class that came to mind. You're right, the classes are better, saying they are the same was wrong, but the point me and the parent comment were making is just that the main benefit of paying is the environment more so than the course curriculum

I see this degree as a huge boon for folks in the technology sector who are already working, but want to pick up a masters degree (for professional development or promotion). This isn't a replacement for the face to face college experience, but individuals who are working full-time don't necessarily want/need that socialization.

This is cheap enough that I could easy see tech companies offering to subsidize this degree as a perk for their employees, assuming the employee gets accepted to the program.

I think you're spot on.

There's quite a barrier to a student with an existing undergraduate degree wanting to expand into a masters in a different field, particularly technical fields like engineering or computer science.

mooc's like Georgia Tech's offer a middle-of-the-road option between a tradition masters w/ placement testing (or a whole second bachelor for some) and professionally 'doing without' any accredited education and relying solely on chops and applied experience. I think there is a clear hole in the educational market for these 'transitional' services, and online courses seem to fill it well.

The real questions (VikingCoder stated above) are: to what degree does that $6600 certificate raise your earning potential?

AND

how effective, in contrast to traditional degrees or self-directed studies, are these online courses at educating people to professionally acceptable standards?

This one isn't much different from the perspective of someone wanting to expand to another field. You need a bachelor's in CS from an accredited 4-year program to enroll, or else you have to go through the usual placement-testing/remedial-course process if your degree is in a different field, as with the regular Georgia Tech CS Masters.

I don't see MOOCs as offering anything in particular that would make it easier to lift that kind of requiement. Large courses (whether in person or online) rely on incoming students coming from a standardized background, to allow the courses to assume a lot of things and minimize tailoring to individual students' varying needs. And MOOCs by their structure rely on instruction in (very) large courses.

The real change is price for degree, and price to attend. You will have to go through the same placement-testing or remedial coursework, yes, but will have only $6600 to pay for the masters on the other end, and are able to take the courses on your own schedule, in your own geography. Keep your day job and all that.

If you're already in a college town with an affordable & flexible CS program that you stand a chance of getting into, then this probably doesn't offer much. But then, how does it stack against the Georgia Tech name? MOOC or not, that's got to look nice at the top of the certificate.

I understand this isn't for everyone, but I think there is some new-to-market value in these programs.

San Jose State suspending its online offerings indicates that online only classes may not be all they're cracked up to be.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/San-Jose-State-suspends-o...

Or that San Jose State did a crappy job of theirs. We'd need more than a short news article to determine which.

Theres no shortage of anecdotal reports by college professors complaining that higher than normal numbers of students fail/drop out of online courses. Heck, my own anecdotal experience of distance learning in college recently bears that out.

I'm told by someone who's taught one that the completion rates on free MOOCs are in the low single digit percents of people who signed up, if that. But, as he points out, this is really ok, as people are learning as much as they care to.

Yeah there is a difference when you actually pay for them, this is paid for. I've never completed a free one, but any online college course I've paid for you can bet I've completed spending several hours a week on and well over 16 hours or more leading up to mid-terms and finals.

if something is free, i bet many more people sign up to see what it's like. if it's not for them, they bail. a high percentage of dropout i would think is expected for something that's free. it's comparing apples and oranges...

Dropout numbers are a pointless metric on moocs. I've lost count on how many moocs I have signed up for, without any intention of completing them.

It's just an example of people trying bring in old metrics, on new things they don't understand.

Same here. I've learned a ton from the moocs I've signed up for and not completed.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is data.

Edit: I suppose I should post something useful here rather than just a snark reply to someone's snark reply. Anecdotes represent distinct points of data and, therefore, a bunch of anecdotes would then be a collection of data.

I'm not sure that's correct. To become useful for science, you also need to put in a lot of work to correct for bias, etc. Having a plural number of anecdotes all with sample bias is not necessarily data and any attempt to create a correlation will run into problems.

The plural of anecdote is anecdotes.

The plural of datum is data.

Datum != anecdote.

Data != anecdotes.

QED.

And of course, college professors are completely unbiased in evaluating MOOCs...

I welcome high-quality MOOCs. I think competition will improve in-person offerings, especially at smaller colleges. I grow tired of getting low-quality students from my prerequisite courses. Sometimes I feel like removing the prerequisite requirements for some of my courses. The quality of some of them are so low.

The article isn't very clear, but I think this SJSU/EdX collaboration was an attempt by SJSU administrators to save money by doing a "flipped classroom" with MIT educational materials. Maybe it's not politically correct to say so, but an average failing grade by SJSU students on MIT curricula does not surprise me at all. SJSU only has a 47% six year graduation rate.

How many SJSU students can afford to go to 4 years of college full time?

19% part-time students.

https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search...

San José State University just suspended the MOOCs -- their library school masters program (for example) is still mostly all on-line/ distance education

One counterpoint to this is daphne coller's claim that pass rate is about 70 percent for people who paid $50 for a special track that includes verification of identity and means to prevent cheating.

There will be failed starts here and there. It does not invalidate the model.

My experience with MOOC's: They're still expensive, over-priced education.

I've taken many online courses, and I've always felt as if I could have just researched things on my own and bought a book or two. I have yet to take an online course that I felt was worth my money. All of them consisted of: Buy these books, read this material, answer these questions. Well I can do that on my own for free thank you.

Can you get a piece of paper that will assure and potential employers that you have actually studied what you say you've studied?

Yes. In many industries, this is called a certification.

"On your own" is not an accredited institute of higher learning that you can put on your resume.

Note: GREAT employers won't care whether you learned material on your own, or in an accredited degree program. Merely Good employers can be forgiven for thinking there's a difference. HR personnel who often get to screen resumes simply cannot be expected to understand that someone with a Masters is not inherently any more qualified than someone without a Masters.

So, the question becomes, does an Online Masters add $6,000 or more to your lifetime earning potential?

I think they provide a structure, and some people really benefit from it. If you are paying -- even if it's a few hundred instead of thousands of dollars per month -- and have a clear schedule, you are much more likely to stick with it and actually make the effort to learn the subject.

This is an aside, but I wonder how much longer the law schools will be able to deny admission to the bar to people with on-line law degrees.

You are allowed to take the California bar with an on-line law degree, but that's unusual.

Obviously, the law schools have a huge incentive to prevent this from happening, and they hold an ace card that traditional MS degrees don't have - it is flat out illegal (illegal as in you can be put in prison) to practice law unless you do the education exactly as specified by the law schools.

Computer Science departments may confer a useful degree and body of knowledge, but there's no professional association that can deny (under threat of fines and imprisonment) people without an MS in CS from writing code.

I'll probably come back & post more on this later, but one thing to note is that it is not the law schools denying admission to the bar, its the bar denying admission to people who have not gone to law school. Also, it's not illegal to practice law without the education - it's illegal to practice without the bar. The ace card isn't really the law schools so much as it's the bar associations. Meanwhile the bar associations are filled with attorneys who have JD's and want to keep the value of that degree up, so they have a vested interest in requiring JD's for admittance into their profession. It's kinda a circular & self reinforcing system, but like Mark Twain said, every profession is a conspiracy against the world.

I think the focus on legal education should not be getting online right now, but to change the JD to a 2 year degree, or start offering LLM's or something equivalent without the need for a JD and allow people to practice with those degrees. I've heard many law professors talk about how the final year of law school is pointless. Unfortunately, making a JD take 3 years is like Alka-seltzer coming up with the ad where they put in 2 tablets instead of one -- they're making money off it because people think it's needed.

Law schools are over priced, but they're also producing more than enough lawyers, so I don't really see accessbility as a bottleneck that needs to be solved, which is what most of the MOOCs are solving. Price is an issue that needs to be solved, but given the self perpetuating old boys network that is the legal profession any changes need to come through slow reforms, not major disruption.

Finally, firms & government agencies aren't going to hire people with online degrees even if they are admitted. School's name recognition carries more weight than it should (in my opinion) in this profession. It will be extremely hard for grads to gain the skills and prove themselves when they're not able to plug into existing networks after taking an online degree.

Mark Twain is a wise man, but let's be careful of false equivalence. The regulatory capture in law really is pretty egregious.

I read an interesting article about on-line law schools a while back.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3078930/ns/technology_and_science-...

I'm not as concerned about the employability for a few reasons: 1) many of these students appear to be "non-traditional students who bring extremely interesting and rare skills, and 2) online degrees, taken while working full time, will leave students with relatively low debt levels, 3) many of these students are enhancing existing skill sets rather than trying to break into law as a zero-experience associate.

I do agree that people with online law degrees would be at a very severe disadvantage in the job market if they're just the standard "history major with law degree" looking for a job with a firm or other entry level law job. If that's the case, I'd agree that they might want to avoid an online degree (honestly, you might want to consider avoiding law school altogether from what I've read lately).

But think about some of these students here... one case is particularly interesting - an earthquake engineer who (according to the article) "will take over as in-house counsel at his engineering firm, and he figures he will be among the first to understand both the mathematics and the law surrounding earthquakes." This guy has nothing to do with "entry level" law jobs. He's very unique, and it sounds like he almost certainly would never have gotten this legal training without an on-line option. Does it really make sense to deny someone like this entry to the bar, because we already have "enough" 24 year old history majors with no work experience who have decided to go $150K+ in debt to get a traditional law degree?

The Georgia Tech MS is an incredible deal!

Just wanted to chime with a few other interesting online degree programs, particular helpful for :

1. Post-Bac Computer Science B.S. Program from Oregon State. Takes 1-3 years to complete: http://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/online-degrees/undergraduate/...

$450/credit x 60 credits = $27K

2. Stony Brook University Electrical Engineering Online: http://beeol.ee.sunysb.edu/index.shtml

If Pre-reqs met, ($245/credit in-state / $742/credit out-of-state) x 41 credits = $10-30K

My story: 31, attending a decent PA state school getting a 2nd (and maybe 3rd) BS in Physics and CS, in-state full tuition < $9k/year. Went to a more expensive school in Philadelphia for my first Bachelors in Information Systems. Moved back to PA from Bay Area, had Data Analyst-type skills, applied to Startup School and got denied (naturally), but didn't have strong programming experience to get in a startup. Hope to return to the Bay, only prepared this time.

Yeah, I could've spent years self-teaching everything I needed to know, but found it helpful to go through a formal academic program to save time. However, I'm also supplementing my learning through Codecademy and MIT OCW.

But we definitely need more rigorous and legitimate online programs because so many people want to go back to school but can't because of family/work obligations, and the popularized online degree programs are degree mills at best.

Subjects such as CS and EE can be taught well online, but to teach Lab Sciences online would be impossible, unless simulations would be considered a substitute for actual Lab work. Medical School's another impossibility.

But if I knew about these online programs beforehand, I would've strongly considered it before quitting my job and being a full-time student.

I was thinking an interesting startup would be one that matches people taking online courses into study/support groups. Then each person has to put down say a $100 deposit, and the group only gets their deposit back if everyone in the group completes the course.*

As a bonus the money taken from groups that don't complete the course could be distributed to the groups that did so you could actually make money from taking courses.

Anyone interested in working on this??

* There would be exceptions for illness, etc.

I think these guys - http://functionspace.org have some kind of subject groups and articles. They announced some upcoming courses a little while back, perhaps they're on this idea.

Yes I'd be interested in working on this (email in profile). I think it could be similar to http://www.gym-pact.com/ but for MOOCs (i.e. "get paid to finish MOOCs"). It could also expand to coders who have trouble finishing their side-projects (I had this idea recently).

Yeah, I got the idea from gympact! What would you envision as an MVP?

Sign up and put in credit card (maybe use stripe) or paypal info, choose which course you're taking (on coursera, udacity, etc.), and set an amount you want to "wager" on finishing that course (and a date to finish it by if it's a pace yourself course). Come back when the course is over and upload your certificate to prove you finished the course before the deadline (with email reminders). Make money for finishing it (paid for by people who didn't finish).

tried something like this with studybrunch.com--though we weren't directly targeting MOOCs. We ran into a chicken-egg problem...

What was the problem you ran into exactly? It sounds like a good idea?

In the past, the only way to acquire a deep understanding of a topic was to attend a university and study in a traditional class setting. As such, employers made hiring decisions based on the merits of one's Alma mater; in the early days of higher education, individuals attending top schools were the only ones who had access to the highest quality instruction.

Today, the biggest threat to Higher-ed is the movement towards open courseware, largely spearheaded by MIT (see here: http://bit.ly/9GawDQ). However, open courseware cannot be a threat to large institutions as long as hiring is based on a paper degree rather than the amount of acquired knowledge and specialized skill one has attained.

I believe these online degrees are a rather expensive way to solve this problem.

My only concern is that some ongoing identification/verification takes place so the degree doesn't get "gamed" by being on line, thusly lowering it's value.

This is going to change the higher education not only in USA but worldwide .... kudos to all who put this kind of effort in disrupting the long due stagnant eco-system ... it is going to be proven as a god-sent-gift for a student coming from a poor financial background from 3rd world countries ...

This is a great first step, but what America needs is a quality, inexpensive, Bachelor's degree program. I hope it will happen, but it's not an obvious evolution from this GT initiative.

Does anyone know if it is possible to use this degree for VISA purposes?

IMHO, this is a great step towards democratizing education. No way should it cost $200,000 for a bachelor's degree.

No GRE .... superb

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