I think these online technical degrees are just the next iteration beyond those one-year MS/MEng degrees that started popping up around 2000. This was back when "financial engineering" was the buzzword... that worked out well, didn't it?
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 agree with regarding an M.Eng as a 5th year of University, though it's a year of actual major-related courses rather than Engineering core classes. That's in fact how I decided to do one: my professor pointed out that it was not one year on top of four, but one on top of one. I got to take another year of electives that were applicable to my career, rather than the core classes (chemistry, etc) that I was required to do during especially the first two years.
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."
Mostly right is a mostly correct statement. Heard of Renaissance Technologies?
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.
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"