The author draws a hard distinction between Udacity/Coursera MOOCs (good) and traditional master's degrees (bad). I'll interject that with Georgia Tech's Online Master's in Computer Science program [0], which is delivered via Udacity and insanely cheap [1], you can get the best of both! (Their "Computability, Complexity and Algorithms" class is one of the top Udacity courses cited in the article.)
Keep in mind that a traditional degree program does have a huge advantage over a strict MOOC: accountability. It sounds good to say that anybody can go push themselves through one of these courses. Try pushing yourself through ten, and actually writing all the papers and implementing all the code, while working full time and having a family. That grade looming at the end of the semester really does wonders for your motivation. Plus you can get help from live professors and TAs, and the Piazza forums for OMSCS are full of smart, curious students who love talking about the subject at hand. There's a richness to the degree experience that I don't think you get with scattered classes.
These numbers still look very high from a European point of view. It seems it makes a huge difference whether a society deeply cares about educating the population, or cares just superficially.
For example, in Berlin you spend less than 300€ per semester, a CS master takes 10 semesters regular time. Add two semesters to make the time more realistic, and you end up with 3,600€ which are roughly $3,800.
Oh, and it contains a full time ticket for public transport (which would otherwise cost 970€/year, i.e. 485€/semester). In other words: University education is cheaper than regular public transport, even though it contains a full time ticket.
Oh, and if your parents don't have that money, you can get half of the university costs + half of the living costs + half of the rental costs from the state. [1]
And note that Germany is by far not the best one in Europe regarding education, in universities as well as all other types of schools. It is regularily and heavily criticized for cutting educational expenses more than is good for the country. [2] However, after reading statements like the parent comment, I suspect it is still pretty good.
[1] More precisely, you get a debt called "BAföG", from which you have to pay back only ~50% after finishing - either in rates or all at once.
[2] For example, this forces universities into projects financed by third parties (i.e. companies), which adds a strong bias to the research direction and even more so to the results. Even worse, if this research contains business internals (which is easy to claim by any company), this leads to results being only partly published, or not being published at all. To be fair, the latter is more a problem of the law and not of third-party project. There should be a law that demands everything that is fully or partly paid with public money is Open Access as well as Open Source.
I agree that there are not-yet-mainstream concepts for schools/universities/etc. that should be covered by public money as well, at least partly. Currently, this exploration happens entirely in the private sector, which is simply inadequate (read: too small and too slow) for the society to move forwards with its educational system. A society should actively invest into improving their education the same way they improve on science, and that investment is clearly lacking in Germany and many other countries. We advance the educational topics, but not the educational system itself.
But: Investing into classic schools and universities is still better than not heavily investing into education at all, which is the only real-world alternative I've seen so far. (And I would be glad to be introduced into a real-world third alternative.)
> Yes there's some education conferred along with the schooling
Some? Maybe I was just lucky, but at school and especially at university I got a very good foundation and always felt well prepared to educate myself later on (through books, websites, technical manuals, and so on). Contrary to conventional wisdom, I learned more about critical thinking and judging sources in school/university than anywhere else. Not in all lectures, but in enough lectures that I would otherwise have missed. Without that initial foundation, educating myself later on would have been much harder.
Okay, I can introduce you to three real world alternatives I've seen in my own life—self study, direct mentorship and work experience. I'll share one example of each from different fields.
To be clear, I don't think there's a single one-size fits all solution for education. One of the core problems I see in formalized schooling is that by its nature it pushes large numbers of people through the same curricula. This may have been good in the early industrial era, but in today's world most job-related skills that can be commoditized are either outsourced or automated. Non-job related skills are also of great value, though it's not clear that it's best for people to build them in an factory-line style either.
Self-study: I put over a thousand hours into foreign language classes while growing up and got pretty bad results. It's an ancient discipline and curricula have had centuries to adapt, but it's just not well-suited to formalized schooling. I've met literally thousands of people with advanced degrees in English language study who don't speak that well. I've also met a lot of foreigners who graduated with degrees in Chinese who don't really speak or read comfortably. Though I've hired people for positions in which English language skills were important, I've never even considered looking at their related credentials rather than evaluating their results. Foreign languages are very learnable through self-directed study. This is even true for one's native tongue—most really good writers have gotten there through voracious reading and practicing their craft, not generallythrough advanced degrees.
Work experience: Another discipline I've seen schooling fall down is in sales. It's a core business skill, but those I've met who have excelled in it have come from a variety of backgrounds, not necessarily business schools. Almost invariably, the people who really know how to sell have gotten that way through work experience, either for themselves or on commission for someone else.
The third alternative, that of direct mentorship, is probably the most powerful I've encountered. Especially in music, athletics or other extremely competitive fields, there's nearly always a mentor behind the top performer, and often there is a series of several mentors over different stages of the learning process.
Now at this point, I suspect you're thinking about the fact that there are two types of educational goals—getting really good at something and getting to minimum level in all the core skills. Though my three examples were related to the first goal, schooling often fails in the second goal as well. It can succeed, but there are still a lot of people who do what must be done to get the credential they want and little else. On the other hand, it's exceedingly rare to meet someone who reads broadly and doesn't end up with at least a decent education.
Curious reasoning about society. For me, american society seems to care about education more, exactly because it's members are willing to pay for it themselves. In your sentence, you juxtapose 'society' and 'population', but those are exactly the same things.
For someone who moved from Australia to US, I don't think America cares about education for all. Only education for the elite rich. Universities should not cost as much as buying a house. The country literally puts a student in debt for life. That's nuts
> But it's subsidized; so people who aren't getting an education are paying for those who do.
This is just another way of saying that the society cares about this issue!
To put an analogy: When a society cares about parenthood and children, non-parents pay some share to parents. This is how financial solidarity works. How else should that work? By telling parents that they do a great job, that you appreciate what they do for society, but not giving a single cent to them? That would be hypocritical, not solidary.
So why can't it voluntary via donations to universities?
> By telling parents that they do a great job, that you appreciate what they do for society, but not giving a single cent to them? That would be hypocritical, not solidary.
It's not hypocritical if you compliment someone without paying them money.
Education is perhaps more important for preventing crime and violence than police and courts are. Remember, police and courts just deal with the crime; they don't prevent it like having a proper education and employment does.
No, only some portion of the population (possibly not even the majority--see the U.S. 2016 election) decides for everybody including those who are against it.
One could very much argue that having educated people is more beneficial to the society, and therefore for everyone, than it costs the society. Also educated pay more taxes individually since they usually earn more.
But you'd have to argue it, it isn't self-evident that more education is simply better. Look at the number of PhDs who can't secure post-docs let alone tenure track. They may feel some personal satisfaction from the letters after their names, but it's very questionable that "society" benefits from churning them out. Once you educate people to the level of basic literacy and numeracy, say age 16, it's diminishing returns after that.
Subsized - yes. But I don't agree to the second sentence: Generally the higher educated people are getting higher salaries afterwards and are paying way more taxes. These taxes are then used for providing education to the next generation (and also for lots of social programs which target the low/no income population).
If education was always profitable like that, governments wouldn't subsidize it, they wouldn't need to. Heck people would be fighting to give student loans.
The reality is lots of people study subjects that don't result in higher salaries but political correctness insists that people be able to study the arts easily, so governments "have" to subsidize education.
Well, no, the cost of education is ridiculous. Not many people get out of undergrad without any loans, and especially if you want to go on to get higher education (yes, even law degrees which pay nicely after you graduate), you'll be stuck with a mountain of debt that you won't be paying off any time soon.
I know someone in particular who went on to get a law degree (and was steadily employed in her field from her time of graduation) but was only managing to pay in the double digits toward her loan's principal on a monthly basis -- the rest went toward interest.
The benefits are ridiculous. Not the costs. Where I live it costs $28,000 to get a BS. I took out loans for every penny. Before college my salary was just under $18,000. After college I was making $48,000. I got my MS and PhD for free, fully funded by my work while in graduate school. I even made a decent salary, $18,000 during the year and $30,000 during summer internships.
Yes, but so are the trade schools/apprenticeships where people go that don't go to university, so what's your point? Your education is subsidized either way, unless you don't attend either of those options, in which case the individual is probably not going to pay for anything at all.
When the government pays for health care (like what happens in most european countries) it means that people that are not sick are paying for people that are sick. Why should they, right?
I hate that sort of terminology, money only exists for you to trade because you are a member of a society that collectively decided it was a good idea.
Welcome to social state, where the state thinks the sustainable development of the whole society can be only accomplished by increasing the life level of everyone
I'm studying a 3 year coursework masters that allows people with no background in CS (just had to do an additional semester of courses) to participate and it aims to give a pretty well rounded CS education. Not a common thing, apparently.
I completely agree, the motivation and environment that it gives you, the reinforcement that you're actually doing something official and serious as opposed to doing something that very few people outside of the software industry take seriously, the structure it gives you, the fellow students you meet and befriend, it's all huge. Additionally, looking at the Udacity/Coursera material, a lot of it is shallow, poorly taught, and would not have taught me nearly as well as my master's program has taught me.
Other Masters have acceptance programs for this as well. I know that Delft TU has an 'introduction' year which covers everything you need for the masters years (two). It does require a technical (of sorts) bachelor and has a low success rate due to it containing all the difficult subjects in one instead of multiple years like in the regular CS Bachelors and skipping over any form of specialization courses. Not completely undoable, but difficult non the less.
I imagine there are multiple universities around the globe offering the same sort of educational entry.
While it was shown in the article it doesn't matter at interviews, we (at my company) do require technical masters degrees. Though it does not need to be a CS master. The form of individual thinking combined with analytics and methodology we found to be far better at those completing (any/a) Masters degree than those without. Especially self-reliance, which is important if you do not have groups of 10+ devs working together.
Is this UChicago's program? I did a masters there without a CS background, and it was amazing. Incredibly hard, but amazing. The beauty of it is that they ramp you up on the mathematics and programming if required with a few additional classes. They also let you test out of either if you already know it. Doing that masters was one of the best things I've ever done.
> Keep in mind that a traditional degree program does have a huge advantage over a strict MOOC: accountability.
I wonder if this is a contributing factor to the success of those who completed MOOCs. There was zero accountability but they STILL manage to complete the coursework and assignments.
I'm im the same camp. I've start studying at a university a few times now, and I keep failing because other oportunities come up that are more important than passing the course.
I need to be able to self study at my own pace according to how my free time allowes. I'm also not that interested in formal tests and exams. And even course projects.
I want to learn what I need for whatever project I'm currenty working on or going to work on next.
Jumping in as another OMSCS student to second your post. The accountability really makes a difference finding the balance between work/life and the schooling (which can be nontrivial considering the courses are certainly rigorous).
I so want to enroll and take the OMSCS; I know I could succeed at it if I took it, but the school requires you to have at least a Batchelor's degree to attend (they don't count work experience in software development - so my 25+ years mean nothing).
I found out about the OMSCS after I started my work on Udacity's "Self-Driving Car Engineer" nanodegree course, which I am currently taking. My plan (hopefully) is after I complete the nanodegree, I'm going to take some kind of online BS program (maybe accelerated if I can find one), then hop over to the OMSCS (hopefully it or something similar is still running). I mainly want to do it to prove to myself I can do it - I believe that I can.
I made some early life choices that have led me to where I am at, and while it hasn't hindered my job or career prospects, I have always wanted what I should have done in the first place.
Western Governors University (non-profit, accredited, affordable) offers a few different B.S. programs that you could look at to use as a buffer. I received my undergraduate degree from WGU and highly recommend it. It's self-paced and there are ways to fast-track the degree in less than the typical 4 years.
Keep in mind that a traditional degree program does have a huge advantage over a strict MOOC: accountability. It sounds good to say that anybody can go push themselves through one of these courses. Try pushing yourself through ten, and actually writing all the papers and implementing all the code, while working full time and having a family. That grade looming at the end of the semester really does wonders for your motivation. Plus you can get help from live professors and TAs, and the Piazza forums for OMSCS are full of smart, curious students who love talking about the subject at hand. There's a richness to the degree experience that I don't think you get with scattered classes.
(Obvious disclaimer: I'm a current OMSCS student)
[0] http://omscs.gatech.edu [1] https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/program-info/cost-payment-sched...