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Of the people who start a nanodegree, how many finish? Of the people who finish, how many accomplish the expected career goal? I'm asking because Udacity is sta

• all2 8y ago
  I actually don't think these numbers are important for Udacity, or for people taking the courses. What is important is that people are afforded the opportunity. It isn't Udadity's responsibility to force people through a system. Rather, they set a bar (payment) for some resources and then allow anyone who wants to use their material to do so. This isn't a classical university/college setup, where success of the institution is marked by how many people graduate. I'm not quite sure how we could evaluate their system, though, as these kinds of large-scale course offerings with low barriers to entry are a newish phenomena.
• lsc 8y ago
  I think that the prestigious college model of only letting in people who they know have a 90+% chance of making it is damaging to socioeconomic mobility; there's a lot of us who have, maybe, closer to a 50% chance, who know this and would be happy to buy the lottery ticket in question, but it's not available for sale. I understand the need to prevent people from spending money they can't afford on a degree they can't get, but personally think a weeder class would be a much more fair way to go about doing that filtering.. make me pass a few really hard classes before signing up for the degree program.