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Georgia tech offers a fantastic online CS masters program for $6.6k (1/6th of the cost of on campus degree). I highly doubt that these universities have offere

• marcell 6y ago
  This could be explained by the difference between fixed costs and marginal costs, and the fact that in person students paying higher fees subsidize part of the fixed costs.
• krapht 6y ago
  Eh, qualify fantastic. It's great in that the courses are difficult, and if you complete them it will signal you are smart computer scientist; it's backed by GaTech's name brand and the diploma is the same as the on-campus diploma. It's not fantastic in that the courses vary wildly in quality, are mostly taught by teaching assistants, can require 20 or more hours of (busy-ish depending on course) work per week, and just like undergrad, you will struggle and be forced to teach yourself the material instead of being taught a significant portion of the time. Usually the textbook is much more informative than the lecture; your life is better if you own many textbooks on the subject since often the lecture information density and coherence is poor. What I'm saying is, the course lectures are pretty mediocre for ~40% of offered courses. OMSCS is valuable because it's cheap and prestigious, not because the instruction is high-quality. It's great for self-starters, auto-didacts, and hard-workers with background in the subjects (admittedly, most students from decent engineering schools will qualify).
  • andreilys 6y ago
    Fantastic in that you can easily graduate debt-free with a degree that sends a strong signal in industry. The alternative is graduating 6-figures in debt, and having missed out on all the benefits of on-campus learning.