But to that end I've heard multiple people in hiring positions whose opinion of Georgia Tech's CS program has diminished greatly because they now view them as "that school with the online Master's." I'm hope the net effect is negligible but I've heard too many people say that or agree with the sentiment to dismiss it entirely.
Online education might be a real thing one day but it's got miles and miles to go before anyone takes it seriously. Right now it's at the level of "there are pretty good lectures that you can listen to if you're curious about a topic".
As it turns out the reason most people don't do education and have a full-time job at the same time is that they are essentially incompatible. If you are dedicating enough resources to your job to not be fired, you are not taking your education seriously (unless your period of study far extends that of traditional students by many years). A serious degree program IS a full time job even if it's only a few hours of week of physical in-class time. Online is a way to cheat and pretend you can do both, when in reality you can't and one or both of them suffers a great deal.
Cheating is cracked down upon and students have been expelled for collusion. Exams are proctored by humans or AIs (it is easy to do eye tracking and screen scraping, it even detected me trying to open the exam from a VM and refused to open). These (Georgia Tech's, MIT's, Standford's, etc) online programs are going to eat the middle out of the rest of the university sector as the content is substantially better than most midrange universities for a fraction of the price. You may be prejudiced against online programs for whatever reason but they are here to stay at the top end and the bottom end and it is important to be able to distinguish between the two.
The idea that being in a physical room and speaking to a professor in person makes you more worthy of a degree is simply not accurate. A degree should be a measure of academic ability, not a measure of physical proximity and willingness to put ones life on hold for a predetermined amount of time.
That is almost the definition of a degree. During a degree, every class expects you to devote time and resources to learning. The degree programs we see today are structured in such a way that they expect you to drop everything else and learn (or research, in graduate studies).
If you can't 'put your life on hold' in order to study you won't be able to do it quickly or coherently enough to generate the large body of knowledge that a degree represents.
In practice, it's currently a complete cesspool of low-quality for-profit degree mills.
I would argue that MOOCs from top tier universities far, far exceed the average online for-profit in terms of quality of content. It's ironic, considering they're free. The caveat of course is you don't get a degree, though many have options for certifying you took the class.
In my opinion, a bullshit degree is worse than no degree. The person with no degree is relying purely on skills and experience. The person with the online degree meanwhile may be of questionable caliber.
I have sympathy for people who people attain online degrees out of necessity and are fully aware they're just getting a piece of paper to satsify whatever arbitrary bureaucratic requirements. For example, it's not uncommon for a minimum level of education to be retroactively forced upon already-competent employees. The questionable caliber part comes into play when you have people who fail to realize that their obviously poor-quality online school is, well, just that.