It doesn't devalue the prestige of my degree but it devalues the thousands of dollars I've spent and the opportunity costs paid by not having a remote option. It's de-moralizing being midway through my degree knowing future students will not have my debt or be constrained geographically and temporally. It's like an externalization of costs where my debt will be used to frog hop the next class(es) ahead of me.

This is a fair complaint. The students from 1995-2020 will have paid over-market fees for their education. However, it is precisely because of this insane inflation and greed that MOOCs have become an option.

As someone who has suffered alongside you (though 6-8 years ago, when it wasn't so bad and scholarship money flowed a bit better), I feel your pain. But if I have overpaid for my education, knowing that I contributed in some small way towards the globalization/openness of post-secondary classwork was well worth the price.

"devalues the thousands of dollars I've spent"... sunk costs fallacy

The word "devalue" comes up a lot in conversations about this sort of thing, but I'm not sure exactly how that works. If half the student body at GT died before graduating, would your degree be worth twice as much?

I think dilution is less of a concern than reduced rigor, which is a completely valid thing to worry about IMO.

I agree -- but we can't really know about that until the program's run for a while.

I think they made a pretty smart choice starting with a CS degree. The field is notoriously full of extremely talented autodidacts, whether because the material is more amenable to that approach or because those who learn it are more capable of doing so.

In any case, the attitude towards educational background in the field of CS/software engineering is already quite liberal and accepting. So there's less of a prejudice against this program than there would be for an online MS in many other fields. Now they just have to make it work.

Despite other comments about not staking their reputation on this degree -- and I agree that the "Online" part of the title seems like a hedge -- Georgia Tech takes its reputation extremely seriously. Smart people are staking their own personal reputations and careers on this program. This is something new and it may fail, but not because there is any intent to deliver a lesser education.

This is probably going to work like University of Maryland and their MBA program. They have a MBA program at Smith School of Business that is offered at UMD @ College Park which is their primary school. Then there is the MBA from UMUC (University of Maryland University College). Two different types of MBA's (One is officially ranked and the other isn't), but has the University of Maryland name on it. If you are not from the DC Metro area or keep track of this, you could think that a UMUC MBA is the same thing as a MBA from Smith which is a Top 25 program.

This course will not help autodidacts, since a BS is required for enrolling.

This degree program doesn't allow people without a BS to get a graduate degree. I think it's wrong to say that having an entire Masters degree program from a highly respected institution online and accessible to everybody, everywhere for free doesn't help autodidacts.

The biggest impact for those who don't qualify for admission may be in advancing the legitimacy of online education, with or without a degree.

As an employer, the difference between an awarded MS and a certificate of completion in this program is not going to be that substantial to me. I'm going to interview both candidates to determine their level of knowledge and skill, and both indicators communicate the same educational background.

I expect a natural outgrowth of this sort of thing will be students providing access to his/her detailed course records as part of their resume. If I'm interested in hiring developers for machine learning applications, being able to read the code from those standardized, well-known assignments would be tremendously more useful in skill assessment than asking somebody to code FizzBuzz on the whiteboard and "riddle me this, batman: why are manhole covers round?"

The "GitHub account as resume" idea is an interesting trend, but they're not standardized and I don't have time to digest 20 unique projects in 20 different languages on 20 different frameworks to ferret out the non-boilerplate bits which may tell me something about the candidate.

Not twice as much but yes ... more valuable. This is well studied in agriculture and economics. When there is a bumper crop, farmers suffer.

Seems like it's explicitly designated "Online Masters" OMS as opposed to simply a regular degree you could complete online, so they're still separating it from the B&M degree.

While I feel like this is a step in the right direction for online education, the fact that this has the online designation plus its availability to a much, much wider audience seems like it would be a temporary setback in the eyes of employers.

I do wonder what the immigration repercussion of this is, too. I've often considered taking a Masters simply because it would make it easier for me to stay in the US.

From the Inside Higher Ed article I linked elsewhere:

> Galil and Bras both said they did not think the Udacity partnership would cannibalize its existing master’s degree program. They said the residential college experience would still appeal to students who are on a Ph.D. track, who want a full range of career services and who want visas to live in the United States while they study.

Nice find. This adds more weight to the idea that the "online" designation was carefully thought out to avoid immigration quagmires.

Same here, I think it's a really easy way to devalue their degree unfortunately.

A Bachelor's would be easier to accept, but a Master's? I don't think people are ready for that yet.

I actually disagree. Masters degrees are much more about just getting the knowledge than are bachelors degrees, which are more about signaling. Lots of very highly-ranked institutions have masters programs that are relatively "easy to get into" (compared to their undergraduate programs). E.g. Columbia, CMU, Penn, LSE, etc.

Agreed with rsanders. A bachelors carries a lot of other risks/requirements. It's definitely possible (and already available), but I think a masters in CS is perfect.

A masters requires a lot less courses, and you don't have to worry about general education requirements, which often involve a routine amount of writing and open-ended discussion (as opposed to a Q&A basis you'd likely find in STEM classes), or, for example, science courses that may require labs.

I think the Masters degree is an excellent place to start. MOOC-style education requires more of the student than traditional teaching formats. A lot of people don't have the necessary skills leaving high school, but they are likely to have developed them during the course of an undergraduate degree.

+1 This mirrors my thoughts exactly.

> Same here, I think it's a really easy way to devalue their degree unfortunately.

This only makes sense if you consider degrees to be collector's items. Maybe the problem is not with the degree.

Are you living in a world where no one cares where you got your degree from?