Isn't the point of having a degree that you don't have to explain it? Isn't it shorthand for "I know X"? I'm not sure I want to spend a year working on an "MIT micromasters" only to have every interviewer ask wtf.
The Second (in person) Semester, at 33K USD leads to an actual Master's Degree[1].
It looks like the first master's program this is available for is Supply Chain Management, which from what I've seen[2] is one of the harder parts of manufacturing
I work for a manufacturing business. I agree with what you say about supply chain, especially if "harder" implies "more stressful." Purchasing is one of the most stressful and high-burnout jobs in the plant.
I doubt that a person would be hired fresh out of school for this kind of job, which implies that the 33K USD would be paid for by an employer, perhaps for someone who is showing promise in a related field or at a lower level.
I don't think you have to worry if you did something cool and talk about it. It may be actually an interesting conversation. I've got one degree split over 3 universities on my CV and it always resulted in a quick chat about it. (and I'm glad it did)
Then again, I have to admit I never ran into one of the infamous asshole recruiters...
Yeah, and they might know its nothing like actually getting a real graduate degree from MIT. MIT has a ~10% acceptance rate from a self selected group of elite candidates.
I have some experience with admissions at elite universities, and I can say that they generally weight candidates who have proven they can get "A" grades at their university or an equivalent much more favorably than unknown candidates.
In fact, with most even Ivy League Universities, if you don't get in, but can move into town, and arrange to take a hard class or two, and ace them, you would find your next application would be much more favorably received.
MIT is laying out a different path for these graduate students; essentially: "Let's not have to take you at your word for how successful you can be...Show me you can pass this degree program upfront by doing half of it."
I don't think it's in MIT's interests to dilute their brand by issuing shitty substandard degrees; instead, it seems much more likely that they are looking for ways to on-board many more quality students and keep their recruitment / admissions cost-to-successful-graduate ratio as low as possible. Hence the "We have 40 grads a year, industry wants thousands" quote.
This is a step in the right direction. However the $33k for the 2nd semester is still out of reach for many.
"As part of the pilot project, students who perform well in the online half can take an exam to apply for the second semester on campus. Those who get in would pay $33,000, about half the cost of the yearlong program."
Would be nice to see them eventually offer affordable online courses & exams for 8 semesters.
You need to re-read the article. The first part of the Masters is the "micro" part, and is completed for relatively little money ($1-$2k). The second semester is done on campus at MIT, and will run $33k. Once completed, you will have the same degree as those who do it via the normal method.
If more people have access to quality education, and they are eventually given a degree based on how they perform in the course, we should not be bothered about brand value. Educational institutions should cater to as many students as possible without compromising on quality.
So I googled it, and for Germany there seems to be a mean cost of 118,000 € per student for the whole degree.
It is very different depending on degree and also university. Medicine is very expensive and half the money goes into educating doctors.
The cost per year per student ranges between 5930 € and 12,170€ over the Bundesländer (counties), maybe depending on the degrees offered? [1]
I found a number for the average cost in the US at US$36,564 per year [2], which today is 32,199 €. So, for Germany, it's about a third per year on average.
The German number is measuring the cost. The US is measuring the amount that universities charge. Those are two very different things.
The actual cost is probably still substantially smaller in Germany -- IMO higher ed is one of those areas where markets create lots of inefficiences that a mostly or completely socialized system doesn't have (e.g., spending tens of millions on fancy new buildings and other amenities designed to attract people).
The lesson of the USSR seems to have been that competitive free markets tend to be more efficient than socialized ones, because the inefficient universities would be out competed by the efficient ones.
(You could still be right though, because universities are not a perfectly free market.)
Seriously, the notion that there was a single cause for the decline of the USSR -- and that this cause corresponds exactly to the ideologies at the heart of its antagonistic relationship with its enemies -- is prime facia suspicious. There were a myriad of economic, structural, political, environmental, geopolitical, and military reasons for the collapse of the USSR. Boiling all of that down to "Socialism Bad" is a nice rallying cry, but not exactly a helpful analysis (or at all likely to be very accurate).
>... because the inefficient universities would be out competed by the efficient ones
What does this even mean? What does it mean for a university to be "efficient"?
I think you're confusing what ideology claims should happen with observable reality; namely, that higher education in the US is 1) closer to a free market than peer nations; and 2) horrendously more expensive than peer nations.
>... because universities are not a perfectly free market
It's one thing to say "we don't know what works, so let's try the thing that one particular ideology prescribes."
It's another thing to say "Those people over there don't have our problem. I bet the reason is because we're not doubled down on the exact opposite of what they're doing."
In any case, I think I answered above why a free market won't fix higher education: brand names / flashy stadiums / dorms / academic buildings sell better than good instruction and solid research.
How many people go to university in Denmark? In the UK when degrees were free about 10% of people went to university. Today, when a degree costs about $50,000, approximately 50% of people go to university.
Free higher education is a good idea, but the cost is prohibitive. There's a difficult balance to strike between keeping the amount of money required affordable and opening up as many places as possible.
What are you implying here. Make it more expensive, more people will come? That's a bit silly and just looking at the UK as an example ignores that educational attainment has grown everywhere. You could say the same for other countries where fees didn't become so expensive. The German Abitur (sort of A-levels that is a decent proxy for higher education) grew by sevenfold (as a portion of the population) in the last few decades. That's just the economy, political and educational system at work, improving.
Now does money impact education, obviously. A free school in a traditional form would definitely be crap. But there's a difference between free and costless to the student. That's the difference between the UK and most other EU countries. Take this chart for example, dark-blue is higher education expenses:
You'll find Denmark at the very top spending more than the UK per student (which makes sense, they're much richer). It's no surprise then that Denmark offers solid education and that Danes make ample use of it.
It's not that the UK spends more per student on education than everyone else, it's simply that the percentage of revenue sources is more from tuition fees and grants, than the public, than pretty much anyone else in the EU. At best it lowers educational attainment because you end up with the same funding for universities as before and the same as other countries, only the barrier to entry is now higher for students.
Some fees make sense to create incentives to do well in school, actually graduate and take it seriously. Like say in the Netherlands where you'll pay something between $7k and $10k generally in tuition for a degree. (supplemented by tens of thousands of funding from the government per student to the educational institution). But again, the notion that increasing fees in these countries makes educational attainment skyrocket is myopic.
No. I was saying that providing education isn't free so someone has to pay, and individuals paying for their own places will provide more places because there's a very obvious risk/reward connection (risking borrowing money for the reward of a better job) than society paying for places (higher tax liability for societal benefit).
You're drawing a conclusion from correlated data. Every country has seen university enrollment increase regardless of cost. Australia's university is still cheap and mostly taxpayer funded and yet they have seen just as much growth in attendance as the UK.
I've never taken a full class in either, but although Coursera seems more structured (they have quizzes, tests, homework autograders), my impression is that Coursera is more technically diluted. This is for the CS and stat courses I have tried.
A lot of MIT OCW courses have all of those aside from the autograders, but the reason I prefer OCW to Coursera is because OCW is self-paced.
Many Coursera courses move very slowly (not their fault since they're taking thousands of students), or move too fast and have too much "homework" for a 9-5er. What's worse, some don't let you get ahead! With OCW I can set my own times and pace myself for my kind of learning.
I also prefer college lectures and books to Coursera lectures. Like you said, Coursera content can be too simple.
Most of the Coursera courses I take are actual college courses, like this algorithms one - https://class.coursera.org/algs4partI-009
They are a lot of work to keep up with, but the good ones have deadlines about a month past the 'end' of the course so you can work at a much slower pace.
Well, Why do we care of showing degrees off and that gets counted in? "I have a board which says 'Alas, I graduated MBA from 'bla bla'"
I would say, if we are able to show what we have built, or talk and convince intellectually as to what we are capable to build should matter more than any piece of paper.
I do agree, there would be a problem of filtering the right ones for a job in lieu of a "paper degree", but I hope there comes a better way in the world to judge and educate people to be more innovative and building real incremental things rather than just getting 'paper degrees'"
This has to be really cost-effective for MIT; I mean, they aren't really putting much in the way of resources towards these online students. But I think it's an attempt to solve a problem that's already in the process of evolving into a non-problem.
Most of the good programmers I know just go to school mostly for the credentials and to socialize with other programmers there, and then go home and self-teach for actual skill. School centers around getting a job. But it's starting to become not the only way to get a job. (Leaving out startups, of course; you don't really need credentials there except to impress VCs.)
Some companies are recognizing that formal education in programming is not very effective, and are paying more attention to StackOverflow and GitHub accounts and that sort of thing. Our work and expertise is becoming more visible through the Internet. That suggests that maybe we're not going to have to worry so much about credentials.
My older brother is doing very well for himself as a developer, without any formal training past some classes in high school back in the 90s. As for myself, I'm leaving for Kansas City once I'm done with my Associate's degree, and I'm going to UMKC there... for a few semesters, until I find a job and/or a cofounder. I don't intend to finish the degree I'm going to sign up for. They let slip during my visit there that they're already having issues convincing students to finish their degrees rather than let themselves be hired out.
But I do intend to go, in order to meet other programmers. That's the real power of universities: they collect bright, ambitious people and let them work together. Online classes don't have that power, and the credential problem is already being solved better, so I don't think this is going to go very far. But maybe it'll help accelerate the current solution by giving more credence to self-teaching and online study. Good try, but it'll probably be irrelevant in the end.
Kind of begs the question of whether one could recreate the social aspect of universities and leave out the expense of formal classes as they are now? For instance, whether you could make a sort of hackerspace-modelled university where all the "classes" were projects that one student was looking for help with? I'd attend that.
This program is aimed at MIT's supply chain management degree, a pretty technical thing to know how to do, and one that can cost your company many millions of dollars very quickly if you mess up; it's the kind of thing that I would guess even a pretty wild entrepreneur would want some training at in many circumstances.
Michael Dell almost folded Dell early days over a supply chain problem in fact; he was pre-buying inventory for his computers, and got bitten by a technology change leaving him holding enough worthless inventory that it could have easily ended the company.
At any rate, if you're Dell, you want people thoroughly trained in this before they get to go muck up your new laptop deployment schedule; even a small screw up in a small part could mean major revenue problems.
MOST startup developer screwups aren't on that scale, which is one reason it can work well to just jump in like you are planning on doing.
>> Kind of begs the question of whether one could recreate the social aspect of universities and leave out the expense of formal classes as they are now? For instance, whether you could make a sort of hackerspace-modelled university where all the "classes" were projects that one student was looking for help with? I'd attend that.
Sounds kind of like Make School [1]. Will be interesting to see the outcomes for their first real 'class' of students.
In my "university of applied sciences" in Germany most of the formal classes are in semester 1-3. After that (and in Master) >70% of the classes are actually "projects" which you have to do with a group of your fellow students. E.g. search a real company and code a piece of useful software for them; consulting for a virtual company (try to convince the professor that your "solution" can save the company); doing "Data Science consulting" (bi weekly presentations) for a virtual NYC taxi cab company.
If this is successful, perhaps they'd consider expanding this to a Bachelor's (MicroBachelors). It's a step in the right direction, at least. I've gone through a lot of the MIT OCW videos and notes, and by and large, the quality is very high. Promising.
I think that would be very useful for a lot of older tech types, like myself, who never bothered with a Bachelor's degree in the first place. I'm in the East Bay and there are a number of master-level programs that seem very interesting, but the idea of doing a 4-year undergrad degree at this point makes me want to stab my eyes out - I'm pushing 40, have kids, and doing fine in my career.
MicroMasters? Is that like a Bachelor's without calling it a Bachelor's, so people keep paying exorbitant amounts of money to attend physical classes to ultimately get a piece of paper? Ok MIT.
If you read the article, it clearly says that they let you do the first half of the Masters in this degree program online for much cheaper than doing it on campus. Then if you do well enough they give you a certificate for that part, and if you want you can do the second half of the Masters at that point, paying half of the normal amount you would pay for the full Masters degree.
If nothing else, this restricts the set of people who end up paying for that second half to those who have already demonstrated they can handle the work.
It also makes it more likely that their employers will foot the bill. Saying "I did the first half, here are my grades, please send me for the second" is a pretty compelling pitch.
Getting employers to accept online bachelors is a lot harder than masters. Most jobs have bachelors requirements and an online degree will likely get flagged. But for a masters it can work as an added bonus.
In a pilot project announced Wednesday, students will be able to take a semester of free online courses in one of MIT's graduate programs and then, if they pay a "modest fee" of about $1,500 and pass an exam, they will earn a MicroMaster's credential, the school said.
If the trial fee is $1500, I'm not sure they'd go right back to $150
The video embedded in the article talks about Tsinghua University beating MIT in rankings. This is a quantity vs quality since Tsinghua University churns out more research papers than MIT [1] because of the vast amount of students.
To be fair, Tsinghua is widely accepted as the second best university in all of China; the quality of the students is extremely high. The quality of the research is probably not so high.
As far as I know, the prestige university you go to if you want a specifically technical education is Shanghai Jiao Tong Daxue. (Don't take that as particularly authoritative; I'm mostly familiar with it as a contrast to Fudan.) But I don't believe Tsinghua is technically focused in the manner of MIT. It's very much part of China's Ivy League.
> To be fair, Tsinghua is widely accepted as the second best university in all of China
Tsinghua University and Beijing University are both regarded as the best university in China, with different people ranking different one first. But in the area of CS, Tsinghua University is undeniably the first.
But "supply chain management"? It seems that three months buying parts in Shentzen, a month at the Port of Los Angeles, and an intership at Digi-Key or Mouser would be the path to expertise in that.
I spent eight years building software for global sourcing operations and supply chain management. It's both incredibly dull and incredibly intricate. As a result of designing and building the software, I have a fair amount of expertise in the field, but I'd never admit it to anyone.
