So, former WGU student here, though I hadn't completed my degree.
Many WGU students HATE these types of articles, because they undermine the legitimacy of WGU.
WGU was not designed for traditional students, it was 100% designed for working professionals, where WGU will only admit you with a reasonable amount of experience in your field.
WGU is regionally accredited, not nationally, and it's a non-profit. So it cannot be compared to University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, DeVry, etc.
It was founded by a group of governors out west, hence the name. They realized that there were many working adults who possessed a great depth of knowledge, from long working in their fields, yet they had no paper credentials to show for that knowledge.
Their model is competency-based, so you must demonstrate you posses knowledge in any given domain. If you can prove you do then you can test out right away, if you fail to then they offer a variety of resources to allow you to get up to par. In many cases classes are tied to obtaining industry certifications.
It's not for everyone, but it is a far cry from a "degree mill." Does it really matter if a person that has knowledge got it from sitting in a seat, paying ungodly amounts of tuition, or if they got it from life experience? As long as a bar is set, and you can meet it, then that should be what really matters.
Just my personal experience, from having attended the university. Unfortunately life sidetracked my completion, but I hope to return one day soon, and complete my program.
I didn't read the article that way (although it's clear many posters did).
The author learned a lot independently. There's a question of what to do with that knowledge. A system like WGU does a few things:
1) Identify gaps and help fill them. Independent learners almost always develop gaps. One benefits from bringing that knowledge to a uniform "undergrad CS degree" level
2) Provide a certification once that's done.
A traditional university degree takes 4 years, costs $200k, and has mixed quality. Being able to do 75% of that independently, and having an institution gap-fill for a few grand? That sounds awesome.
For brand recognition, I don't see WGU as any better or worse than the 4500+ other random universities and colleges in the US. It doesn't match the top few hundred, but that's okay. Most don't.
I'm not sure who would compare it to Phoenix, ITT Tech, DeVry, or other scams like that.
I'd much more place WGU as more a competitor to ASU. ASU is awesome, and is really trying to pioneer models of innovative, quality, low-cost, scalable education.
I hope one of them succeeds.
By the way, yourself being a former WGU student, would you recommend WGU to a super-gifted kid? E.g. having someone start college there at e.g. age 13? That, plus CMU OMSCS, seems like something they could finish by age 17. Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early. Academically, middle / high school seems like a waste of time.
Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early.
Speaking as someone who went to university at 13: Socially I fit in better with my intellectual peers than my chronological peers. Which isn't to say that I fit in well... but at least there was a level of mutual respect. Few educators appreciate the social distance created by a large IQ gap, probably because they haven't experienced it themselves.
Speaking as someone whose school administrators wanted me to start university by 13 but whose parents objected and held me back, being the same age as my chronological peers was meaningless and did not help me relate to them.
The odds that an 18-22yo traditional college student will overlook a 5-9 year age gap because you share a lot of interests and can have interesting conversations are much higher than the odds that another 13yo will overlook the fact that you have no shared interests at all because hey, you're the same age.
I found it extremely difficult to make friends until I got out from under the limiting influence of my parents who didn't want their kid to be "weird."
Now I have a whole bunch of weird friends who are fascinating, joyful dorks, so it's not hopeless either way, but I'd have loved to experience this much sooner.
> The odds that an 18-22yo traditional college student will overlook a 5-9 year age gap because you share a lot of interests and can have interesting conversations are much higher than the odds that another 13yo will overlook the fact that you have no shared interests at all because hey, you're the same age.
I see both as same odds - mainly zero.
A lot of people ITT who are like, “I’m so high IQ - I went to college when I was 13” like many of us out here didn’t have that option. (Rubs very much the same way of r/iamverysmart) It’s not as difficult as people make it sound. Most of your education growing up is a complete joke - it’s just babysitting. Exclaiming that you were some version of detective Conan is also quite cringe.
My comment was primarily to give the opposite side of the same coin as the parent comment. It sounded like we were probably similar children whose parents made dissimilar choices.
He seems to think his parents made the right choice. I wanted to confirm that I thought the choice my parents made was the wrong one.
You can read bragging into it if you really want, but it's extrinsic to the conversation.
All I can advise is a little bit of empathy. There are plenty of people who are nerdy, and have horrible social skills. For every bit of how obnoxious “I’m so high IQ - I went to college when I was 13” sounds to you, the flip side is that the person saying that probably:
1) Doesn't have very many friends
2) Which doesn't give many opportunities to practice social interactions
Which sort of cycles back on itself. It's hurting them a lot more than it's hurting you.
Usually, it’s some moron on the Internet saying he was a “gifted kid” like it’s an achievement but you have independent verification that Colin Percival (cperciva - this topic starter) is smart. He’s a multi-time Putnam winner and the founder of Tarsnap.
Also the source of one of those amusing HN exchanges where people think everyone else is run of the mill. You know the one.
He himself said he couldn’t associate with people who were lower than his IQ. I don’t give a shit what his accomplishments are - he clearly still has the same asinine mentality that any 13-year old has when they think they’re smart.
Idk why people on HN assume this is the first time I’ve had to deal with a Putnam winner (or a fields medalist), a celebrity, a billionaire, etc. I live in SV after all. I’ve talked to all of these folks many times. I talk to this person no different than any of the other people I’ve talked to. They deserve no different when they say such things. I judge what they say and are actively doing - not what past accomplishments they have made in some unrelated field.
He himself said he couldn’t associate with people who were lower than his IQ
That's not really what he said at all. He said he fit in somewhat better with his intellectual peers than with his age cohort. There's nothing really controversial about that at all. Most people prefer the company of those with whom they share common intellectual pursuits and viewpoint over those for whom their only common factor is age. Often physical and mental age councide but when they don't, it doesn't seem unreasonable that common mentality would be a stronger bond.
And even if the sentiment were elitist (which I dispute) I don't think I'm the context of this discussion, it deserves a hostile response. I appreciate the individual sharing his personal experience, even if I wouldn't qualify as the type of person he'd share a beer with.
It's not about the achievement or the title of being a whatever. It's just that if you're the kind of kid really interested in math competitions and you're really good at it, then you've got a small set of people with whom you can really enjoy sharing your view of the world through your favourite lens.
Whatever. Essentially, I like this guy's software and he seems fairly personable, so I'm inclined to not really believe he's "I'm so much smarter than you"ing a bunch of people.
You sound like you have an inferiority complex, you probably were not blessed with a comparable IQ to the people you describe and resent them for it because in SV that's your most important asset.
I'm not that smart compared to the other people you replied to but smart is relative. I chose to go to the 3rd best high school in my mediocre Romanian town and had the highest entry grade in the entire high school. When it came to math I would grok the concepts by simply reading on my own 30 minutes before class while my peers would need tutors and still not get it.
Do you think I had a good time in high school? What my peers lacked in math skill they gained in ego preservation. They saw intelligence as a threat that must be neutralized. I doubt my story is that different. I'm telling you this because it's pretty obvious you did not live it so you might gain some empathy and let go of your resentment
>The odds that an 18-22yo traditional college student will overlook a 5-9 year age gap because you share a lot of interests and can have interesting conversations are much higher than the odds that another 13yo will overlook the fact that you have no shared interests at all because hey, you're the same age.
I think the odds are honestly in better favor of the 13YO. if only because a 5 year age gap for an 18 YO is a magnitude different than a 5 year age gap for a 30 year old, or even a 24 year old.
It may even be a legal risk depending on the profiling of each peer for the former. Of no fault of either party, just of the fault of decades of bad actors and a culture highlighting them.
I have a lot of friends and coulleages like that now, but I can't imagine them even giving me the time of day if we met a decade prior and somehow all had identical interests.
Grass is always greener. You don't know the counterfactual and you would have likely been disappointed in your parents had they sent you to college early as well.
I'll let other people, like the parent comment, speak to their experiences. He, at least, doesn't seem to think my grass was greener.
I do think listening to any of the professional educators who unanimously and repeatedly told my parents it would have been better to accelerate my path through school would have been a good idea.
First of all, neither do /you/ know the counterfactual and so you have no bearing on whether or not this person "would have likely been disappointed in your parents had they sent you to college early as well."
Do you have any experience with folks who went to secondary education early? Because I was miserable in high school bored out of my mind and left 1 year only and my only regret was not leaving even earlier like some of my peers did. Speaking platitudes like "the grass is always greener" may make you feel better but it doesn't line up with 25% of the profiles of students I've seen go to secondary education early (and I know a lot of them).
Genuine question, cause I don't live in the US, is starting college at 17 unusual? Over here half of the cohort finishing high school are 17, so I expect a similar proportion starting college here are 17.
Personally I had a 2 year gap between high school and university, so I went from being one of the youngest in my year to one of the oldest,which was kinda nice. Plus the time away taught me some self reliance so college was pretty easy to adjust to.
Canadian here, but I think the US follows the same age-grade mapping. Kids usually enter Kindergarten in September of the calendar year in which they turn 5, i.e. those born January-August are 5 years old and those born September-December are still 4 years old. After that, grades 1-12 follow with a majority of post-secondary-education-bound students entering a few months later.
So yes, in the modal case (advancing with the cohort) a student entering college will start at 17 years old if their birthday is late in the year.
Have you found the gap to be self-imposed (the kind where you struggle to keep a conversation going with a stupid person) or is the result of projection by your peers (where they feel uncomfortable having you around because you are smarter, and that makes them insecure about themselves)?
Is the social distance visible only in domains where you have devoted time to excelling in, or do you experience it in domains outside your expertise / in random conversions too ?
Do you think you benefitted from jumping to university so soon in life ?
There was definitely insecurity-related bullying. More so in elementary school because the teacher encouraged and participated in it; moving from class to class in high school also helped to minimize bullying compared to being in a room with the same kids all day long.
A lot of the difficulty came down to a lack of shared concepts. To me, partial derivatives are very natural concepts and I would get a few sentences into describing something in terms of partials before I remembered that I was talking to people who didn't even know what those were. (Ditto for differential equations, vector spaces, orthogonality...). Over the years I've learned to a limited extent how to convey ideas without drawing on terminology which most people aren't familiar with, but that has taken decades of practice.
I absolutely benefited from going to university early -- and I also benefited from staying in school. I only finished high school a year early, but spent 4 years taking high school and university courses concurrently. While I gained very little socially from high school, I had a couple excellent teachers there and learned some useful material in other subjects. I've met people who dropped out of high school to attend university full time who struck me as shockingly ignorant of e.g. history.
> I've met people who dropped out of high school to attend university full time who struck me as shockingly ignorant of e.g. history.
This is an interesting complaint. I would argue that everyone whose knowledge of history consists of the entirety of their high school curriculum, with nothing forgotten, is shockingly ignorant of history.
After reading one relatively short book on the history of China, ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465015808/ ), I had a Chinese high school student remark to me on how unusual it was for her to find someone who could talk about Chinese history. But I was meeting only the lowest possible bar.
If someone is shockingly ignorant of history, that's not because they missed high school; it's a problem that high school doesn't try to address and isn't intended to.
I'm not saying that high school gives people a great education about history. But I would expect anyone graduating high school to be able to give general answers to questions like "which countries were we fighting against in world war 2" and "where was the Roman empire".
If you can only speak in terms of partials/other-math-lingo - it speaks more to your own limits than the limits of others.
This is something you should - uh - think about.
I mean this honestly. Being able to convey ideas to many people of different backgrounds is a skill and an intellectual pursuit. If you’re incapable of talking to people except in nerd shit - you’re not really any smarter or whatnot than them. You’re just insular.
You're absolutely right -- as a 13 year old I was quite limited. I was mature enough to carry a conversation with 20 year olds, but not mature enough to carry a conversation with a 13 year old. (I like to think that I've grown up since; and while I don't talk to teenagers very often, when the situation arises I do manage better now than I did back then.)
This is exactly my point, and why University was a far better social experience for me than high school.
OP was nice enough to answer a pretty intimate question.
You’re just insular
We don't know this person personally, so it would be wrong to make assumptions about their communication.
you’re not really any smarter
You are using their innocuous comment, to project your insecurity onto OP. Well done on proving their point. Yeah, some people are better at tasks that are traditionally considered to signify intelligence. The kind who go to study difficult majors at university at 13, are very very likely to be smarter within that definition than the majority of the people they run into.
It is fine to accept that. It is not like OP is going around taping 'stupid signs' on people's foreheads.
> it speaks more to your own limits than the limits of others.
Indeed, and that is totally okay for a 13 year old to have limits. You can't expect a kid to have any real maturity. People only really get good at communicating with age, and even then it is hard.
I agree to some extent. I have forgiveness for pre-teens and early-teens going through these phases. After all - it’s a phase. It is no different than when a kid is obsessed with Minecraft or some other shit. (Which is see as less intellectual than mathematics - eyeroll) It’s when that goes from “it was a phase” to “I was better than everyone else” is where I clearly draw the line.
>Over the years I've learned to a limited extent how to convey ideas without drawing on terminology which most people aren't familiar with, but that has taken decades of practice.
I think this is one of the most remarkable lifeskills to have. Personally, I feel stupid when I find myself between a jargon laced conversation. On the other hand, I respond very well to clearly communicated (not ELI5, but simple) ideas.
Putting things across as simply as possible is very difficult to master IMO.
Reading this thread made me realise I developed this as a defence mechanism and have honed it over many years, but as you say it's a great social skill as well.
It's amazing how many conversations you can have about interesting subjects (and thereby dodge smalltalk) by simply rewording them into something everybody at the table can understand.
I don't think the gap I experienced was self-imposed. I was genuinely interested in the nuances of chess openings and my classmates were struggling to figure out what to do when their Candyland card had two squares on it instead of one. (This isn't a criticism; the game is meant to pose just such a challenge to children the age we were.)
We just weren't thinking on the same planes. My mind made most connections so quickly and automatically that I didn't realize other people's didn't. I didn't know why I couldn't have a conversation with other children. I just knew it didn't work. They would just stare at me and then leave. I knew I could talk to adults fine, but I didn't have enough life experience to realize the other kids couldn't make mental connections like I could.
It was actually when my younger sister started school that it clicked. I knew she was a smart girl, but academic subjects were surprisingly hard for her. That was when I realized someone could be smart, but have to take time to learn certain things, or at least in certain contexts, and that the things they learned might have to be layered on top of each other slowly.
Prior to that, my only experience had been of someone's presenting an idea to me and my immediately understanding it. It's hard to relate to other people, especially children, when you don't have that conceptual framework.
I think you nailed the key with "mutual respect." That to me is what distinguishes children from adults. Some people achieve it at age 12, others maybe never in life. I'd rather be around a mutually respectful 12 year old than a same-aged person who still thinks and acts like a child.
Agree, and that large IQ gap can be even more brutal in children/adolescents. In elementary school, I compared my 'peers' to chimpanzees. That's not exactly conducive to learning things like empathy or teamwork. How well would the average adult work in teams if it were them and 5 8-year olds? There are multiple important life skills that require some form of peer group to learn.
People like genius children/prodigies that don't have a natural peer group require trade offs find them one or else they lose out on important non-intellectual skills.
Indeed. I was completely miserable in high school, instead getting my dose of social interaction by visiting a hackerspace. Genuinely believe that was the only thing that kept me from going insane at that point in life.
Now of course interacting with people that are twice my age during my teens has produced some bonus problems in my social skills, but the alternative here is feeling completely isolated, not somehow magically learning to be normal™ person™ as many educators seem to think.
A lot of these depends on personality. Personally, I didn't relate to my peers at all, and did a lot better with an older crowd.
This child does great with his peers. They relate around activities like soccer or other normal kid stuff. It hasn't been a problem yet. He's bored out of his wits in class, but the social stuff is fine.
I also don't think he has the maturity to do well with kids much older than him. College students can interact around intellectual interests just fine, but to be blunt, he'd just come off as super-obnoxious to college-age kids (not in a snooty way, but in the same way as most other kids his age). I don't think he'd make many friends there.
Even as someone who's gifted, how do you manage to get into a university at 13? I'm assuming you're non-American? Is it just a matter of taking entrance exams, showcasing aptitude at the college level, then matriculating?
I'm Canadian. I finished Grade 12 mathematics (and took the "school leaving" exam in that subject) when I was in Grade 7. Simon Fraser University (where I attended) has a special entrance category for "secondary student with superior academic standing" to take "one or two courses" while still attending secondary school.
I was admitted under this category, and when my "one or two" courses ended up stretching into half a degree... well, as long as I was getting mostly A+ grades, nobody was going to step in to say that I wasn't allowed to take any more courses.
As a practical matter, I'm sure it helped that my father was a Professor of Chemistry and a widely-respected member of the University Senate. When my admission required approval from the Dean of Science, his response was "no problem, I'll see him at lunch tomorrow". I like to think that I could have gotten in without that connection, but having someone on the inside who knew how the system worked absolutely made things run more smoothly.
Maybe, but I'd argue that age is mostly relevant to the extent that older people generally know more -- an effect which is balanced if the younger person is more intelligent.
I think that is a pretty fair and accurate assessment of it. For me, with a lot of experience, the credential + filling in some gaps were what I really needed and the WGU degree was a great way to take care of both.
As for recommending it to a super-gifted kid - I don't think the program is setup to allow that. You have to have a high-school diploma and at least a bit of work experience to even be admitted. I also think that one drawback of the program is that you can graduate without having written a ton of code, which is fine for someone who's been doing it for a long time, but less ideal for someone who hasn't?
1) A GED would be trivial for this kid. So the high school diploma, I'm not worried about.
2) Kid started doing (real, not Scratch) programming in 1st grade. I'm not worried about coding experience or computer science background. I am worried about software engineering background, but that could come later.
I’d be more worried about social development. Of the small sample size of gifted people who didn’t want to be with their peers, how many have formed last relationships, friendships etc.
We had obviously gifted kids in my school and they came across as arrogant and entitled. 15 years later, most of them went on to get graduate degrees but don’t seem to be progressing socially (i.e. absent from reunions, weddings, small town bar run-ins)
I'm not sure attending traditional school with chronological peers does all that much to improve that situation. I know very few people who are still friends with anyone from high school, for example. I only have two friends from high school that I even talk to anymore, and only one that I'm close with. I don't feel like attending a traditional school did much of anything to help me develop social skills, as I still struggle with those quite a bit even now.
My mother dropped out at 14 and got a GED by 15 back in the 70s because she was so bored. (Parents didn't believe university was for girls, so that wasn't an option).
Seems like a way to screw over a particular subset of kids.
I dunno about why. But it was set at least in the late 90s. I took the California High School Proficiency Exam back then because it had a lower age requirement (and I was in California).
Challenge where appropriate and allow them to practice self teaching. It's better to have accreditation from a top university than a one off. And if the child is capable they should be able to move through the material and jump the artificial hoops.
As at the end of the day. The reality is it's about who you know. And if your more concerned about the degree. Your missing the point.
My parents took the middle approach: skipping grades and doing gifted and talented programs. It still wasn’t nearly fast enough. Socially it was still tough for me.
My only advice is don’t ignore the social aspect. Still there has to be a better way than sticking them in public school for 12 years. After-school activities like athletics might be helpful.
> Independent learners almost always develop gaps.
I think that goes for any leanrer, independent or traditional. Ask a random sample of college graduates to lecture for an hour on their degree focus and you will see the evidence of this.
The purpose of national college accreditation standards (as ABET does for engineering) is to avoid those gaps. This is accomplished publicly by their specifying core courses and syllabi that span the competencies expected from anyone earning a given degree (BS, BA, etc). Accreditation leaves schools little wiggle room when creating compliant courses and content. By delivering on a base set of cores that span essential theory and skills, students and employers are assured that anyone who earns that degree in an accredited school will indeed possess a standard set of core skills and thus will not suffer from gaps.
Accreditation is important, especially if the school is not well known nationally.
I've seen far more incompetence out of college educated engineers than autodidacts. I've seen far more time spent unteaching bad habits and bad ways of thinking for juniors. Computer science theory is mostly useless and only midwits who are wooed by theory would think otherwise. Big O notate the $80k on a degree you didn't need.
I know very few graduates of schools outside the "top few hundred" in the US who received thorough grounding in core skills unless they took the personal initiative to fill those gaps through self study. That's hardly a rousing endorsement for that track, if the student has to later plug the holes that a poor school left in their education.
I have no personal experience with WGU or Phoenix or other online unis. But I've met a few folks who graduated from lesser schools (outside the top 200) on traditional campuses. Unless those kids were preternaturally bright and took the initiative to teach themselves (fill the gaps), they often face an uphill battle to recover from the poor preparation that an undemanding and incomplete academic program can inflict on 1) their ability to compete in those skills on the open market and 2) their passion for learning. IMHO, that's a high price to pay.
"on the job"? Most likely. But I spent a lot of time and money getting a degree from an accredited university, where I was bored the whole time and maxing out the number of credit hours they would let me take while also working as much as I could. Why? Because I could've aced the first 2 years of CS classes by the time I was 13. I would imagine that's not uncommon among people who grew up with a hacker mindset and had the resources to explore it. I surely had gaps in my knowledge - not saying I didn't learn anything from the college experience. But I would love to live in a world where I didn't feel like I would, at some point, be better off with an accredited 4-year degree just to get or keep a job in the first place.
13 seems low, but I had 3 years of full time programming experience by the time I was 17.
It's really important to note that I'm not particularly gifted. I was required to work "real jobs" over the summer starting at 15 and the only way to convince my parents that programming was a "real job" was to make as much as I could working at the community pool. After the first summer I kept working over the semesters nearly full time. I was doing freelance Perl CGI and PHP+HTML+JS junk. my main advantages were:
1) I could do piece work for $8/hr,
(2) I presented professionally because I was usually the only native English speaker bidding on the project,
(3) I was a single person doing full stack + sales/bidding (the competing offshore outfits mostly sliced up labor between backend, frontend, and sales due to language barriers and extremely low-skilled programming labor. For projects of the size I was bidding on this introduced a lot of expenses/overhead without any real advantages), and
(4) I was available in US time zones when bidding on these projects. Even during the school year my after-school availability was way better than the offshore shops could usually offer, and I could answer emails during the school day.
To reiterate: not a genius! Just a kid slinging super simple HTML+JS+SQL+PHP/Perl. I didn't even know SQL for real; I knew CREATE, SELECT (without joins), UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE. Joins were implemented using multiple queries and for loops. Didn't matter for my clients, who just wanted cheap CMSes/ordering systems/etc. for random folks' .com get rich quick schemes, pizza shops who thought they really needed a customer website, etc. I'm pretty sure grubhub/slice/google maps/social media destroyed my old market a decade ago ;)
So a real genius getting there by 13 seems like an extreme outlier but not at all impossible.
A university doesn't cost 200K. Even in the US residents pay less than that and if you take into account community college for the first 2 years it's not really as absurdly expensive as it's made out to be. Please don't spread half-baked misinformation.
>That, plus CMU OMSCS, seems like something they could finish by age 17. Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early. Academically, middle / high school seems like a waste of time.
Apparently even high school is a waste of time. What's not a waste of time for you? Are you to be put directly as head of engineering at Tesla so that someone as gifted as you doesn't "waste" their precious time?
That's nice. State schools now cost a minimum of $10,000 in state tuition per year excluding room and board. That's the cheapest you can get. Out of state tuition is $16,000-$20,000. It's not that cheap anymore.
> That's nice. State schools now cost a minimum of $10,000 in state tuition per year excluding room and board. That's the cheapest you can get. Out of state tuition is $16,000-$20,000. It's not that cheap anymore.
People under-estimate the total cost of school: housing is going to be the biggest expense in CA.
It's insane to think that only a few decades prior, the CSU/UC system was almost entirely covered with pell-grants and student aid if you were from CA, a UC you could cover with just a PT job, or working FT in the Summer.
Now it's entirely impossible to walk out without high 5 to low 6 digits worth of debt even if you live with your parents.
We took the envy of the University system in the US and turned it over to the administrative cronies that came from banks and hedge-funds who monetized it 20 ways from Sunday in order to bleed the students dry and wasted it on bloarted salaries form themselves and more needless things to attract foreign money into the the campuses while gutting the academic programs where ever possible--we used such crappy lab equipment in most of my undergrad it was astonishing where all the money went in student and lab fees.
I went to several CSUs, as well as did summer school or took extra elective at Community colleges to expedite my graduation date and to make up for a lost semester due to a severe car accident, and the level of BS I went through only to see how these leeches operated still makes my blood boil.
I was in an impacted major, Biology, in one of the major 'party schools' in the CSU system and these bastards prioritized admission into the department based on out of state and non-US based tuition rates.
They didn't even hide it, either: they only offered a class you needed to graduate once a year and instead of opening up the section for more students they capped it unless you were from out-of state or out of US and could ten petetion for it based on an 'urgency' basis.
I'm glad they went to Zoom school model, because it shows just how unnecessary 99% of the expenses are and we're re-thinking how we actually educate and accredit degrees.
I got into a well-known University in Europe with a strong AI and ML CompSci program after having founded a fintech startup and my work experience working for a megacorp.
And to be honest, I now realize that my actual worth was way higher even back then (an honors student with letters of recommendation) but I put up with a lot of it because of the 2008 financial crisis that hit me/my family really hard economically as well as the CSUs particularly bad (they cut the budgets hard) and made us all scramble for the doors in order to graduate and try to get into the horrible job market for the few jobs left over.
In short, I will laugh on the grave of traditional academia, which cannot come soon enough.
Average 4-year private school would cost 200k, if not more if you're going to any private T100. Average person in this community also wouldn't go to CC.
Why wouldn't an average person in this community go to a CC?
I understand there's some stigma for community colleges but you can get a great education without getting anywhere near 200K. Won't be Ivy League though.
For example, Stony Brooks costs 10K in tuition per year for in-state residents.
Stony Brook isn't a community college. It is a 4 year university. I do agree though that there are many great universities where you can get an education for a fraction of the $200k bill that top private colleges have.
For what it’s worth, many people reached out to me after reading the article to thank me for introducing them to the idea that they could earn their missing degree in less than 4 years and/or without student debt. Many of them are self-taught developers with decades of experience that can’t move up the corporate ladder, work abroad, or pursue graduate studies because they lack this important piece of paper.
>> or pursue graduate studies because they lack this important piece of paper.
It's pretty disingenious to imply the only thing traditional degree-holding grad students have over somebody with only industry is a "piece of paper". I say this as a former grad student who (with a degree) came out of industry. There are plenty of underwhelming students with only academic experience, but if you had industry-credit and a few terms, where would you get the other skills that I'd argue are far more important than practical experience?
They did not imply that. They just said the piece of paper was a barrier to other things they wanted to do.
That's the situation I'm in, and somebody recently suggested I check out WGU. I was thinking of doing a Master's degree, and it is an absolute bedrock requirement everywhere I've looked that you have a Bachelor's to apply to the Master's program. Would I get more out of spending 8 years doing a BS part time in the traditional way? I'm sure. Am I going to do that just so I can do a Master's? Fuck no. But if I can get the piece of paper in 6 months, that's starting to seem doable.
Look, I'm not here to judge, but the Coursera + UC Boulder Electrical Engineering OR Computer Science Masters will take anyone, regardless of degree status. There are also some UK universities that will as well, notable Oxford's Software Engineering. Just my 2 cents doing the research.
Could you provide a reference for the UC Boulder option? I've had professor pals look into this on my behalf, and the confident answer they got back is that all US accrediting bodies require a Bachelor's before entering a Master's program.
The UK option is interesting. For those curious, here's the bit explaining that they normally expect a Bachelor's but will consider experience: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/study/index.html
As well as the options willhslade mentioned you can also do individual Master’s modules as distance learning with the University of London International Programme and then transfer to the Master’s programme proper.
You took it the wrong way--and I get why you did. There is definitely a lot more to university than "a piece of paper."
But there is not more to being locked out of working abroad, high-level corporate jobs, and certain fields than a piece of paper. A seriously below average traditional student has access to all of these things, while a high performing, high knowledge person doesn't, simply because they took a different life path.
No, he said you can't pursue graduate studies unless you have an undergrad degree.
Let's be real, most undergrad programs are trash, and only exist to satisfy industry filters. Wow you learned all these topics on your own but do not have a paper? Too bad!!!! . I respect graduate studies, but I have zero respect for undergrad.
I don't feel that he's being disingenuous. He just doesn't have the experience or the context. University prestige and your uni social circle can dramatically improve your professional life, but you're not going to know that if you haven't experienced it yourself or personally know anyone who's had the privilege.
For a school-leaving person, sure. The social aspect and (for me) the iron-sharpens-iron part are valuable. For some the network connections are very valuable.
But I belive the author was returning to school to get an official qualification after some years of work-experience. (or did I read that wrong?) in that context the ancillaries are less valuable.
Certainly I think a place that tests knowledge for the purpose of recognizing levels achieved already through work experience is a really valuable part of the education chain.
> Certainly I think a place that tests knowledge for the purpose of recognizing levels achieved already through work experience is a really valuable part of the education chain.
I don't disagree with that. I just disagree with the author for discounting the value of both the social status and network connections that traditional, elite universities offer.
> WGU is regionally accredited, not nationally, and it's a non-profit. So it cannot be compared to University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, DeVry, etc.
Just want to point out for those that may not know, 85% of universities in the U.S. are regionally accredited [1]. Regional accreditation, which WGU has, is the most prestigious and widely-recognized [1]. Some folks may mistake that nationally is "better", but, as you'll see from the link below, that simply is not the case.
> Many WGU students HATE these types of articles, because they undermine the legitimacy of WGU.
What is "these types of articles"? How does this one "undermine the legitimacy of WGU"? Even a cursory skim-through of the article would show that the author worked hard and learned all of the material that they then passed exams on at WGU. They don't make it out to be a "degree mill" in any way whatsoever.
It might have to do with the title. "I got a Computer Science degree in 3 months" makes it sound like it isn't serious. As you note, reading the article shows that the author worked hard, learned the material, already had an associates degree in the field, already did a semester in CS at a major university, and took 4 study.com CS/IT courses and 3 Sophia Learning CS/IT.
So the headline makes it sound like "look, here's an easy way to get a piece of paper that says you have a CS degree" when the reality is that they'd already done a lot of the work before enrolling and as AviationAtom notes, WGU works off demonstrating that you have the knowledge.
This isn't "go from zero to CS degree in 3 months". This is "if you already know a lot of your CS stuff, you can work really hard filling in the remaining gaps and showing that you know what you're doing and get a degree in 3 months." Between the associate's degree, a semester at Concordia, and the pre-WGU online courses, they'd probably spent 2-3 years learning.
I think the issue is that the title makes it seem like it's easy. It probably isn't the hardest program, but a decent amount of the author's ease comes from the fact that they had already filled most of the requirements - and just needed to demonstrate their competency. Which seems like it's part of the point according to AviationAtom.
More pointing to the clickbait title they chose. It implies that WGU is a cakewalk, that can be breezed through. Very few people complete their degree there in a very small timeframe. It takes great dedication to complete it rapidly.
That said, those that have ample available time, and are driven, can benefit greatly from the flexibility of the model. You only pay for the amount of credits you enrolled in for the semester, but when you complete those classes you can accelerate your other classes, without paying extra. It must be done with care though, as you could find yourself with all the classes you were versed in already knocked out for the next semester, and only tougher classes left over. I found that out the hard way.
A headline stating that a 4-year degree can be earned in 3-months? That alone is a huge red flag suggesting a degree mill. Lack of national accreditation is red flag #2. I don't mean to say that this is a degree mill, but the nature of the article does raise reasonable suspicions. Alumni are rightly critical of such articles that make their school sound like something it probably is not.
The speed at which you can get a degree can look like a red flag, but you are mistaken about the accreditation. Regional accreditation is actually what you want, not national. Most universities you think of are regionally accredited, whereas the for-profit ones that you can't transfer credit from are nationally accredited. Ie, Stanford = regionally accredited, DeVry = nationally acccredited.
It is not, but I didn't think ABET accreditation was a big thing for CS and was more common in engineering? CMU and Stanford, for example, do not have ABET-accredited CS programs, although MIT does.
CMU and Stanford don't need anyone or any organization to tell the world they do a good job educating CS students. Not so clear if the CS dept is at the Small Town Liberal Arts College and Seminary.
But the other 4,999 schools CS programs, like the one being discussed at WGU, the source of the accreditation is a valuable signal.
Some perspectives still hold that degrees are critical, but unless it's from less than a handful of the top programs in a field, the degree is barely worth the paper it's printed on. Degrees are useful to get into corporate work, but having industry experience, a competent body of work, recognition from your peers, and a demonstrated work ethic can get you into almost any type of job at a competitive rate of pay.
In some cases, degrees can be harmful by elevating incompetent, ignorant, entitled graduates to positions they shouldn't have, particularly in middle management. Getting a degree is not paying your dues or putting in time toward something useful. It can be, but it depends on the individual, so degrees fail as a shibboleth for utility.
Always construction workers feel smarter than architects and civil engineers. Nurses feel smarter than doctors. YouTube watchers feel smarter than PhDs in physics.
And it's possible to acquire the equivalent of a PhD through the vast wealth of information and literal college courses online. Degrees don't mean what they used to.
The dilution of quality caused by profit based perverse incentives, the cultural issues grounded in grievance studies, and the enormous wealth of high quality material and alternatives to formal education have radically changed what academia means to society going forward.
Gatekeeping for profit and not discriminating between the value of a degree in mathematics and a degree in underwater basket weaving, eliminating political, ideological, and epistemic diversity have resulted in a world where degrees increasingly mean you simply paid money to exist in the presence of other folks with paper over a sufficient length of time that all parties involved felt satisfied with the kabuki show.
Accreditation through a legitimate culture of intellectual peers in which institutional academia has earned the respect and dedication of its members approaches the ideal case. Few, if any, American institutions pass muster. They're not without value, and some departments are world class, but they exist in relation to near total institutional failure, and they are infecting the rest of the world.
Academic journals, outdated pedagogy, DIE gatekeeping, woke babysitting and infantilized students are just the most obvious rot.
American academia has a lot of soul searching and hard work to do, or it's going to be displaced by something better that serves the need for legitimate accreditation in society. I personally don't want that to be private corporations, and I'm rooting for the professors and alumni who want to preserve the integrity of their institutions.
If you're referring to Dunning-Kruger, it doesn't work like that. Go read the paper. More educated people feel they know more than less educated people, they just underestimate the degree.
> Many WGU students HATE these types of articles, because they undermine the legitimacy of WGU.
> Their model is competency-based, so you must demonstrate you posses knowledge in any given domain.
The guy took courses at college, online, and worked in the field for over a decade before speedrunning WGU. It seems to me he’s the exact model of “demonstrating competence” that you mention - I don’t see how that makes WGU out to be a degree mill.
This sounds like a surprisingly good idea, something I hope we see more of (but of course I'll remain pessimistic).
What's crazy to me is that it wasn't always the case that you had to go through the formal process of school to achieve credentialing. If you were truly exceptional, and could prove that, you could then get the required credential.
For example it used to be the case that you didn't need to go to law school to take the bar exam. You still don't in a few US states. Law school might make it a million times easier to learn the law and pass, but if you already know it why not go straight to the test?
Another, admittedly extreme, case was Ludwig Wittgenstein getting his PhD from Trinity College. He had already written the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on his own, then basically showed up and presented it as his dissertation, defended it, mocked his friend Bertrand Russel during defense and got the PhD.
What's crazy to me is that if Wittgenstein was alive today he would not be able to achieve this anywhere. There are plenty of people out there who have done ground breaking work in their field, but because of the orthodoxy today, have zero chance of getting a PhD without going through the entire process.
There's such a huge difference between schools saying "you technically don't need us to get the credential, but it's going to be much, much harder to go it your own way" than "it doesn't matter what you do, if you don't sit here and play by our rules you will never be recognized".
This is where it's hard not to get pretty cynical about the state of higher education today.
> Another, admittedly extreme, case was Ludwig Wittgenstein getting his PhD from Trinity College. He had already written the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on his own, then basically showed up and presented it as his dissertation, defended it, mocked his friend Bertrand Russel during defense and got the PhD.
> What's crazy to me is that if Wittgenstein was alive today he would not be able to achieve this anywhere.
Hey, does this exist for video game animation? I was extremely disappointed with an online school I recently went to for video game animation (the classes were way too spread apart and while the modeling sections were interesting, I really just need to work on animation for the models I purchased).
I know this is tangentially related, but this was so demoralizing I kind of gave up on game dev altogether.
that's a big problem in software TBF. The bar is all over which ways and changes dramatically based on the domain. If we can't agree on a bar, there's not much point in the endless arguments that result while pointing to our own interpretations
> Does it really matter if a person that has knowledge got it from sitting in a seat, paying ungodly amounts of tuition, or if they got it from life experience?
well, the real life experience is much more preferable. But the general model of professional industries unfortunately require sitting in a seat for years and getting a piece of paper before resetting 80% of what you learned with imperfect realities.
I'm glad there is an option like this for a developer thrown out of the market without a degree to fast track their way to that piece of paper, but it's a shame that piece of paper is held in such high regards
I guess what do you mean by “recognize”? I’ve reviewed hundreds of resumes, and never dug into the regional vs national accreditation for a degree. You recognize the big names, and otherwise just generally say “seems they have a CS degree”
They do check if you're applying for a certain VISA based on your skills or job. Some companies do also check when they need an "accredited" engineer for some compliance reasons.
Georgia Tech doesn’t make a distinction between the online and on campus degrees. You don’t get an online degree from GA Tech, you just get a degree from GA Tech.
I'd defer to no_wizard's comment, as I'm just not really sure how various overseas institutions go about recognizing/giving equivalency.
I know American institutions can be very picky about what they accept, so they could be similar. Unless the standards are drastically different I feel any institution failing to recognize an education from another seems wrong, but that's a whole different rant.
I think the education system everywhere has much catching up to do with modern society. It used to be that much professional knowledge could really only be obtained in the classroom, now anyone with a desire and access to the Internet can learn much outside a classroom environment.
Kinda seems like my 4 years’ bachelor degree and whatever this ‘uni’ in the article is have radically different standards of what constitutes a degree.
I don't believe so because it is not nationally accredited. If the college are not nationally accredited, then it is highly likely that universities in Europe will not recognize WGU. Unless the institution have a formal agreement (Articulation Agreement) with WGU to transfer.
That said, WGU does not do traditional GPAs, as I recall, which can cause issues with transfers. It's more of a pass/fail. Trying to transfer credits is generally not advised, as I recall, instead you would want to complete your degree with WGU.
That has not been the experience of my peers so far, granted I don't know anyone who went to Harvard intimately enough, but I know quite a few people who went to well regarded masters programs after graduating WGU
About to finish the WGU BSCS program myself and have made a lot of friends in the program along the way. Many, including myself, that choose to go to grad school look at Georgia Techs OMSCS program, which is a very solid/reputable program.
So the key difference you’re describing between this and a degree mill is that you’re expected to already possess the knowledge. And maybe organize it a little bit or fill in the blanks. As opposed to cramming it, or blowing through it too fast for it to amount to anything. This makes sense. I can imagine traditional universities offering this sort of thing everywhere.
I have to ask: what mechanisms are in place to thwart cheating? Specifically, paying for someone to take all those tests in your stead. Though it's possible to cheat at traditional universities in individual courses, it becomes increasingly hard over the duration demanded for attendance even on an accelerated schedule for lots of small reasons that add up.
- A live human proctor watches your screen and webcam the whole time.
- You need to show a 360 degree view of your room, walls, ceiling, table, floor, ears, scratch paper, etc.
- You must use an external webcam elevated on a stand that can see both you and your screen at all times.
- You must show your face and your passport or ID card before each exam.
- You can’t talk, stand up, get out of view, or take a break during the exam.
Although I’m sure some people could find a way to cheat, they make it extremely difficult. I have taken over 30 online proctored exams from WGU, Study.com, Sophia.org, Saylor.org, TOEFL, and Georgia Tech’s OMSCS, and I can confidently say that WGU’s proctoring process was by far the strictest.
>So, former WGU student here, though I hadn't completed my degree.
You also hadn't completed reading the article. The author covers all of your points in a positive way that in no way describes the institution as a "degree mill".
> On my first day, I completed 4 courses in the span of 4 hours. At a traditional school, it would have taken 4 months. It made me realize…I had underestimated how much knowledge I had gained from previous schools, jobs, projects, books, papers, and talks.
This passage underscores how, for this guy and whoever he was selling himself to, a CS degree was just a credential. He did not have much intention of actually learning anything. That’s (I believe) fundamentally different than most people who seek college degrees.
> “Serious” students are largely only found in degree programs that have weeder courses.
I went to a top 20 university, even higher ranked CS program. There were plenty of weeder courses. There were also plenty of students that were only there to get the piece of paper they believed, probably rightly, was necessary to get the job they wanted. All of the CS courses were recorded, attendance never mandatory for lectures. It was not uncommon at all for lectures to be less than half full due to students watching a months worth of lectures right before exams.
I'm not sure this is out of alignment with being a serious student, it's just out of alignment with how the uni wants to teach classes. This is how I did school in 2000, even when classes were not recorded.
This is a problem I have with online classes as well, the material is all done already, why are we running it temporally, instead of DVR style.
You can still weed people out and have a strong "certification" program without requiring real time in person attendance.
I'm a serious viewer of Better Call Saul, but I watched it all right before exam time.
How many programs weed out students anymore? None that I have heard of, and the notion seems unlikely given that most are happy to take their students’ money all the way through graduation.
I would say most of the STEM majors at my university (top 20 US school) pushed students to the absolute brink in the first year, jam packed with advanced math, physics, and chemistry. It was pretty normal to come out of freshman year engineering, CS, or chemistry with a sub-2.75 GPA and the joy of learning completely stomped out of you.
I don't know if it was intentional or just the collective effect of having a bunch of professors with no teaching skills and god complexes who hated engaging with undergrads, happy to assign 40 hours of work per week per class with no regard to the fact that students are in 3 other equally-difficult classes.
Mostly (that I know of) people didn't switch out though, they just took the terrible treatment as it was supposedly normal to have a terrible GPA and terrible time in the STEM majors there. Also there were a lot of international students in the programs - I doubt going to America to study engineering and coming back with a liberal arts degree was an option for them.
Personally, I switched into Industrial Engineering which had notably fewer hard sciences requirements. Still miserable, but less so.
I also managed to find a loophole where each engineering major had its own stats class that was 95% the same content, then vaguely applying it to a problem in that field of study in a final project. So I satisfied my Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, etc. requirements by just taking MechE Stats and ChemE Stats.
They closed that loophole by the time I graduated by having one unified Stats course for all engineering majors.
Some Googling tells me the average final GPA for an engineer there is between 3.3 and 3.4, meaning a lot of people are going to graduate with much lower grades than that. I eventually graduated with a 3.5, but I was below 3 for quite some time. I had two Cs, a fair amount of low As, and a lot of Bs.
What tended to happen was that your GPA increases throughout your time in undergrad because:
* classes are easier later in the major, or they seem easier because you're more directly interested in the content and your classes up to this point have built up the base knowledge, rather than being the freshman year survey of "all the hardest but largely unrelated science classes all at once"
* your study skills improve
This doesn't really excuse how the students are treated in my opinion, both by the professors and generally how the system was set up. Obviously hard things are hard, but there were many, many brilliant students in a very dark place because the school just throws them in the deep end and says "fuck you".
Something like MIT's first semester being pass/fail only could have gone a long way.
Also we were on the quarter system, and engineers needed an absurd 48 classes to graduate, which is a full 4-class schedule every quarter without a single drop or failure in order to graduate on time.
These classes are the same content as full-semester classes at other schools, but crammed into 10 weeks to fit the quarter system.
My school seemed to revel in how hard it was, kids and professors would constantly disparage other top schools saying they were practicing grade inflation. To what degree that is true, who knows. Anytime you go to a top-but-not-Ivy-league school, people are going to talk about oh why our school is actually more legit, etc, whatever. Seemed like half jealousy and half Stockholm syndrome to me.
My department's policy was a 3.2 curve. So half the students in every class got B+ or worse. 2.75 is a B-, most classes had at least 30% at or below there.
I taught university (big state school) about 10 years ago and it was department policy to flunk >= 40% of each calculus class. We curved to accomplish this and every class was told this was the policy on day 1. We got a mix of students at my school and this was to keep the dopes from designing airplanes and such. I personally would have been happier letting engineering do their own dirty work, but that was math's job and I like my plane flights to be uneventful, so yeah.
So when they're checking airplane parts for quality, do they just rank them all and throw out the worst 40%?
At my school, the engineering college was perpetually irritated because the Arts and Sciences college was using one of their required courses as a weed-out class for pre-meds, so there were perfectly good engineers failing prerequisites for no good reason.
> So when they're checking airplane parts for quality, do they just rank them all and throw out the worst 40%?
I have no idea about airplane parts, but I would not call an engineering student "perfectly good" if they couldn't make it through an engineering pre-med weeder. The level of technical ability I expect from an engineer is an order of magnitude greater than a doctor. They should be crushing it.
Decent bit! I can only speak to my somewhat recent experience but the CS program had like a 30% attrition rate for year 1 + 2 b/c each year had a weeder course
Georgia Tech retention rate for first year CS students is 60% IIRC. Now, many of these will go to other majors and not drop out. But these majors are widely known at the school (e.g. riding the management train). While many of these students will go on to graduate, 12.2% of enrolled first year students are not on graduation rosters 4 years later.
This. Our goal was to build a toy OS, from scratch, in x86 assembly, that could multitask execution of DOS COM files. God help you if you didn't already know ASM.
Fortunately we were graded at milestones, and our sins (bugs) were forgiven by replacing our individual buggy implementations with known working implementations that covered the concepts up to that point.
Many state universities are forced by state law to reduce the admittance requirements, especially for in-state students. State taxes are paying part of the university budget and it is politically valuable to keep those universities widely accessible. As a result, the schools are forced to do additional screening in the first year.
I think this is actually a reasonable policy since it allows for someone who has great potential but lacks the maturity to apply themselves in lower grades. They still have an opportunity to turn things around and become substantial contributors.
Your remark about in-state students really matches my experience at the university I went to. I can't think of anyone I personally knew who transferred out other than in-state students.
I was 'weeded' out of pre-med and landed in software. The problem with pre-med was the insane number of hours per semester I was going to have to take while I was also working. I had an interest in computers so tried out the first programming classes and it was relatively easy so the rest is history.
IIRC, for software/programming, any early class heavy with pointers/hardware/math served as a weeding function. So I'm not sure how students won't be pushed out at some point if they can't do the work.
It's been a while since I graduated but for those wanting a high demand major from a dept with limited resources, it seemed normal for one of the 100 level courses to be a step up in difficulty. Pushed out a lot of people from pursuing CS at my school.
Other schools make you apply to the major, and that process just weeds out those the dept thinks are not suited for the program.
There was an article here a month about this (related to an art program IIRC). Basically a number of schools "entry level" courses for certain majors aren't passable by someone with a general high school degree because they only accept students who already learned the groundwork before applying to the program.
I noticed this recently while looking at MIT's computer science program for a data structures class I could recommend to a family member.
Apparently MIT doesn't have an intro to data structures class. The I guess the assumption is that everyone applying to the program got their linked list/searching/sorting knowledge before beginning the program. They have a number of algorithm/datastructures classes but none of them teach the basic concepts. Similarly. I don't think they have an algebra I class (they have one called that, but its not what one learns in HS algebra, has calc/etc as prereqs). That might make sense because the basics of algebra are fairly consistent across HS curriculum and everyone takes it, but comp sci/data structures classes are all over the place, and I can see situations where a subset of students is scrambling to understand pointer linking/etc in the intro to algorithms class they have someone outside of the major taking their into to CS classes.
So, I haven't applied to MIT (lol). But some schools I applied to did ask what major I'd like to do. It could be that MIT doesn't accept applicants who want to do CS who haven't taken some level of CS fundamentals before.
My school wasn't that mean. I think the programming II class was the weed class, and I think the deciding factor was that the projects just took a lot more time than homework you're likely to get in other 100 level courses. I had no CS background but with enough time I got through the homework. Not everyone had the time or the interest.
I can only speak from my experience in Canada, but Engineering programs (I don't know about SWE) here still do so. I lost ~20% of my student peers within the first semester and nearly 30% by the end of the first year.
This was the same for me in Europe, but I’m fairly certain it had nothing to do with difficulty, and everything with people finding out that CS was just not for them.
I don't know about now, but when I was in college some couple of decades ago we were told during orientation that of the roughly 200 or so of us only about 3 would complete the degree. My degree is a BSCpE so not really CS. More like if CS and EE had a bastard child. I would guess they were off by a few, but no more.
1.5%?? That's insane. Either their bar is ridiculously high, or they're letting way too many students even start, with false expectations. Or both, of course.
This is not uncommon in places where getting into university is easy, but getting out (especially of a tough major) is very difficult. The attrition rates are high, and that is known by everyone going in.
I have heard that some European universities are this way.
My compsci program had an almost 50% drop out rate in the first two quarters. The classes were almost designed to destroy people, but if you did survive, you ended up doing pretty well career-wise.
My program does have this, two of the first semester classes have ~50% average (which is the passing grade), not including those who drop out and including 2nd time students.
> "Serious students are largely only found in degree programs that have weeder courses".
I am unconvinced by that logic. Serious students are there to learn from competent teachers- i.e. someone that is proficient in the art of conveying knowledge, not merely possessing knowledge or having successfully brought grant monies to their university. Weed out courses are not for serious students, but are a rite of passage that many times are themselves gamed.
> Serious students are there to learn from competent teachers- i.e. someone that is proficient in the art of conveying knowledge, not merely possessing knowledge or having successfully brought grant monies to their university.
These two are largely diametrically opposed.
- Any professor bringing in significant grant money is at an R1 school.
- R1 schools are famous for bad teaching by the tenured faculty, largely because quality teaching doesn’t gain them much.
- Quality teaching can be found, often in abundance, at small colleges. Some of these colleges do not have weeder courses. There are some serious students at these colleges. These are the rare exceptions, imho.
There's weeder courses and then there's weeder courses.
Some courses are just hard because the concepts are hard. If you're not down to clown, you're not going to make it past it.
Some courses are deliberate obstacles. The degree program at the university I attended had a single course that essentially pivoted you from the 200 level courses to the 300 level courses. It was always full due to it being a requirement and having a high failure rate necessitating people to retake it multiple times.
I never got a chance to take it because I ran out of lower level courses and electives to take to maintain full time status. Without full time status, I couldn't maintain my financial aid. Without my financial aid, I couldn't afford college.
A couple of years later, the program was restructured and the "pivot" was removed. As was other bullshit one was forced to take. If I had started the program a year later, I could have actually completed it. Or if I could have just taken the class. I never struggled with the material.
I don't necessarily disagree, but something I didn't consider until later when exposed more to the "sausage making" of academia was the extent to which the course creators are just incompetent at creating material "on level" for those students. Many just assume the material must be hard, when in fact it (often times) moves too fast as well. Also inability to teach complex concepts simply is another huge impediment. This was one of Einstein's pet peeves, and is one of mine as well. Teachers and students alike seem to want to cram/jam as much material into each course as possible, but I think it ultimately does a grave disservice.
>He did not have much intention of actually learning anything.
I strongly disagree, you are missing the point of competency based education.
It's important to understand that an undergraduate CS degree needs to be accessible even to people without much IT experience. Some people come in with no experience with computers at all.
Look at the names of the first four courses:
C182: Introduction to IT
C172: Network and Security - Foundations
C779: Web Development Foundations
C173: Scripting and Programming - Foundations
Most people on Hacker News would be bored out of their minds taking these courses. Do you know what a computer is? Do you know the difference between HTML and Javascript? Can you write basic scripts using Bash or Python? That's what foundational courses are for.
If you are already beyond this level- which the author clearly was- you can just test out of them. Pass an exam to prove that you already know this stuff, so then you can move on to more advanced material that's more appropriate for you.
> That’s (I believe) fundamentally different than most people who seek college degrees.
My experience talking with people suggests otherwise. When I became an adult and got a few years into my career, it was surprising to me how few people had anything interesting to say about their line of work even to the point of actual disinterest. Yeah, I know that a lot of people don't like to talk about work, but I'm saying that many people not only avoid the topic of their career but will even tell you they don't really care about or like what they do. I've had so many girls I went on dates with who were completely disengaged with their careers and even admitted they got a degree just to make money. I'm talking girls who were chemical engineers, biologists and so forth. Some genuinely liked what they do, but I think ~70% didn't give a f---.
I'm not blaming people in any way, but I think the reality is that not everyone, or even most, are doing what they do as part of a greater calling. They're just humans trying to get by and maybe have a family. The appreciating value of intellectual work along with the idea that everyone should be well-rounded contributes to this impression that people are doing things like getting degrees for reasons that aren't merely utilitarian, but most of the time I think that's not the case.
Part of this might be the context of a date: I spend long hours outside work learning and building things just because I find my profession interesting, but when most people ask about it I change the subject quickly because I know exactly how boring my interests are to most people: I assume they're asking to be polite and don't want an in-depth discourse on CPU design.
> so many girls I went on dates with who were completely disengaged with their careers
Any reason not to think that there was a selection bias for the sample of women who choose to go on a date via the platform you used, or choose to try a date with you?
Right, most people are there for the parties and get degrees in underwater basket weaving. But the hard sciences and engineering are usually for the credentials.
This is also how the programs are designed - if you fail the course there's no hand holding, you have to do it again or give up the degree. And the support that large universities give for their introductory courses is minimal, so generally your resources consist of the textbook and your lecture notes. The lectures online are just as good if you actually want to learn the material.
Off topic, but where did the "underwater basketweaving" meme (in the traditional sense) come from? My dad used to say that all the time in reference to what he considered frivolous academic pursuits.
The term came about in the 50s and is mainly used to highlight problems with the exploitative nature of the NCAA. Basically, athletes aren't being told to, or put in environment where they can, balance education and sports. Sports and selling the colleges brand take priority and colleges were known to make it easier for athletes to get through or with passing grades. Sometimes making up entire coursework for their athletes to take. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/16/breaking-ncaa... That obviously undermines and frustrates anyone who had a hard time in college.
My dad, who was a college athlete, used that term a lot to express frustration at systems which no longer served their purpose and were acting performatively.
When you weave baskets you have to keep the reeds wet. It’s the hardest part other than the design itself I guess. Doing it under water would be easy. (From personal experience, no idea if this is actually correct)
> Right, most people are there for the parties and get degrees in underwater basket weaving. But the hard sciences and engineering are usually for the credentials.
Did you intend to include a "not" as in "not for the credentials"? I would think you do a tough EE or Physics (or Classics) because you want to learn the stuff.
That seemed to be the case when I was at MIT, though that was a generation ago. Everybody seemed into their work, despite claiming to be upset by the course load. Complaining about it (IHTFP) seemed to be more of a ritual or social activity rather than earnest protest.
No, I meant "for". If you just want to learn the material, you can learn it about as effectively for free with self-study and online MOOCs. It's the credentials that cost money, and the economic assumption is that the credentials are why people attend universities. Did you go to MIT because you wanted a high course load or because you wanted a prestigious degree?
Thanks for your answer — I really thought it likely a typo.
Seems like a colossal waste of time and resources to pay for a school and not enjoy it much less learn anything. A modern bonfire of the vanities.
I still learn a lot by reading, but many things do require interaction and guidance.
> Did you go to MIT because you wanted a high course load or because you wanted a prestigious degree?
I lost my diploma within a couple of hours of receiving it and nobody has ever asked me for it. I went there to learn things I thought I wouldn’t be able to learn anywhere else. At the time (early 80s) my high school classmates didn’t even consider it a prestigious school — those were the ivy leagues.
I mean, nobody has ever asked for my paper diploma either (I lost it as well, the day after it was given) and I've never heard of anyone asking, but that doesn't mean the degree is useless. I certainly have "BA from such-and-such, MSc from such-and-such" on my resume. Evidence, if anyone cared, is only a phonecall away.
There's probably a pretty big correlation between expense and how interested you are in actually learning. A super-famous super-expensive MIT is obviously going to have a different student population than a cheaper and less prestigious institution.
Most of the less prestigious 4 year institutions aren't functionally cheaper than MIT though, i.e. once you account for financial aid. The average tuition paid at MIT (and other "elite" schools) is lower than it is at the majority of private schools and even out of state public schools.
> That’s (I believe) fundamentally different than most people who seek college degrees.
Actually I'd bet it's fundamentally the same reason most people get a degree. Especially lately, it has become in the US nearly the default post highschool choice, mostly due to implicit social pressure and America's unique lack of technical training schools like in e.g. Switzerland
> This passage underscores how, for this guy and whoever he was selling himself to, a CS degree was just a credential. He did not have much intention of actually learning anything.
That directly contradicts what the author said about his intentions and experience:
>> While I had some PAs returned for improvements, I made sure to never fail an OA – even if retakes (up to 3-4) were allowed. It wasn’t a race, and my goal wasn’t to brute force my way into a degree. I came for the piece of paper, sure, but I also used it as an opportunity to assess and fill gaps in my knowledge. As a result, I never came close to failing an exam.
And there's nothing wrong with that. There's something fundamentally ritualistic about asserting that people who already have the knowledge required for a credential are somehow debasing the credentialing system by testing out of it.
I'd say that some people are looking for the "college experience." That's unrelated to education other than by proximity to it.
As someone who has spent almost 20 years in software professionally, yeah. I'm considering doing the same thing because there are still plenty of people and employers out there that advantage people who have the paper. I highly doubt that there is anything in the course of study for a bachelors that will truly be new to me (especially since I already completed most of that study once). But if I did want to actually learn something, say by pursuing education at the graduate level, I have to get that credential rubber-stamping my existing knowledge.
>But if I did want to actually learn something, say by pursuing education at the graduate level, I have to get that credential rubber-stamping my existing knowledge.
Most universities will let you audit a course, even graduate courses (if you can convince the professor you have experience in the area) just by paying a fee for that one class. You don't need a credential to do this.
I also didn't go to college but did a pretty solid set of online CS and math classes while working as a software developer. I'd love to get a masters degree, and it would benefit my career quite a lot.
Auditing classes is fine¹ but probably not enough value for me on its own to be worth the time and opportunity cost. I'd want the degree and I'm fairly sure I have the skills and knowledge to begin a CS masters. But I can't get one without doing a BS first, which makes it overall just not worth the effort.
¹ Actually is it? I hear this recommended a lot but I don't know anyone who has audited a university course while not being a student. I tried it once at my local state school but it was an amazingly complex process to get signed up, and then I was told I could have a slot if there was ever an open one. There never was.
1: don't go through the administration, that will be a hassle. Just ask the professor if you can sit in on the class, and if they say you can (which they probably will if there are empty seats), do so.
I think the distinction here is more that this person was already a working professional. And seems to have had the appropriate knowledge to pass most of the classes already.
I got my Masters in a field I had already been working in for years, and the majority of the classes I took taught me nothing new since I already knew the subjects. A few taught me some things about subjects I was not familiar with and took some extra effort but overall the classes weren't that useful. But it was still important for me to get that credential on my resume.
It's not just him. At least at the time I was doing it, it was a lot of people in the program. Maybe even half.
At the time, it annoyed me to no end. Not so much anymore. Programming is a well-paid profession with relatively few barriers to entry. The degree is (usually) one of them. Treating it as just another thing you need to get past in order to get to a good career is fine. Good even. Probably saner than my younger self's "I love this and it will consume my entire life for at least a decade" approach to the subject.
The older me kind of wants to have more people like this on my team. There's a certain ruthless logic and economy of effort here that really earns my respect. It might help counterbalance the tendency to get carried away and over-engineer things that many of us "CS is my life's calling" people tend to exhibit.
Traditionally a degree certifies a certain level of knowledge. Is there a reason to insist on classroom learning to get that degree?
All across Europe you could generally get somewhere from 10-40% of your credits through "recognition of prior learning", although few students actually take these offers as they either don't know about them or are shy about the admin.
Most European education also is very affordable, e.g. Germany with generally less than 1000€/year for (excellent but crowded) public universities, and many side benefits such as free public transport.
A credential demonstrates that you have some knowledge or skill. If they already have the knowledge or skill, what would they learn from the degree regardless of what you assume his intention is.
At the point that the person already has years of work experience and demonstrable skill in the field, some would say the degree is arguably more "personal feel good" and/or vain attempt to avoid being discriminated against by "snobs". I say "vain attempt", because if you don't check the right boxes, the person is likely to get snubbed anyway.
If you talk to many recruiters, depending on the field, the older person's work, supervisorial/managerial experience, and any references can be much more of the deciding factor. Don't get me wrong, degrees and certifications are very nice decorations, but there is no getting around who you know and doing well on the interview.
That a working adult who has already established themselves professionally gets the degree in their later years, can be more about personal pride and dedication to their field, to make sure there isn't any gaps in their knowledge. And perhaps that's where the emphasis should be, showing personal growth and development. Someone taking the time to become better at what they do.
>I saw many opportunities, especially abroad, that were out of reach because I didn’t have the required papers. I felt ready for graduate school but couldn’t get admitted. I had to work harder to prove myself to employers.
Seems like we've come full circle. A credential from an institution was a good indicator of the caliber of the individual. Now, with Study.com and the roll-your-own degree programs, it's hard to know. That once-good indicator tells very little now.
I went to NYU Gallatin for a bit and really wondered what in the world anyone seeing that on a cv would think.
But regarding Study.com, I think that their classes for CS are painful and horrible, but probably the same quality as countless physical schools out there.
I'm 20 years into my career and know how to program competently. I have missed out on job opportunities because I don't have any credentials other than experience. I'm the type of person who would test out of everything immediately because I already know it. Guessing it's similar for this fellow.
I’d love to see something similar for a PhD. If one could publish three good papers, teach some courses and write/defend a thesis — what’s the minimum time requirement for completion?
For world record, a few geniuses finished them in a year.
Fastest for someone I know personally: three years from one of the top universities in the US. This is realistic. Can't say they got much out of the program, though. All-in-all, it seemed like a waste of time.
I spent a __long__ time in graduate school, taking interesting courses, travelling the world, and just on learning and intellectual exploration. If you want that, get a Ph.D. Just realize your advisor is just that -- an advisor, and not your boss. You don't need to do what they tell you to do. If you want a slip of paper, consider why you want it, and if you wouldn't be better served by an MBA, MS, or something else. A Ph.D is not all that important, career-wise.
Rushing a BS makes complete sense to me. A Ph.D? Not so much.
> Rushing a BS makes complete sense to me. A Ph.D? Not so much.
Hmm, opposite feelings. I needed time in the bachelor to figure out what I wanted. For many scientific professionals, they might be publishing papers and could potentially even write a thesis on the side. This would enable them to get the degree and teach, should they want to.
Figuring out what one wants makes a lot of sense, but I haven't seen an undergrad college education as a good context to do that. Most kids I know who did that came out with a squishy education, without real depth or substance. At the same time, an undergrad class looks nothing like real life.
Working in different contexts -- jobs, internships, volunteering, etc. -- has tended to work a lot better for that -- especially when the job is structured as a learning experience and not a profit-maximizing one. For me, travel was magical for figuring out who I wanted to be, but I wasn't doing tourism.
You have a lot more freedom to explore as a Ph.D than an undergrad too:
- No timeline
- You're not paying $40k per year, but getting a stipend
This is great to know about though. Would be interesting to complete such a program for somebody with the knowledge coming out of high school. Makes you wonder how it would affect admission criteria at other 4 year colleges if you can show an entire CS degree on your application.
> Makes you wonder how it would affect admission criteria at other 4 year colleges if you can show an entire CS degree on your application. I wonder how that gets weighted?
At competitive schools, most likely negatively. Just apply to the graduate program. Getting a WGU degree is not some sign of academic prowess that would rate one highly at an elite university — maybe the equivalent of perfect GPA in a college-bound HS curriculum. Being a big fish in a small pond is not exceptional.
At large state schools, they would just treat it like a CC and let you transfer in a certain number or credits (mostly non-major).
At most other schools, they won’t care as long as you pay them.
This concrete university was built for exactly that purpose like another poster outlined. It was built for the purpose to get credits and certificates for knowledge you have, not necessarily to acquire them.
I disagree. University is primarily about getting a degree to put on your resume. I can't think of anyone I've ever met who cared about what they actually learned in school, only that they got a piece of paper at the end.
I'm currently working as a web developer, partly so I can afford to go back to university! I didn't have the discipline/maturity to pass the first time, and now I don't qualify for student loans anymore. I'm genuinely interested in the material, and want to get a solid footing in every major part of the field.
I just really like computer science, and if I didn't have to work for money, I'd probably spend a substantial portion of my energy learning and playing around with it.
(You're probably right about the average person though: most of my ex-classmates don't care much for computer science, they just wanted well paying jobs—or else didn't know what else to do and went, "Well, I guess I'm good at computers, so...")
I'm not very good at formal education though, so my approach is basically to learn everything before I go back to university, via https://teachyourselfcs.com/
Though at that point I question the value of the actual university, especially as the ones I've been to do not really teach the things I'm interested in, let alone in the way that suits me... heck, even MIT (my benchmark for "a good university") dropped SICP! So I might just get one of those online degrees instead.
If teaching yourself everything before going to university seems odd, consider that university expects you to self-teach anyway -- the university just provides the external motivation (you paid a lot of money and people will judge you if you fail), along with its own complications (poorly designed/scheduled courses, depressingly unmotivated classmates/project partners, sleep-inducing (and sometimes) mandatory lectures).
IMO, that's generally correct but not universally correct. The vast majority of programmers are gluing together pre-built libraries, frameworks, tools and so forth and so really don't need much of a degree. However, the people who are creating those libraries, frameworks, tools, compilers, operating systems need, not necessarily a degree (e.g. John Carmack), but mastery of the knowledge provided by a degree to build those things. That's not to suggest one group is "better" than the other or some other value judgement; it's just an observation of trends.
Much like any other tool or instrument, a degree is invaluable if you have something in mind to use it for. If not, sure, it's just 4 years of trivia but it's pretty clear that's not the fault of the degree.
In my university, I learned about voltage timing in mosfets using oscilliscopes and programmed ASICS. Really cool stuff! I also took acting and foreign language classes, and even joined a sailing club.
It saddens me when people don't value a well-rounded education. I find curiosity and learning to be a fantastic thing for all of life.
You can take an acting class or a foreign language class without being enrolled in a research institution.
Product tying is often portrayed as immoral, it is even illegal in many places. Why we force a major part of our society to go through a practice that is similar in many ways but is far more expensive is beyond my understanding.
None of what you learned needs to be coupled with a university as it now exists to learn. And in fact, all of those have been and are possible outside of the university.
My statement was not regarding exclusivity to university, but a rebuttal to the parent comment (re: who cares about what they learned other than the piece of paper?).
I doubt very many people would be willing to pay out the nose for the education if it didn't come with that piece of paper at the end. Sure, we may value some things along the way, but what matters is the piece of paper.
When you look at it to get a scientific education you are right. When you try to grow as a human in humanitarian way, then university social life is also important (maybe not the over-the-edge US college way but for the rest of the world that is definitely a thing). You grow in that time also as a person. When you just earn money and be part of a company you will not grow your social behavior or other skills. That is also the reason why CS degrees have often random other areas included as soft skills like literature etc.
> University is primarily about getting a degree to put on your resume.
If this were true, college giving programs wouldn't get funded. Here's how college giving works:
1. call up an alum
2. remind them what a great time they had during college
3. ask them if they would like a future student to have that kind of experience
4. take down the credit card number for a donation, because that's all it takes to get the wallets to open.
If college were really a credential mill, reminding people of their time in college wouldn't inspire them to open their wallets to give us money for nothing in return.
> An audit by the Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, released on September 21, 2017, "concluded that Western Governors University did not comply with the institutional eligibility requirement that limits the percentage of regular students who may enroll in correspondence courses" and that "at least 69 of the 102 courses were not designed to offer regular and substantive interaction with an instructor and, therefore, did not meet the regulatory definition of distance education."
They later kept their federal loan eligibility but it sounds like it might have been a case where they skated by due to a lack of clear guidance.
Lack of clear guidance is right. The existing outdated laws or regulations just didn’t make sense for their business model or for the Internet age. WGU is regionally accredited in all regions. Not to say it’s good-quality education; it’s not. But frankly most colleges aren’t and I think it meets the same (low) bar that most colleges do—and does better for job-readiness and cost. I have most of a degree from it. I’m still not sure I’d recommend it to others though. I’m not even 100% sure I’ll finish!—but I’m leaning toward finishing to make it easier to get into OMSCS or similar. It’s not what got me my job and career. But if you don’t already have a degree (I did, psychology) it’s probably worth it if you think checking the box can help your career or even just help you hunt for your first paid job.
It’s fine education if you make it so. My direct experience is that I can attain the same knowledge (and then some) as I would at a traditional university I had to seek it actively however.
I think outside of the most elite schools this holds true no matter what. Most people just go through the course motions and that’s that, even engineering students
I was in disbelief when I found out that some people are in a dilemma about getting a CS degree or not, when they already have some other degree. And here I am with no degree in anything, working as a SWE. I've gone back and forth about it - mostly I don't care about the fake degree from WGU and similar schools and then to get a degree where I'd actually learn something new (MIT maybe?) it would be a huge time sync, cost and I'm not sure I'd even be accepted.
I can tell you from experience that every company, from Meta to Apple to hell, even 90% of startups, will just accept the CS degree as is. I'd say to working professionals (those with a couple years experience in the industry now) its a bigger win because it matters astronomically less where you got your degree than when you are first starting out as an engineer. It keeps the gatekeepers away and checks all the recruitment boxes across the board.
Its also a good gateway to get a useful Masters degree, like the two year Computer Science and Engineering degree from Georgia Tech, which if I recall correctly is very cost effective and highly regarded
As far as working in the US, I can understand that. And as for a Master's, I'm not sure I'd ever want that. The Georgia Tech OMCS for example has a good name but I doubt I couldn't learn the same material for free.
Will I get left behind in the industry among a sea of Master's and Phds?
Some places, like Google, and to a lesser extent, Apple, Microsoft, and a few others, still really require you have to a degree (bachelors or otherwise), at least when hiring from the outside.
Other places, like Meta, often default to experience or degree, but not per se requiring both. There are of course exceptions at all of these places, however it seems to hold true in aggregate.
It won't hurt you, thats for sure, and if (when?) the job market tightens, those with degrees often get preferred to those without. That was my experience in the last down turn anyway
Which downturn do you mean? And that's certainly worth considering. Can you explain more what happened then from your experience that gave you that perspective?
Though I wouldn't say it's true it won't hurt me - the debt is certainly harmful.
Well, I've lived through both the housing recessions of the mid 2000's, a regional downturn in the mid 2010s (ended up moving to California!) and the pandemic "boom" that a lot of tech companies have seen wasn't true for every company in the sector, so I lived through most recently a COVID-19 related downturn in 2020.
In my experience doors closed on me because I didn't hit that "checkmark". In fact I remember interviewing at a company (who's name I don't 100% remember, I interviewed a lot in the 2010s and I don't want to call out a company by mistake) and they somehow missed that I didn't have my degree yet and halted the entire interview process after the 2nd round because HR couldn't justify deviating from their norms. I also was told by many recruiters at that time that it was the only barrier to me getting into their hiring pipelines. I eventually caught a break and wound up at Apple, but its because I didn't get hired through traditional means (right place, right time).
This has changed as the labor pool tightened, and by 2020 I wasn't in the same position anymore regardless, but those first two situations have always stuck in my mind about how hard it is to get hired when automated systems gate keep things. I since learned alot about how to work around them (without directly hurting your prospects) and through experience know alot more about networking (though I'm no expert), so I'm a little better insulated, but it was much harder for me than it was for my peers who all got their CS degrees early in their careers comparatively.
Ironically, through pure grit, luck (can't underestimate luck to be honest) and my own drive I've ended up being very successful, but it took alot more work than it would have otherwise, I think. I believe truly I would have reached this point earlier in my career (I'm a Staff Engineer now at a mid sized startup in Silicon Valley) and been better off for it.
Well it's not fake, but I don't have confidence that I'd learn anything from it. If I am going to perform a box checking exercise, I'd rather learn something. And you're right, I have indeed listened to MIT lectures, but that doesn't give me a degree.
ok, so then one should'nt have used the word 'fake' - and if one does'nt know the material, there will obviously be something to learn from.
An argument can be made that MIT's material is qualitatively better, but still, the smarter choice might be to get the credentialling from WGU and the materials from MIT at a lower overall cost.
and I am pretty sure there needs to be a lot of self-motivation to get this done, which in itself should be a good signal to future employers. Not all jobs need cutting CS research.
I just put in a couple hours of studying @ WGU for Discrete Math II last night, and I'm happy that the school exists.
I spent months trying to get my brick-and-mortar to allow me to complete my B.S. remotely; I had dropped out after junior year for startup reasons.
Long story short, the idea that an adult working full time might want to complete their degree without dropping $65k wasn't acceptable (of course COVID forced the university remote.)
Then my partner began a WGU Master's program and told me about it.
Although I wasn't able to transfer in most of my courses (older than 5 years), I was able to transfer a chunk of gen-eds. Now I'm slowly but surely working through the degree, diving much deeper into math topics than I ever did before.
I have the time to actually understand things instead of passing by the skin of my teeth. I also have the choice to skip a topic entirely if I know its contents.
It can be a slog, and there are times where it appears a gargantuan task. But I'm learning, and the challenge of doing it while working full time gives me great confidence.
Make sure you match with an excellent mentor to cheer you on while holding you accountable.
Now, some things to consider:
* I value the friends and shared experience I made @ brick-and-mortar university. This doesn't replicate that at all.
* Prices, although relatively low, have risen.
* Self-motivation is critical.
* No detailed feedback on projects.
I appreciate it for what it is: a self-motivated, self-paced escape hatch for those who want to earn a degree, where your experience is valued, and your bank account is respected.
OP is a class act. I reached out to him the first time he posted this and he was really helpful with answering my questions. I applied then and am now one class away from finishing my Masters in Cybersecurity. I have 20 years experience in the field and am in a stable, well paying position that I don't plan to leave. This was a vanity degree for me but I also wanted to learn something in the process. So I took my time an emersed myself in the course material even though I could have probably tested out of most courses within a few days. Like any school, WGU will allow you to get what you want out of it. You want a checkmark? WGU will allow you to can get that cheaper than anywhere else. You want to really learn and get credit for it? Then take your time and you wont be disappointed. Are you done learning after your degree? Nope, but as a lifelong learner my experience at WGU was great and am glad I went for it.
When I was in undergrad (20ish years ago) it was absolutely possible for a motivated student to graduate at a highly accelerated rate. I know someone who had approximately 5 semesters worth of classes done at the end of his freshman year, having taken about 40 credits worth of classes each semester (12 credits was considered "full time" and you needed to average slightly more than that per semester to graduate in 4 years in most degrees).
He was able to do this because:
1. Only foreign language classes and lab sciences had class-participation requirements
2. All classes published a syllabus so where possible he could start the major projects early
3. Most of the lower-division classes were a joke to a smart and motivated person anyways.
4. He convinced an academic advisor to sign off on it (this was arguably the hardest part).
At a lot of schools, you can take CLEP tests to get out of (especially) 100 and 200 level courses. Take the test, pay a (somewhat lower) rate for the credit without taking the actual class, and it's done.
If you're capable of completing 5 semesters worth in 2 semesters, you're probably capable of passing several of those tests with only a little studying over a Summer.
At this Univiersity, at this time, you could not take CLEP tests for credit in any classes that were in the same school as your major. So e.g. a Physics major (school of science) could not get credit for the e.g. Math and Chemistry (also school of science) requirements without signing up for the actual course.
There were other classes without any official CLEP, so the process was to convince a board of professors to orally examine you on a day that they'd rather be with their family on vacation or doing research.
Most colleges are a "scam". When doing my degree I tested out of the maximum number of classes which, in my opinion, is infuriating and a perfect example of how dishonest the industry is. If you know the material you should get the degree.
That, in my opinion, is how a merit based education should work. Instead, our system asks: Do you have the support system to and finances to enable you to spend 4 years without earning an income to complete a degree program?
Impressive! How many credits did a "normal" class (like linear algebra or calculus I) have? Or how many classes did he have to take to get 40 credits in one semester?
The exam taking phase must have been hell :P
The best I once did was only 48 credits (with the baseline for full-time study being 30 per semester, "normal" class giving 6 credits, european university so only a 3 year bachelors degree) and I was very tired after that semester :D
I just graduated from WGU 2 days ago, after almost 20 years in the industry. I didn't rush through it was quickly - I finished in just under a year. I studied finance my first time around in college and have tried to do a CS degree a few times since, but juggling a full-time job and now a family makes that tough. The flexibility the WGU program offered was honestly more important than the raw speed at which I could go through it.
Some of it was stuff I knew really well and only spent an hour or two on, some of it was filler (I now have ITIL v4 and Project+ certifications that were annoying to get and mostly useless?), and some of it was new and interesting (Discrete Math, Computer Architecture, etc..). Overall, it didn't feel like markedly different curriculum from the in-person courses I took at other schools.
Aside from a few terrible classes (the AI course is just a horrendous waste of time), most of them were decent and I felt like I learned something from them. The overall curriculum is a little odd and probably not ideal for someone who has little programming experience. For example, the very first "scripting and programming" course uses C++ to build a simple command-line application, but then you never do anything with C++ again. What is the point of that? I understand how C++ can be useful in a learning context, but I don't think a brief introduction to it really does any good. Two of the biggest courses are big JavaFX projects, which ughh.. fine, but I think there are probably more useful things to teach.
I understand that a CS degree is more about theory than getting job-related skills, but a few of the decisions made serve neither very well. So if I had one knock on the program, it is that someone who comes in with little programming experience is probably going to come out of it without having written much code that resembles what they'd be doing in a job.
Overall, it was a really good experience and it feels good to finally finish up after all these years. I am currently applying for the Georgia Tech OMSCS program, which is a common route for WGU graduates. That one is fairly rigorous and cannot be sped through, so looking at several more years for that, but at the end of it all, a BS + MS in Computer Science in around 5 years and under $20k total seems like a decent result?
That's a good question, given that it hasn't been a huge deal so far in my career. Two things:
First, I realized I wanted to dig deeper into CS topics. I love this field more every year I am in it and wanted to round out my knowledge in some areas. Getting a master's degree and the courses that are part of that seemed like a good way to accomplish that - I've taught myself a lot over the years, but that route leaves some areas untouched. You don't always know what you don't know, plus having deadlines, goals, etc helps keep me on task even when something feels like it isn't immediately relevant. So, getting a BS was the first step in that goal.
Second, as I progress more through my career, there are some interesting positions that require, or at least favor, some kind of degree. I feel like having one or both gives me more options and flexibility.
What I would like to have is a topic approach one. It should be fully online with facilities for student communication such as Discord and online assignment/project submission.
One example: let's say I want to learn OS. The course chain will look like this: Programming class, Comp arch using C and assembly, Data structure, and then straight into OS.
In modern universities you can apply as independent students but the process is often a bit tedious. Also you have to go through a lot of red tapes just to remove some pre-requisite, e.g. as a Math student I don't need Discrete math, and as a Data Engineer I don't need the basic programming class at least, but in reality it's really difficult to get these done easily, if at all.
Of course I can just go to say Berkeley and download their course materials and learn for free. I figured I'm not smart/persistent enough to go through it on my own, so paying some $$ to get a proper learning platform is a better option. Really wish universities such as MIT or Berkeley has such options but I know it's too much for them. Once they open the gate there will be too large a demand to handle.
I went to WGU for my BSIT. I didn't learn much there, but the degree and certifications helped my job prospects. Spent about $10,000 going for 3 semesters (already had my AS from a community college), walked out with 13 certifications and a boost in pay from being headhunted within weeks.
I've had another job since then and am earning more still. I would say at least for IT degrees WGU is worth it. It gives you the sheet of paper HR needs to let you in through the door for cheap, plus a bunch of certs that helps your resume stand out. Not a bad deal if you have any autodidactive capability.
WGU BS / MS Graduate here: I attended 3 other "traditional, B&M" Uni's in years past (~60 credits). I also attended a couple Community Colleges (16 credits).
I created a career in IT by getting a job (2000) and working full time over the years. I got certifications on my own that I transferred in for credit with WGU.
I have now been teaching full time in an IT program at a community college for 2 years and have also developed and manage 2 different MS level online classes for a traditional B&M university you have definitely heard of.
I can tell you, unequivocally, that what I had to do to complete my degrees with WGU was more rigorous than what I am requiring my students to do now (not my choice ... chain of command). The grading was harder at WGU than what I am permitted to do now with my students in the CC and B&M MS classes. I have now been on each side of the "WGU is not legit" argument. Anyone who thinks this is very wrong. No, it's not Stanford or MIT, it's not supposed to be ... though I'm sure grade inflation and special treatment happens at those places. There is no special treatment or grade inflation at WGU. You take a cert exam, take a test, or submit a paper to an unknown grader. You either pass or you don't. Simple as that. If you know your stuff, move on. If you don't ... learn it to move forward. It's meritocracy at its best. That is NOT the traditional University way.
I would included the OP in this ... he states in the end of his blog post that "The program is not the most rigorous." How does he know this having not attended other university recently? How does he know this not having developed or taught classes at other universities or colleges. He's right about the clear value that can be attained from combining knowledge, experience and work ethic to a WGU degree. He's wrong about the rigor.
IMO: WGU is not the place to LEARN, it's the place you PROVE WHAT YOU KNOW.
This article was interesting to me because it helped me learn about WGU. I dropped out of college just one semester prior to graduating (and had a 3.7gpa at the time). I've had nearly two decades of experience in industry, and it'd be great to be able to get a degree at this point in my life just to get the credential to match my work experience. WGU seems like a really reasonable program for someone in my situation, compared to taking time off from work to go back to school or hoping I get famous enough someday to get an honorary degree.
I thought about going to WGU instead of a community college/transferring to a private/state school to earn my bachelors, but after starting to apply to WGU it literally seemed like a diploma mil to me. There would be WGU recruiters constantly calling me etc. and overall didn't seem legit to me. So, I decided to go to school for 4-6 years instead.
I wonder if places like RenTech would hire someone with a degree from rentech. I think that the DoD hires folks with degrees from UoP, so I'm not surprised they would. I saw a few folks on Linkedin work at Amazon with degrees from WGU and on their website they list that a few students got accepted to grad programs to Harvard etc. [1].
https://www.uopeople.edu/ WGU reminds me of the uopeople which is in the process of earning regional accreditation.
It really isn't, they hold regional accreditation which, while debatable in total, is much harder to get than national accreditation, because the audit is considered to be much more strict.
What WGU is though, is mostly self guided learning, you don't have a traditional professor, you have advisors and pooled resources and group study to drive learning and for asking questions. It does work, if you're a very motivated person and learn well without professor / teacher guidance like you would get at a traditional state school.
Is it perfect? No, its definitely not, but its not a diploma mill, and I'd argue its of higher quality than University Of Phoenix and the like.
It's not even structured as a for-profit enterprise.
WGU filled the gap as a working professional. They're extremely affordable too. Would I advise someone who say, is just graduating high school and can get into a state school or good college with scholarships to pivot over to WGU? No, I wouldn't, but they wouldn't benefit from WGU the same way either at that stage of life IMO.
> I think that the DoD hires folks with degrees from UoP
Most federal government jobs that require a degree only require one from an accredited university.
The quality of the degree is not relevant for any but the most sought after positions (e.g., certain state department jobs, federal judge clerkships, etc.).
I think some military folks and some GS folks who want to move up to higher jobs but are prevented by the degree requirement often go to places like WGU. Same holds for masters and doctorate degrees.
I’m a student of WGU, and tried UoP, not the same whatsoever. UoP was garbage. Flagged me for fraud on my first test.
WGU is what it says it is. Online school with no breaks designed for low friction at the cost of interaction.
I am familiar with UoP too, but I got the impression UoP was that it was very much amateur in it's operation. A bunch of idealistic people trying to make education have zero cost barrier to entry. It's simply not feasible to run a college like that at this time. WGU and UoP can not rightfully be put in the same basket.
I have a background in academia and extensive experience interviewing for FAANG, particularly at the entry level. For me this article highlights the futility of current higher education institutions.
From our experience a degree is a mild indicator of performance when hiring at entry levels. We get some great candidates with no degree, and many poor candidates with degrees. Above entry level, the correlation pretty much disappear. I'm really curios what kind of difficulties OP was facing for not having a title.
I don't think we have completely removed a title from our job posting requirements, but it usually uses one of those silly conversions (CS degree or x years of experience).
That makes me wonder, what value would Universities provide if a degree wasn't a signifier anymore? what if all tech companies hired purely based on interview performance and ignored titles even for filtering? I imagine a future where all the knowledge and material is open and free on the internet, and University staff acts more as coaches and mentors, helping people who needs it in a 1-1 fashion. One can dream.
Well, where interview requirements reflect actually doing the job, I'd guess the correlation would be significantly higher, no? If interview requirements don't correlate with job performance, I'd conclude the interview process is flawed. After all, the whole point of an interview is to assess performance capability, if it isn't doing that then you need a new process.
I share the dream, but I season it with a splash of optimism.
The internet is a revolution in information availability and communications capability. People can, right now, learn anything they want, anything at all, for free, all they need is interest, dedication and to prioritize setting aside time for it. The business world still largely operates on the old paradigm though: signaling capability through credentials. But as companies find time and time again that the two don't always (or even usually) correlate, they're creating interesting interview processes to assess capabilities. The credential is largely a legacy requirement in environments like this.
The pace of this change is accelerating. I think over the coming decades you're going to see less importance placed on credentials in technical fields, and people will begin to just learn what they're interested in, what can get them ahead in life, on their own time, and try to work in those fields on their merit and capability. I do believe that one day people won't need credentials, they'll only need to prove themselves. This is easier for honest people but harder for grifters and phonies.
Of course, there are jobs for which mindless obedience, willingness to waste hours of your life and capacity to eat shit are defining characteristics for success. Hopefully those jobs go away, but as long as they exist, they'll have senseless requirements like credentials that people will go through the rigmarole to get. Jobs built out of red tape will have red tape.
Much like view on higher education haven't changed greatly, views on job descriptions haven't either.
People will not apply for a job because it wants 10 years of experience for an entry-level job, or some other such nonsense. I have found many employers list a dream sheet, but realistically they are open to accepting candidates with less qualifications, especially when they end up getting very few applicants (due to the hefty qualifications they asked for).
A big part of education is spacing and repetition so completing a full course quickly before starting the next one doesn't sound like it's very good for learning even if it might speed up the degree.
I wonder what specific opportunities he felt he was missing out on. I've been working in software for 17 years without a degree and have never noticed the lack of a degree stopping me from anything. I've never had it come up during interviews.
As someone already mentioned here, there may be some immigration-related requirements that can be satisfied by this degree? E.g. when immigrating into US, the lawyers had to check for degree equivalency between my 3-year bachelor's degree to check if I satisfy H-1B visa requirements (IIRC the answer was "yes" when they also included the first year of the master's program that I have already completed).
Thanks for sharing that, as I've been wondering if I would ever run into that (currently at about four YOE as a SWE) without a degree. I find it interesting that there are people who already have a degree in something but still feel bad they don't have a CS degree. I don't have a degree in anything!
I see a good number of commenters mention that they also went through the same program/went through something similar.
I was wondering if getting the degree translated into any professional benefits? The conventional wisdom is that degrees don't matter, but the author in this blog post says otherwise and they unfortunately have not written a follow-up. I personally have a degree, so don't have perspective.
When it really comes down to it: you applying at the same time, with a degree, against a person without a degree, means you're more likely to get the job.
In government you often get higher pay for having a degree, so it ends up being a box that must be checked if you want to advance further up the pay scales.
Interesting to see such polarizing opinions on education in the comments. The value of education is a mix of learning, credentials, and socialization - and the experience is different for each student. WGU makes a lot of sense for working professionals.
Data point of one: WGU's credit transfer appraisers are comically incompetent
I wanted to complete a CS degree there, since I already have a lot of credits from elsewhere, which I officially transferred to WGU. But then they told me I can't be in CS because I don't have pre-Calculus completed. WAIT WHAT? Right there on my transcript, there are completed 'MATH 460 Math Modeling' and '696 Applied Math Project' and 'MATH 394 Probability and Statistics', which all obviously cover pre-Calc, but no - the appraisers think I might not be able to handle Calculus I so they won't let me go to CS (but I'm welcome to do some IT course).
Bah, to be honest this seems a lot like a degree mill.
I work as a SWE and I decided to apply yo a Bachelor'degree course in Computer Science at the University of Milan; that took me 4 years to complete. It doesn't matter how well I was prepared in different subjects, since many courses required a lot of study and preparation. And the average time of completion os around 4 years, so...
Fwiw, another accredited online educational program, with interaction with others, is
BYU Pathway Worldwide and associated programs. It requires a Church affiliation but not necessarily membership (I think). Tuition is much lower, vastly lower to students in poorer countries; it has accredited bachelors programs (through BYU-Idaho, but all online; like IT, business, others), and is also suitable for those who need to first become qualified for a university (like learning English, which is used in curriculum, and other basic skills), and then provides that university (and then tuition is again lower still, last I checked). I believe it also provides mentor-like contacts who encourage students to not give up. I think it is not self-paced, but has semesters.
I have several friends and family members, all active LDS, who have done BYU Pathway, and they all say the same thing: "Wow, is it churchy!"
That first semester especially. These people are all very familiar with the various iterations of CES, from early-morning and release-time seminary to the BYU religion curriculum and Institute. So on the one hand they had an idea what they were getting into and even welcomed it somewhat. But none of them expected it to be as heavy-handed as it was.
If the religious content feels that overbearing for active, committed Mormons, I don't know that I could in good conscience recommend this route to non-Mormons.
I think a lot of people confuse Computer Science with SWE or something similar. A lot of universities and programs do a terrible job of explaining CS.
You will get some CS knowledge working in the field, but its akin to any field where someone can get by learning how to do X without understand the theoretical underpinnings of X. CS is the theory and study of computation. A trained computer scientist should be able to understand computation and information in terms of abstract models, the mathematics behind those models, and reason with those models. CS can be seen as something only tangentially related to physical computers, it is the academic study of problems and problem solving.
This is not something you can learn in less than a year of study. Anyone selling you a CS degree without making you take a theory of computation is also really doing you a disservice. A lot of people have a degree in CS these days who really lack the fundamentals of the science portion of CS.
We are all caught between the rock of 'You should get this degree because you are serious about the actual theory of Computer Science' and the hard place of 'the job this degree unlocks justifies whatever it takes to get what you need done.' I enjoy some CS theory(especially theory of computation!) and other nice things but hate school and will never go back. I got my degree in CS for the monetary benefits, not because I was heading in for an enjoyable academic safari.
I will also say, as this person appears to be only a bit older than myself(I would say OP is no older 30) it doesn't shock me at all that they could have learned everything a degree would have taught you eventually just by reading things online. Other than some some algorithms(eg flow, more advanced trees) and some discrete math I can believe you'd hit on most of what a CS degree could offer, if you're willing to find it for yourself that is...
The inclusion of industry certifications with the degree programs at no extra cost is interesting, do any 'regular' colleges integrate certifications like this?
I also don't see: Theory of Computation or any Algorithms course.
It looks like someone can come out of this program and not know what big-O is, and what it is of major algorithms in computer science. Sure you can get by day-to-day, but a Computer Science degree should entail:
- algorithmic complexity
- turing machine vs stack machine vs state diagram
- computer organization
- programming languages
You come out of that with a circuits-to-programming language awareness of how things get translated and executed to the lowest level along with algorithmic complexity and estimation and awareness of "what a computer can calculate".
This looks like it falls short, but the devil is in the details.
I did the same thing. Got a Bachelors in CS in 1 term at WGU. Very happy with it, got a great job after graduation and I feel very well prepared for it.
I know this sounds really sketchy so here are my thoughts.
* Most undergraduate-level college courses (from any school) are stupid easy, especially 101-level classes. You could skip every lecture, spend 3 hours studying before the final exam and still pass with a B or better. This is what I did for 2 years at a traditional state school where I studied mechanical engineering. At WGU it is exactly the same, except you don't need to wait until the end of the term to take the exam. You can schedule the final exam on day 1 of the term and then move on to the next course if you pass.
* It's not that hard to get through a textbook quickly if you are disciplined. If there are 20 chapters, read 5 per day and you will finish in 4 days. On day 5 wake up early, take a practice test, review the questions you missed and re-read those sections, repeat 3-4 times and you should be scoring 80-90%, that's a pass so schedule the final exam for that evening. After these 5 days of studying you will be better prepared than the average college student, who generally fucks around all term, shows up for lectures but doesn't pay attention, and hardly reads the textbook at all, but somehow still passes.
* Lectures and videos are a waste of time, reading is more efficient
* It helps massively if you can study full time. I took out loans to pay the rent and tuition and didn't work a side job. I studied 9-5 every day like it's my full time job. I paid back my loans after 1 year of working.
* The hardest courses take 10-15 times as long as the easiest ones. Data Structures and Algorithms, Computer Architecture and Discrete Mathematics etc. are the big ones and this model lets you spend more time on that and less time on bullshit.
* Controversially, WGU makes sure you learn SQL really, really well and glosses over Linear Algebra. I find my SQL skills to be extremely useful on the job. I've since studied Linear Algebra on my own time, but I haven't found any uses for it outside of my game development hobby.
* No, you can't master a subject you spent 1 week studying. But that's true of all undergraduate courses, not just WGU, which is why new grads struggle with basic leetcode questions unless they grind leetcode outside of school. In my opinion the purpose of a bachelor's degree is to teach you the basics and bring you to the point where you can get an entry level job and study on your own, which WGU's BSCS absolutely does do.
* Getting a degree in 3 months might seem impressive, but it's not. The average college student might spend 4 years at school, but if you only count the time they are actually studying, it's not going to be more than a couple of months. And when they do study, it's not effective, it's not goal oriented, they study out of obligation and fear of failure which leads to procrastination and burnout and all-nighters before exam day that aren't very productive.
Would this be appropriate for someone fresh out of high school? The only concern I can think of is the lack of socialization, which is easier to address during high school than university.
Seems odd that speed limits on learning were(/are) the norm at most top institutions. What purpose do they serve aside from being slightly more administratively convenient.
They serve another purpose. Credentials with red tape to get test another aspect of someone's capability: the willingness to tolerate senseless bullshit in order to get ahead. For a lot of jobs that's a requirement, you won't do well at some places and in some fields without it.
I’m trying to find a tech job after almost a decade of manual labor. After reading this story I thought WGU could be a great, non-traditional fit for me so I started the sign-up process. A few seconds after I filled out the first step of the sign-up (name, phone, email), they called me twice (real people, not automated) and texted me. I’m probably being too selective, but it was an off-putting experience.
That’s fair. I’m not in any position to judge the quality of the school. I was just surprised that the school called while I was filling out the sign-up form.
"Driven by sales, not academic qualifications" is a GREAT metric for people providing your academic credentials.
No normal college can afford that many warm bodies calling. That tells you that either their profit margin per student is MUCH higher, or their student volume is way higher (they take everyone).
Personally, reading that headline, I would think "oh wow, this guy learned enough computer science to get his degree in 3 months, he's either some kind of super genius or has some crazy learning hacks to share", when really he just Game-Genie'd to the end credits as a formality since he already knew computer science and just wanted the piece of paper.
An example of a non-clickbait title for this article:
"I already knew computer science; here's how I got the piece of paper in 3 months"
For me, what he wrote is exactly what I expected from the title.
In some universities from where I am there's something known as "rendir libre", which means that you can skip classes but still do the final exam for each subject, so you would be able to achieve something similar to this.
I like that kind of system, as I don't like the bureaucracy of the education system getting in the way of someone who has the knowledge, I think it was a nice read and what WGU does is useful for a minority of people.
Do WGU accept international students? I just curious since I have 15+ years experience in programming, but having no degree of any kind does limit job options now when I had to immigrate.
Can anyone suggest some other options good to get a degree with reasonable price? I really dont mind studying, but I certainly dont have several years and tons of money to go to traditional university.
I'm in Australia, I got my degree in almost half the time since I already had experience in the field from working as a developer.
Some of the fees are per subject, and some per semester. I had to pay the former like everyone else, but saved on the latter due to the fact that I stayed for a shorter time.
> They confirmed everything I had read and told me that although they didn’t officially accept foreign students (I’m Canadian), they would try to make an exception.
Wait, aren't Canadian universities very affordable? Is the problem lack of university spots for students?
In 2022, the average cost to complete a 4-year bachelor’s degree in Canada (while living at home) is about 50,000 CAD.
Personally, the problem was time, not money. I couldn’t find a single university in Canada that would let me complete a bachelor’s degree online in less than 2 years, let alone 3 months. This is despite having 3-4 years of post-secondary education in the field (equivalent of an associate’s degree, plus a semester of university credits).
Now that remote learning is ubiquitous due to COVID-19, I suspect there might be more options for Canadians seeking accelerate their education.
>If necessary, many of these shortcomings can be offset by using the 3+ years you’ve saved to do an Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) at Georgia Tech (<$10,000).
A number of MIT courses were like that. You had to pass six calculus tests per course. If you were exposed to the material before, you could do this in a couple days.
As someone who teachers at a university, the level of courses at WGU is absurdly low. I looked at the algorithms courses, the discrete math courses, and the AI course.
These would not be acceptable in any CS department that I know. The material and exams are at the level of a high school education, nothing more.
You got a piece of paper. You did not get a CS education.
There are bootcamps that are much higher quality than this.
This comment comes off really strongly to me in the direction of gatekeeping.
> These would not be acceptable in any CS department that I know.
Personally, some of the courses I'm taking now are just as hard as those I took during undergrad at a brick-and-mortar university.
I would say that the promised scope & depth of my undergrad courses at my brick-and-mortar university was greater, with interactive lessons, feedback, etc.
On the other hand, to learn that breadth of material takes two interested parties. Often I had professors who wanted to research, not teach. Sometimes the course was taught entirely by TAs after hours. Usually the pace was so fast that I never had time to learn one thing before we moved on to the next.
There were students who did the bare minimum, while others went beyond. That piece of paper symbolizing their "CS education" means much more to some than others.
> You did not get a CS education.
Hard to argue since you haven't defined "CS education", but I'll read it as "..the CS education that my university provides."
I believe it, and acknowledge that not all CS educations are equal.
> There are bootcamps that are much higher quality than this.
I think the goals are different. WGU allows me to study at a slow pace, go as deep or as shallow as I please (while passing a minimum bar) and will grant me a B.S. at the end of it. I already have a job; what I'm missing is the degree.
Perhaps I wouldn't feel such a strong need to get the degree, if it wasn't a prerequisite to even higher education!
> (while passing a minimum bar) and will grant me a B.S. at the end of it
The minimum bar is too low.
> Personally, some of the courses I'm taking now are just as hard as those I took during undergrad at a brick-and-mortar university.
I can't argue with your lived experience. But I can tell you, as someone that teaches such courses, the ones offered by WGU are woefully inadequate. The material they cover, the depth in which they do it, the rigor of the problem sets and exams, are all wildly out of tune with what is offered in any CS department that I have ever seen.
> This comment comes off really strongly to me in the direction of gatekeeping.
I don't care about gatekeeping. If WGU wants to offer a CS degree, that's great. Let's get everyone involved. But! Then they should offer a CS degree with the same level of rigor that is expected of any other student in any other CS department.
It is very disingenuous of them to say they provide CS degrees, but then target the courses to such a low level.
> Perhaps I wouldn't feel such a strong need to get the degree, if it wasn't a prerequisite to even higher education!
Except that a WGU degree will not open the doors to even higher education. I cannot imagine a single CS department admitting a PhD student based on their credentials from WGU. The effort required to convince someone that you know what you're doing, is so huge compared to getting the WGU degree, I don't think it contributes much.
Brick and motor universities vary in quality and I’m not sure where you attend or what level classes you took - intro classes are typically weed out in stem and aren’t very fun. However, I think it’s pretty easy to see that the DS&A classes (not sure why it’s split into two courses, seems like WGU does that for every slightly challenging class) at WGU look completely watered down from what is taught in a single semester at the nearby university of Utah.
They are talking about learning about hashmaps (how, at this point in their education???) and it looks like the class can be completed by doing a single project. So yes, this is very unimpressive.
> Brick and motor universities vary in quality and I’m not sure where you attend or what level classes you took
3/4 years of a B.S. at a large research university, with 1 or 2 grad courses thrown in.
> DS&A classes..at WGU look completely watered down from what is taught in a single semester at the nearby university of Utah.
I agree with that. They do look watered down.
> They are talking about learning about hashmaps (how, at this point in their education???)
I checked the link and don't see what you are describing. One comment is talking about how to use a hashmap. But, I wouldn't be suprised if they didn't know what a hashmap was at all, since I've encountered that in undergrad at brick-and-mortar too.
> More than half the classes in the CS BS degree at WGU look like filler too
That's exactly how I feel about most gen-eds at a brick-and-mortar :)
But, I am actually learning things from these filler courses that were never taught at my university, nor taught at the workplace, which honestly did surprise me in a good way.
> There are bootcamps that are much higher quality than this.
imo... bootcamps are much higher quality than most universities. I've interviewed at least 1000 engineers at this point, and I've interviewed a ton of top tier university graduates that are essentially useless and need to be trained up, but most bootcamp graduates can "hit the ground running" (but lack foundational skills). The idea that software engineering is some academic endeavor is so flawed. It's a trade, and should be taught in trade schools.
(note I'm speaking of developers / software engineers. If you want to do computer research (etc) then I lean toward academic backgrounds)
There is no better. It's two different types of education. Bootcamps are just a refined version of the "teach yourself" crowd and there's nothing wrong with that.
If you're looking for engineers that can code a fullstack application in Typescript/React or a Backend/Front architecture in Python / Go / etc with a JSON API + a swift frontend; bootcampers will probably have a leg up. After all, they learned the specific knowledge to get them there.
If you need an engineer that can do audio dsp programming, embedded bare metal and/or firmware bootstrapping + development, OS design, compiler/VM design, etc; you'd be hard-pressed to find a bootcamper that could do the job without extensive training, let alone hit the ground running.
But ultimately, it's a moot point. After about 4 years, if they care more about the field than just as "a job" or "to pay bills" (e.g., they have a genuine interest and drive), either one will have enough experience to branch out and fill in their gaps.
I believe there is better. Applied skills like software development should be taught with hands-on education.
It's no different than becoming an electrician. You don't go to university to learn that. You go to an apprenticeship program.
It is my opinion that computer related trades should follow the format of the more physical trades. ALSO, you typically get PAID for an apprenticeship program. So, my opinion that it is in-fact a better way to learn aside. It's certainly financially superior.
> If you need an engineer that can do audio dsp programming, embedded bare metal and/or firmware bootstrapping + development, OS design, compiler/VM design, etc; you'd be hard-pressed to find a bootcamper that could do the job without extensive training
What differentiates a course as "high school" level vs. college? I honestly feel like my high school courses were just as hard as my college courses. The only difference is they required the prerequisite knowledge from the high school courses. Or, at least, having that knowledge helped.
Something that has always bothered me about STEM degrees in the US is the requirement for about a year of non-STEM coursework as a degree granting requirement. I think this is ridiculous.
Sure, yes, general education is important. And this is what secondary education should be for. The idea of consuming a year (or more!) of someone's time while pursuing a STEM degree on such coursework is, in my opinion, deeply misguided.
This is particularly true in a systems where a student is paying from $30K to $60K per year for this education. Sorry, but, if I have to spent $50K per year the last thing I want to do is burn it on course work that is utterly irrelevant.
Taken a different way, this means that a STEM Bachelors in the US could be completed in three, rather than four years. That is huge. That means higher graduation rates and people available to work faster.
That does not mean that nobody would or should take these courses. If someone is interested in sociology, history or political science, by all means, provide the courses as electives --not as graduation requirements.
Let's be free market and let the market decide. You can stipulate that a student must take five electives to graduate. These electives are not on forced subjects. You can take more STEM courses or choose to go into non-STEM classes (geography, world history, business, whatever).
Yes, this would likely reposition some of the stuff nobody cares about. And that's the right way to do it. If you have to pay back $200K to $300K in student loans, the system should not force you to burn 1/4 of that cash on bullshit no company is ever going to pay you for.
I truly think this is one of the great injustices, and maybe even the tyranny, of a system that, in my opinion isn't connected to reality at all. These non-STEM courses are cheap (in terms of the cost of offering them) courses that universities stuff into the student's shopping cart. The profit margin on these is probably outstanding when compared to some of the other subjects (for example, Chemistry requires labs; Robotics requires machine shops, tools, etc.).
From a competitive perspective, any nation that can focus their STEM degrees strictly around STEM to graduate people with the same capabilities as the US in 3 years rather than 4 is going to have an advantage over the long run. Not only are out graduates absolutely saddled with ridiculous debt, they have to invest another year or more for the same job-relevant education. Like I said above, no company is going to pay someone for that shit.
Sadly, I don't think this will ever change. There is no political value in going after this issue. If politicians can't use something to their benefit, it gets no attention at all.
>It’s accredited. Their programs are accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU), the same accreditation body used by the University of Washington (#24) and the University of Oregon (#94).
Haha, agreed, also, in my 30 years of working in CS at more than a dozen different companies of all sizes in 3 different countries, never ever did anyone ask for my degree.
Does anyone reasonable and with an internet connectt really believe they can get sonething of substance (e.g., CS degree) for relatively nothing ($5k)? That's not how the world works. Anywhere. Anytime.
Who was that said there's a sucker born every day?
Yea I am aware of that, my apology, I should have mentioned that I was asking more about getting EU blue card, they have a score system for foreigners and a degree/master could count towards that if we want to work as a IT worker in Germany/Austria
I mean New Mexico now offers free college education with very few restrictions and many European countries offer similar programs, not sure why it would be so unbelievable.
Plenty of countries have online universities with a Fair price. For example, the Open University, or UNED from Spain (where you have a handful of them).
Many WGU students HATE these types of articles, because they undermine the legitimacy of WGU.
WGU was not designed for traditional students, it was 100% designed for working professionals, where WGU will only admit you with a reasonable amount of experience in your field.
WGU is regionally accredited, not nationally, and it's a non-profit. So it cannot be compared to University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, DeVry, etc.
It was founded by a group of governors out west, hence the name. They realized that there were many working adults who possessed a great depth of knowledge, from long working in their fields, yet they had no paper credentials to show for that knowledge.
Their model is competency-based, so you must demonstrate you posses knowledge in any given domain. If you can prove you do then you can test out right away, if you fail to then they offer a variety of resources to allow you to get up to par. In many cases classes are tied to obtaining industry certifications.
It's not for everyone, but it is a far cry from a "degree mill." Does it really matter if a person that has knowledge got it from sitting in a seat, paying ungodly amounts of tuition, or if they got it from life experience? As long as a bar is set, and you can meet it, then that should be what really matters.
Just my personal experience, from having attended the university. Unfortunately life sidetracked my completion, but I hope to return one day soon, and complete my program.