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Online vs. Traditional Degrees?
Justin Rainbow asks: "As a computer science student, avid internet user and full-time programmer I find it very appealing to finish my CS degree online. Finishing at least a year early and studying whenever I want are just a couple of the draws to the online campus. However, are these internet degrees even worth the paper their printed on? Is an online degree just a waste of money? Can an online degree give you just as many opportunities as a traditional university? Has anyone in the Slashdot community graduated from one of these online schools? Did it help or hurt your career? What about graduate school admissions? Does an online degree hurt your chances to get into a great graduate school?"
As a medium sized business owner (150+ employees) I can say with certainty that brick and mortar schools matter. Nothing can replace face to face experience and interaction over the course of 3 to 5 years. On the other hand, if you are over 25, just work on your resume. If you've made it this far without the degree, it's not going to help you climb the wage ladder.
It completely depends on where you get your online degree. Many universities offer online degree programs that are fully recognized at accredited universities. This is something that you have to look for and be aware of. I suggest contacting other universities and inquiring whether they recognize degrees from the online university you are considering, and also make sure that credits from the online university are transferable to other universities.
Also, you have to make sure that you're able to stay motivated working in an environment of your choice. Like many telework situations, some people find that they're not productive at home due to too many distractions. I know a few people who are incredibly smart that have received online degrees and it really depends a lot on how motivated you are and how much you want to get out of it. They also recommending asking as many questions as possible to make sure you get the most out of your education experience.
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
A good reason to attend school in meatspace is that you can interact with others, form groups, work on tasks.
Just because you have a degree doesn't mean you'll be successful in what you are doing. You have to actually do something people can use [e.g. want, has a value, etc] to make money and/or fame. If you're lucky enough to be self-motivated to do your own work/projects then online could be ok. However, most are not and required a good kick in the ass to get going.
Another good reason for attending real school is you get to meet new peeps, socialize, do something other than being alone at home.
I can see the value of an online degree but only in the most limited of situations, e.g. you're already working and you want formalization or you live in the sticks and can't afford to move out, etc.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If you're looking at any field outside of IT, online courses are really lacking because you have zero interaction with other students, and that's a good part of where your experience with work politics, and where your future contacts will come from.
As long as it is backed by a real school, I see no problem at all.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I graduated with a CS degree in August 2004. Like most of my peers, I used the internet heavily for research, problem solving, and certification training. Perhaps the biggest problem with online degrees is the level of understanding you will receive. Computer Science is not an easy subject. The math alone is the reason many people drop out of the school. You will never get the same education from an online degree as you would from a traditional university. Yes, you can email or live chat with a 'professor', but that is no substitute for real, in-person communication during class time. Also, the in-class discussions are an integral part of understanding the more complex subjects. If you are genuinely concerned about what you will get out of the degree and not just the piece of paper, I would strongly consider not getting the online degree. Whatever your decision is, good luck in your future.
Actually, errors.
Finding them is an exercise left to the reader.
(Sorry to perpetuate this...)
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
A completely online degree will not work for physics. However for computer science you don't need to go to class.
I think it depends on the degree, but in general, when you want to get your REAL degree from graduate school you definately wont want to do it online.
But if you don't interact with professors not only will you not have to worry about grad school, how are you going to network for a job once you go to business school or law school?
Imagine getting a business or law degree online and trying to become a judge or work for a fortune 500 company.
Most grad schools want dozens of letters of recomendation. Sure, you can probably get them from your boss, mailman, ect... But they carry more weight if they are from a professor who worked with you on a research project for 3 years that was just featured on slashdot.
Some classes just do not do well online.
* Classes meant for you to present something in front of an audience. (Speech)
* Classes meant for the students to learn to work on a group project like they would in the workplace.
* Classes designed for face to face interaction of the students.
Otherwise it is mostly up to the student. Some people do fine taking classes online. Some people do not.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Dude, if I may call you dude. Online schools like the University of Phoenix are great if you already have a great career and are just going after a piece of paper to look good to get that next promotion. However, life is more than have a framed piece of paper hanging on the wall. Life is about socializing, making friends, and sharing ideas. Consider that you may meet someone in a traditional college with whom you will start the next Google. Yes, that's right. The founders of Google attended Stanford together, however I am not sure if they ever posted a story on Slashdot.
:)
You might make friends in different fields that open doors which you never considered. You never know who you will meet and what opportunities will arise from these chance meetings. Additionally, social networking is one of the best ways to find employment. You might do an internship and get hired or find other talented people like yourself and start a company (read the history of Hotmail).
Online learning tends to be very isolated and there is very little chance of meeting interesting people and connecting with them. Online courses are likely filled with people chasing a piece of paper and missing out on a far richer experience. Online learning also decreases the number of females you will meet that aren't from India or China. Please note, I am not biased against Indian or Chineese women, they just statistcally tend to comprise the majority of female computer science graduates. Going to a brick-n-mortar college will land you in a liberal arts class where you might find a date or even future wife. Remember, sometimes the journey is it's own reward
Maybe Slashdot could do a longitudal study of your education and career path choices to find out the answer to online vs. traditional schools and lifetime opportunities at the 4-year and 8-year mark. I've been to both type of universities and definately prefer the face-to-face interaction at a traditional school and have found it to be a much richer experience.
I used to teach university CS, served as department chair for a year, and have taught 1 (One) online class (graduate, computer security).
The experience left me wanting the interaction that comes in a classroom setting. Discussion posts were stilted, with some simply filling the requirement using regurgitation of the text to get the minimum grade. I am a strong advocate of web-based technology, but teaching a class using it exclusively is a hollow experience to me. I had much better experiences using the web tools to augment "on-ground" classes.
Now, the utility of online programs cannot be ignored. A lot of us spend great amounts of time commuting to and from work, and driving yet another long leg to school a couple of nights can be exhausting. When we lived overseas, online was the only way my wife could continue her degree work. In situations like these, online programs can make going to school possible.
Some schools do a better job of it, too. Actually, I'd give University of Phoenix some consideration WRT online, because they've been doing it for a while and have refined the process more than most. Our school waited a long time to do on-line in order to carefully evaluate tools and techniques.
After all this, I think attending a resident program where a portion of the classes were available online would be the best situation. You'd have the benefit of cohort interaction along with the opportunity to capitalize on the flexibilty of online classes when needed.
. However, are these internet degrees even worth the paper their printed on?
Yeah, probably about that much.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
I'd say do your major classes in the classroom, but pursue your gen eds elsewhere. I decided to take some online classes over the summer to speed things up, and man, am I thankful. First off, the online model of classes is usually MUCH better, especially for summer courses. Second, it is great to be able to do it in your own time. As for taking your CS courses online.. I'd suggest you drop that idea. You should be learning more than the concepts in a classroom - you should also be spending time working with others in the class, especially on programming projects. You can't always be a loner, and the classroom experience shows that you might actually be able to work with a team.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
If you're in the position where you need to learn something, and it's not all about the piece of paper, then online learning can be a great help at fast tracking this in an inexpensive way.
However if you need a piece of paper that says MIT on it so you can negotiate a 20K payrise, then your online-only university isn't going to be much of a help.
It's not the nature of being taught by correspondence, but rather the esteem of the university which issues the certification. Online courses available from certain ivy-league universities are still considered legitimate, because the issuer is considered with high regard.
The reason why people have negative feelings to online courses is because there is an over abundance of fake degrees available online, which use catch phrases such as "Earn a degree, based on your existing life experience", and "Qualifications in XX hours".
First a disclaimer I am a professor who teaches at a bricks and mortar university. The value of an online degree depends hugely on what you want out of the degree and on your own background. If you are highly motivated and have a very particular aim in mind then go for it (well modulo making sure it is not a rip-off program). But dont forget if you were that highly motivated you could just go get some books and read up on it yourself. If you have poor communication skills and anything less than an iron will dont think about it. A big part of a good CS degree is things like doing group projects, learning communication skills, and getting a sense from your profs of what is impotant and what is not. I have taught quite a few PhDs in my career and I absolutely refuse to do that in any situation where I cannot have regular (at least weekly) contact with the student. Some things cannot be easily communicated anyway other than face to face and this carries over to undergrad degrees as well. Part of this discussion has been about the value of CS degrees in general. I am also an employeer of CS graduates (small company 13 programmers, 6 with PhDs in CS or similar). We have some very good programmers without a Bachelors in CS but they are limited in what they can do when it comes to following the pure technical track. Every now and again I can see them struggling with a problem which they cant solve by brute force intelligence. CS is getting to be a deep subject now and some really smart people have thought up some really smart solutions to hard problems. These can be very hard to pick up outside of a formal teaching situation. On the other hand some of the PhDs in CS cant be trusted in front of a customer. Know what you want to do and pick your options accordingly - there are a lot of them out there.
This sounds an awful lot like someone making excuses for not being very successful by blaming someone/thing else for their lack of success.
I didn't go to an Ivy league school. I went to a moderately well respected state university and earned a bachelor's degree in CS. Later (while working) I spent a couple years in the evening getting an master's degree in CS (from a school you have heard of and probably think is pretty good - but it was a complete waste of time as it was less in depth than my undergrad courses). The master's degree never helped me land a job or get a raise or promotion. It's been a long time since I made anywhere close to as little as $100K (yep, I just work for "da man" - I'm not self employed or have my own company). Of course, I'm good at what I do, I take the customer's needs (even if they don't know they need it!) very seriously, and I work my butt off when needed to get the solution working or the bug identified and fixed.
BTW, since I left the university where I got my bachelor's degree, I have only seen one person from the school (and that was my girlfriend at the time) so even my first job had nothing to do with contacts from school (or, for that matter, family) - I interviewed just like everyone else and ended up at a large company. Sure, now I have contacts because people know of my work, but those contacts were EARNED.
Have you considered another line of work?
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Many people I know who've completed post-grad degrees need those relationships because all they've done so far in life is go to school. They need a network and recommendations.
If you're already in the work force in your field and are looking to expand your knowledge and skills, these personal contacts are not as essential. You're already employed, you already know people and have a social infrastructure. Online courses make sense then as all you really need out of them are the knowledge in your noggin and the paper in your hand.
man, I feel like mold.
I've never, in my career, seen a developer who understands fundamentals because of college, and I've never seen one who lacks skills because he or she didn't go to college.
I side with the other responses strongly disagreeing with this. I too have seen many gifted programmers who had gaping holes in their knowledge because they did not study various uninteresting or seemingly unimportant topics. They were great at what they did study but they were not well rounded, more like a technician in some ways rather than engineers. In my own personal work I have occasionally had answers to technical programs come from completely unexpected sources, from topics I would never had the forsight to have studied on my own initiative.
Your statement is only true for the extremely minute portion of the population that will read *all* the textbooks on their own initiative. It does a great disservice to otherwise intelligent programmers who would benefit from formal training. For example most aspiring game programmers out there might be under the illusion that they just need to read some OpenGL books, maybe some graphics and AI gems, and they are ready. They would never image that the answer to some problem they will run into comes from some boring databases book written in the 80s, or from a microeconomics text, or a psychology class, etc. I emphasized non-computer science but I want to be clear that the "gaping holes" I referred to above was in computer science. The material you cover in a formal degree program is valuable and almost no one has the self discipline to study *all* that material on their own and need the prodding of professors. I did. A friend did not, and he is the rare exception who did not, the rest delude themselves.
Are you serious, you have time to harass someone for a typo on a slashdot thread? This is rediculous, trying to add little levity to the world and I get bitch-slapped by an Anonymous Coward who is so afraid of bad e-karma that he gets his rocks of like this.
It's a shame everyone's replying AC, becuase just about all of them are rebutting you fantastically.
It's amusing, how you backpedal. How is "It is impossible to get a job which pays $100,000 a year if you arent ivy league or born into it. Perhaps with a Phd you can, but you'll have a shit job at Walmart with your bachelors degree" consistent with 1% of the UofU starting fortune 500 companies (your ridiculous number, not mine)? The answer is, it's not.
Nobody's debating that it's an advantage in a lot of cases to go to ivy league schools. Is it true that a mildly disproportionate majority of fortune 500 CEOs are Ivy Leaguers? Perhaps. But not by a lot, and certainly not by enough to imply that it's 'the only way.' An Ivy League education is far more helpful in politics than most other fields, and it's not even imperative in politics -- I have family in state politics with nothing more than a nursing degree and a hell of a lot of hard work. If you work hard and well at what you do (and, admittedly, have a little bit of providence smiling on you) you can get just about anywhere, with or without an ivy league education. Given two identical applicants, one of whom is an ivy leaguer and the other of whom is from a state university? Sure, most places would take the ivy league guy. Given two identical applicants, one of whom is cheap offshore labor and the other of whom is expensive domestic labor? Sure, many places would take the cheaper guy.
Notice a theme? Two identical choices. If your goal in getting hired is to be an identical choice, you ain't getting hired anywhere, buddy; not WalMart, not Google, not NASA. Ivy League applicants have that advantage; offshore laborers have their own sets. Neither of those prevents someone from a community college, state university, or small private university from building his own repertoire, proving his stuff, and landing a job that pays twice that of some washed-up ivy leaguer ten years down the road.
It's the greatest time of your life. Never again will you have leisure time to pursue whatever you want, whenever you want.
Not only that, but you're on your own, you're surrounded by other people on their own.
Seriously, for any of a thousand reasons, don't shortcut college.
Life's a journey, not a destination. Stop running. (Obligatory Demotivator
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
I attended UoP online for 3 classes. My first 3 classes, in fact. They require you attend 3 or 4 of their own "intro to learning" type classes. 9 hours of credit and $3,600 later I dropped them in favor of a brick and mortar school which US News and World Report rates in its fourth tier -- ranking 165-215 in their class. (USNWR 2006 Edition, America's Best Colleges)
UoP isn't even listed. I have an opinion as to why -- their education is hollow. I didn't learn a damn thing there, and the "team projects" consisted of one person doing all the work while the other 5 slacked off or did a halfass job - most of the time causing the whole team's grade to suffer. Sure it was convenient to go online once a week instead of driving 2 hours to class, but think about this... if each person is only online one hour a week, do you really think they're putting in 15-20 hours a week on the actual classwork?
And then there was my job interview. I had 14 years programming experience and showed "9 hours completed at UoP online campus" on my resume. The VP I interviewed with saw said, "Well, a piece of paper is a piece of paper, right?" I got the job, but only because I'm one of two people within 200 miles with 10+ years of Foxpro experience. I'm still not sure if showing UoP on my resume helped or hurt my salary negotiations.
Now, on getting employers to call you back... note that the resume gets 8 seconds attention. I know from watching my bosses, who get the resume from HR and read it in between emails, phone calls and visits. You have 8 seconds to make them say, "Damn, this guy's good. I think I'll ignore that phone call." Content matters most - concise, informative. Pink paper, perfume, frilly fonts - straight to the trash. Times New Roman 10-point, that won't give them a headache. Give it to someone who doesn't know your experience (email to me if you'd like). In 8 seconds, would they say "gimme" or "g'bye"? If the latter, work on the words and layout. Don't sound desperate.
In 9 months during 1997 I went through 150 resumes, no interviews, no callbacks. I read "What Color is Your Parachute" by Richard N Bolles. It taught me a lot of the process. I landed my next job within weeks, and most of what I applied for after that.
The unfortunate thing about most online offerings is that they are created in direct response to student wants. As other comments have stated, some non-college programmers may not know the subjects that they really need to be effective programmers. That said, why should students be dictating the way that courses are delivered? Why not let the curriculum developers that genuinely know what they're teaching/talking about develop the courses? If the students know what's effective in the classroom, why don't we give them a complimentary degree in education?
As a technical college instructor, I hear a lot of students complaining about their online classes, primarily because they don't have the self-motivation to do the work on their own. The flip side is that before the school had online classes, the students were clamoring for them.
I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.