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Online vs. Traditional Degrees?

Posted by Cliff on from the prestige-and-perception dept.

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?"

4 of 467 comments (clear)

  1. When Harvard or MIT offers online courses by elucido · · Score: 0, Troll

    thats when online courses will matter. Unless you have a degree from an elite ivy league school, you arent going to have a good job in technology unless you have a masters degree or Phd, and your online degree will be garbage when compared to a Phd from India or China.

    Get your ass in school and get your Phd or be jobless.

  2. A good job pays at least $100,000 a year. by elucido · · Score: 0, Troll

    Basically you won't meet the kinds of people who start million dollar corporations and who can give you a job paying $100,000 a year at a community college. You certainly cannot work your way up to $100,000 a year because people who join the right fraturnities get first pick of all the jobs. If you want to have a good job, meaning a job which pays at least $100,000 a year, then you have to go to an ivy league school or at least a very elite good school and know the right people.

    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.

  3. You get what you pay for by lheal · · Score: 1, Troll

    ... or, to appease the jackbooted grammar thugs, you only get that for which you pay.

    Universities are in the business of selling degrees. They do whatever they can to make the value of a degree in general and their degree in particular seem as high as possible.

    One of the greatest benefits of a university degree is the network of contacts one can develop. Graduate students especially have an expectation of a relationship with one or more professors, but also with other graduate students. Those relationships tend to last past graduation.

    If you are going for an online graduate degree, make sure you get one that allows close contact with the others in the program.

    --
    Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
  4. Re:I have to ask.... by ipfwadm · · Score: 0, Troll

    BS = Bull shit
    MS = More shit
    Ph.D = Piled higher and deeper.

    It just doesn't work if it's abbreviated B.Sc ;-)

    (That said, I've always seen bachelor of science abbreviated as BS, not B.Sc., though I did happen to also go to RIT).