Ask Slashdot: Fastest, Cheapest Path To a Bachelor's Degree?

First time accepted submitter AnOminusCowHerd (3399855) writes "I have an Associates degree in programming and systems analysis, and over a decade of experience in the field. I work primarily as a contractor, so I'm finding a new job/contract every year or two. And every year, it gets harder to convince potential employers/clients that 10-12 years of hands-on experience doing what they need done, trumps an additional 2 years of general IT education.

So, I'd like to get a Bachelor's degree (preferably IT-related, ideally CS, accredited of course). If I can actually learn something interesting and useful in the process, that would be a perk, but mainly, I just want a BSCS to add to my resume. I would gladly consider something like the new GA Tech MOOC-based MSCS degree program — in fact, I applied there, and was turned down. After the initial offering, they rewrote the admissions requirements to spell out the fact that only people with a completed 4-year degree would be considered, work experience notwithstanding."

Comments

Check out WGU

[FictionPimp]

http://www.wgu.edu/

Solid course material. Industry standard certs tied to the courses as finals, and fully accredited.

The Earl Scheib Institute

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

He will sell you any degree for only $149.95
Cars painted while you study. :)

Re:A printer and a template

[Shados]

I once interviewed for one of the big investment banks (not gonna give a name, but its one of the big evil wall street banks that everyone knows about). That one has the usual silly "4 year degree with 3.0 GPA or we don't even talk to you, no exception, not even if you're a well known superstar in the software world" rule.

I didn't know that, and I only have a 3 year degree (from a country where thats common). I aced the interview as that particular job wasn't even very computer science-ish, and they had been looking for someone for months to fill that position. Then they noticed the little issue of me not having the mandatory degree.

The hiring manager (not someone from an agency, but someone on their payroll) just modified my resume without telling me and passed it over to HR for final signoff. I got hired.

Fast forward a year, they're updating the HRIS system and verifying that all the info is correct. I get an email from HR asking me to confirm that I indeed have a 4 year bachelor with 3.0 GPA from Big Name College XYZ with my boss CCed.

My boss quickly replied, before I had time to go "WTF?!", that I indeed had such a degree.

Needless to say, him and I had a little talk afterward. That was awkward.

Know what you're asking for

[Subm]

By the principle of "Quality, price, speed, pick any two," when you ask for price and speed, just know what you're asking for.

Re:Apply to a local university

[jellomizer]

You often can get a decent rate at part time taking some classes at your local state University. You can often take classes before you are admitted to the school. Usually after you prove that you know your stuff and get a few good grades, the school will normally let you in the program.

As for experience. Experience does matter, however from my own personal experience hiring developers, a college education usually gets employees that don't have those odd holes in their skills, which makes bringing up to speed sometimes a little more difficult.
These gaps vary from person to person... However some of the common ones are.
1. Not understanding details of data structures. Why am I getting a negative number when it is clearly 5 billion!
2. Recursion seems magical. I admit it, in college it took me a bit to get Recursion, after a class in LISP it cleared it right up. Also when you get the details realizing how often the system is stacking stuff together means there is a limit on how much Recursion magic you can do.
3. IPC (Inter Process Communications) Dealing with threads can get sketchy if you don't have a way to get them to talk.
4. Complex Boolean logic with short circuit evaluation. Yep after that one function returned true that second function won't run in your or clause. You know that one for some reason you made to update some data.

Now for those of you without degree who feel insulted by this, don't be this is what I find are often the most common issues. There are a lot of really good developers without degrees, many who I will admit who could kick my butt at coding. But for a company trying to hire, it is normally better to weed out some good employees then it is to hire a bad one.

Hi...

[beelsebob]

Hi, I want to pretend that I've done a bunch of academic learning, because I feel that I have the right to the title because I have some experience.

Hint: Bachelors degrees are different from experience. Experience is valuable, but it's not the same thing as academic learning, in the same way as academic learning is valuable, but not the same thing as experience. If you want a bachelor's degree... go and do one.

Re:Hi...

[metlin]

I have met a number of people who are rock solid programmers and have a deep understanding of technologies. People who can program device drivers in their sleep and have implemented a godawful number of systems over the years. People who have licked networking or embedded systems or whatever (take your pick).

Naturally, they assume that CS is the same as IT, and enter CS programs to get a degree.

And then, I have seen them fail miserably as they realize that programming does not equal discrete math, graph theory, or computational complexity. Usually, it's been a while since they've been out of school, so even simple things like Graphics 101 with vector math and basic physics isn't quite a cakewalk. Plus, I have found that they are quite limited by their own experience and biases (mostly because they've had a lifetime to learn bad habits) and find it quite hard to reconcile real world experience with the academia.

You can especially see this with older, more experienced folks in a class teaching, say, Operating Systems, Architecture, Data Structures, or Compiler Design. And it is not necessarily their fault -- their real world experience sometimes does contradict what's recommended in the "ivory tower" world. Networking is often quite the opposite, though -- it is one of those fields where real world experience proves valuable, and the experienced folks learn a little something about the math behind network routing and such.

Honestly, whenever I see someone with experience wanting to study CS, I just recommend that they get a degree in something like MIS simply because it is a way for you to move up, and it is a lot easier -- handing computer science at a later stage in your life is usually significantly harder unless you've been keeping yourself mentally challenged in math and related subjects. You are in a very different place mentally in your early 30s than you are in your late teens.

Re:Hi...

[rabun_bike]

Very true but you can still teach an old dog new tricks. I went back to school for the third time to get my under graduate coursework in CS out of the way so I can apply to a MS program when my youngest starts 1st grade (in about three years). I started taking CS classes in my late 30's and have 2 more courses to go and I am now in my 40's with 2 kids. What I found is that even though I have a minor in Mathematics it provided me almost no help in Discrete Math. Honestly Discrete Math taken at a large engineering university was an eye opening experience for me. The only thing that helped me was Linear Algebra and some graph theory I already knew. And it really made me angry that the US education system had shorted me so severely on what I would call classic mathematics. To catch up I put in many, many hours to do well in that class. And I did OK with with a B+. Going back to doing proofs after 20 years was a a challenge but it was not impossible. I already have a MS in Computer Information Systems but my heart is in Computer Science and so is the type of work that I do. You can take challenging courses later in life and I think it can be very rewarding. In my Data Structures class the final project was an impossible task for undergraduates. I spent hours working on the project which combined graph theory, and many different data structures and related concepts into a large final class project. I put the effort in and got a 100 on the assignment along with a single fellow classmate also in his 30's taking coursework for another masters program. We both got A+ grades in that class. The class average for that assignment was a 45 which included our two perfect scores. I then went on to take Computer Architecture and Assembler programming and had a similar experience. The undergraduate kids did pretty well on the tests and it was difficult to beat them but when it came to the projects the older students like myself could beat them hands down. We simply have many more years of experience in building things that work as well as tenacity in completing the projects to our best ability. It takes a lot of work to go back to school and complete challenging coursework but I personally have found it very rewarding.

not so fast, not so easy

[DriveDog]

But not wasting your time... I'm all for a solid CS education and I'd give brownie points for it. But if it bugs you to study what you think you already know, then don't. I really can't imagine that a BS in CS is going to impress most hiring managers more than your dozen years of experience plus some other 4 year degree. So get the 4 year degree in something else quantitative in which you have interest. Physics, statistics, math, chemistry, etc. Take your time, and enjoy learning something outside of your normal field.

Fast, Cheap, High Quality

[sycodon]

As with everything else, Pick two.

Re:Fast, Cheap, High Quality

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

As with everything else, Pick two.

Not all options actually hug the tradeoff curve(well, in three variables, I suppose it's some sort of surface; but same idea) all that closely (if at all), so it's still a partially legitimate question... (Which state school is basically north of 10k/yr for beer pong and date rape and which one is an affordable and decent college? Is that ad for SOMEBODY TECHNICAL INSTITUTE a total scam? How much of the expense of a traditional campus can I skip without ending up in a 'MOOC' that might as well just be watching a couple of youtube videos, only more expensive?).

That said, I'd be...a trifle nervous... about anyone who "eh, just wants to get a fast, cheap, CS degree, y'know?". Unless you have purely mercenary motives(and a fairly solid estimate of how much more you could be earning if you had one from a school of a given caliber, in which case crunch the cost of going to school, opportunity and direct, compare to expected increased future earnings, and go on your value-rational-homo-economicus way...), you don't get a CS degree, definitely not a CS degree that you wouldn't be ashamed of, just for the CV.

If you are already a programmer, you know enough about CS-like things that 'CS for enrounding you as a person and enrichment' will be irrelevant, so you have two choices: Do you want to take actual, big-kid, CS for people who want a better grasp of a deeply hairy area of mathematics? Or would you be better off skipping that and focusing on software engineering/development related skills that will make your practical-applied-programming more solid, more maintainable, generally better on the logistics side?

Hard math just seems like a bad place for dabblers: If you just skate, you'll be wasted on anybody who just wants a coder, now(since they don't care about your fancy theoretical education, just your work experience); and equally wasted on anybody who wants to pick your brain, see how you think; because faking knowledge of hard subjects is hard.

This really seems like a " Do, or do not." affair.

Where are the online Computer Science degrees?

[Rinikusu]

I've always wondered what it is that prevents us from creating a fully accredited* Computer Science Degree (bachelor's) completely online, for cheap. I'm not talking code-school, I mean let's learn Computer Science, with all the math and non-shortcuts that entails. The "industry" might want programmers, but *I* want to be more than that, and I'd like a formal education to get it without spending $30-40k/semester and would prefer to do it at my own pace while I continue working in the field. Perhaps this needs to be a Y Combinator style start-up. Courses from Algebra (yes, Algebra), Geometry, Trig, first principles kind of stuff focusing on the WHYS not just rote memorization. Sure, you'd still need the social sciences and what not (and I would be happy to just take those at the local community college for $cheap and transfer them in), but the real meat at the real school. Hell, it doesn't even have to be accredited if you actually learn something.

This also brings me to self-taught computer scientists: I've begun an adventure down "Teach myself math from scratch" lane because, at age 40, I'm still rather annoyed at my math education in high school. I was more concerned about learning to the test, not the concepts, and that's haunted me ever since. Anyone have recommendations for learning math starting from, say, Algebra I or II level (high school) that will actually teach in a way that will be useful rather than taking a test? Stuff that will carry over into future classes as the proper building blocks, etc?

Re:A printer and a template

[SillyHamster]

Great that your boss is watching out for you, yikes that your company has to lie to itself to hire and keep qualified personnel.

Something's broken, and it's beyond individuals to fix it ...

Re:Apply to a local university

[ranton]

Perhaps an actual answer to his question.

First off, make sure your Associates degree is a transferable associates degree. The fact that you say it is in "Programming and Systems Analysis" instead of just Associates in Arts or Associates in Science leads me to believe it isn't a very transferable degree. You would have needed things like 3 communications classes (English, Speech, etc), 6 behavioral sciences / humanities courses, 2 science classes, and 2 math classes. If it is a transferable degree, then you are half way there.

If it is not transferable, you can try to use CLEP tests to get past many required classes. I was able to get past two humanities courses that weren't part of my associates this way. If you can't pass the tests because you are a bad test taker or something, community college classes are your best bet. It will be easy to pass those classes but it will take a while this way.

If you aren't able to go to college for two years during daytime hours, it will be a bit harder to finish the last 60 credit hours. When I needed a BS while working in 2009 I was forced to use University of Phoenix, but now there are many better options at real schools. I followed up my BS with an MS at a real school, so I didn't mind going to a degree mill. But a quick internet search can find numerous online BS programs at real brick and mortar schools.

I do not suggest going to a diploma mill unless you are going to follow up with a real MS. The government is likely to start cracking down on programs like UoP and Devry soon, and those schools will probably obtain even worse reputations than they already have when that happens. That said, I did get a job with a 50% pay increase by just listing I was 12 credit hours away from my UoP BS degree, so it was useful to me all by itself (my boss later confirmed my resume would never have reached her desk if I hadn't listed I was close to my BS).

Worked for me

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Get a degree in Electrical Engineering from your nearest State University, filling all your elective credits with Computer Science courses.

Gets you access to all those "4 year degree" tech jobs, plus a whole slew of other tech jobs that you didn't know existed. That's what I did because I didn't want to pigeonhole myself into a field that is rife with bubbles and outsourcing. Worse case scenario, if at some point I can't find work writing code, I can try to get a job with the power company, a telco, etc.

upper peninsula of Michigan

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I hired a guy who was in a small time band for 20 years after high school. Traveled all over US. No one ever paid an admission price to hear them. Hotel lobby. Restaurant. Etc. Decided to get a degree at age 40. 20 years of travel showed him the cheapest place in USA. Upper peninsula of Michigan. Mich tech or some such place. Finished degree in three years with summer session. Started as entry level coder at age 44. One of the smartest guys I have met. He joined and enjoyed our London times cryptic crossword puzzle group. So go north young man.