Online vs. Traditional Degrees? 467
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?"
Yes, it matters. (Score:3, Insightful)
It depends (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Degree is not the be all (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Not really a good way to go outside of tech (Score:3, Insightful)
Real School (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as it is backed by a real school, I see no problem at all.
Recent grad here (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes, it matters. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is really, really bad advice. Even though I've learned most of what I know through practical experience, my 4 years of college has really helped me. Too many programmers don't understand foundational concepts, and subsequently they lack the tools to adequately understand how to solve a problem. Picking some arbitrary age limit and saying that you shouldn't do any formal learning after that time is just plain stupid. Shame on you for even making that suggestion.
Re:English first! (Score:2, Insightful)
Finding them is an exercise left to the reader.
(Sorry to perpetuate this...)
I agree (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yes, it matters. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, a degree will generally add at least 10 g's to your salary, when you are compared to someone with comparable skill without a degree. College is the way to go. Doesn't matter if it is online or not - a degree is just an extra foot in the door. Talent and people skills will take you the rest of the way from there.
Not only this (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine getting a business or law degree online and trying to become a judge or work for a fortune 500 company.
Re:Is the online school accredited? (Score:5, Insightful)
Both have their place (Score:5, Insightful)
* 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.
Visit a college campus and take a look around! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Depends... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Let's see ... $5 a ream, 500 sheets per ream (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, probably about that much.
Cheers,
IT
Re:Yes, it matters. (Score:3, Insightful)
Never believe your education has ever finished.
Re:Yes, it matters. (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm obsessed with programming, and by the argument above I'm probably at least not stupid.
I have a Master of Science in Computer science. I would have been a better programmer than many with a college degree even if I didn't have my degree.
But what matters is that I'm a better programmer because of my degree, than I would have been without it.
The grand grand parent post (the 150+ employee guy) is giving really bad advice when he says to not get a college degree if you are older than 25.
My recommendation (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of qualifications (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
Re:Yes, it matters. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never seen one who lacks skills because he or she didn't go to college.
I have. Several. I've known some very bright programmers who could cut code just fine, but whose lack of formal education really limited the nature of the problems they could solve. There are a bunch of classes you get in a decent CS curriculum that seem very pointless and abstract -- things like Theory of Computation, Compiler Design, Algorithms and Data Structures -- but not having that foundational knowledge really hurts. There's also lots of benefit to learning a significant amount of mathematics (especially discrete math, but all of it is good).
Of course, you don't actually *need* to go to college, on-line or in meatspace, in order to learn that stuff. You can just pick up a book and do it yourself. In practice, though, it's much easier to learn it in college, and most people who don't go to college will never learn it on their own.
A professors view of online degrees (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Visit a college campus and take a look around! (Score:5, Insightful)
I fully agree with the parent and would like to point out that another thing to keep in mind is that on campus recruiting provides huge oppurtunities for a career. Companies come to career fairs at a campus because they respect the school's program. It's much easier to get an interview with these companies because you get the chance to talk to their recruiters one on one no matter what your resume looks like. If you do decide to get an online degree at least make sure that you are able to attend these events on the college's campus.
You also don't want to miss on out on your chance to meet with professors as other posts have pointed out. Every professor that I've ever had has had specific hours during the week for students to stop by their office just to talk. Getting to know people who are already well established in the field in a personal way can give you a huge advantage as a professional. While I'm sure there are chances to communicate with professors in online curriculums I have a hard time believing that you could achieve quite as personal of a relationship. Knowing a professor or two is crucial to having a good grad school application as well.
If you do decide to go with an online degree it is very important to put a lot of effort into gaining the same social experiences you would with an on campus degree.
Re:A good job pays at least $100,000 a year. (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
College unimportant ONLY if text read on your own (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't rush through college... (Score:3, Insightful)
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. [yahoo.com] (Obligatory Demotivator [despair.com]
Re:Yes, it matters. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, let me see if I can help you here. Let's say that you like to sing. So you listen to a bunch of songs on the radio and sing along. But in doing so, you never learn to read music. That means that the first time that someone hands you a sheet of music you're stuck, because you don't know how to read notes.
I've been paid to write code since I was 14 (and I'm now 42), and when I got into school I thought that I knew a lot. And I did. But what I lacked was the ability to understand higher level concepts and put a bunch of disparate concepts together. In other words, I could sing but not read the music. My time in college fixed that.
You may still think that compiler theory isn't applicable to real world problems like ERP systems. And I'd agree that you're probably not going to find a copy of lex or yacc in an ERP system. But in other ways, there are parallels between the two. Compilers follow formal sets of rules to generate code, ERP systems employ business logic. Compilers (at least good compilers) optimize the code, ERP systems look for efficiencies. Compilers break down large sets of problems in to smaller, more managable ones. So do ERP systems. Compilers deal with topics like memory management, ERP systems manage large data sets.
Last time I visited my dentist, he was telling me about his experience in dentistry school. His first class involved dissecting a cadaver, one with especially large feet. Now you might think that it's not important for a guy who's going to be poking around in mouths all day long to be hacking apart some poor dead guy's feet, but he learned valuable lessons about the human body along the way. So maybe you won't ever apply compiler theory directly, but you'll sure use the concepts that learn to make your application better.
Both want to be programmers and I want to make sure they have every tool available to them.
Make sure that they attend a liberal arts college. As you pointed out earlier, knowing your limitations is a good thing. A liberal arts education will help them see the big picture. Not every task assigned to a programmer is a programming task. Sometimes a slight tweak to a business process can do a lot more to help a company than writing a new program. But if all you know is engineering concepts then you might not look to human factors when solving a problem.
Re:I agree (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Could we hear from someone who did U of Phoenix (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes, it matters. (Score:3, Insightful)
Or just 3. Buy books and read them.
It sounds so easy, doesn't it? But how many people do you know who have actually purchased a dozen textbooks and invested several hours a day for two or more years to reading them and working through all of the proofs and programming assignments?
I've done the first part of that myself. I've bought lots of textbooks, and I've read pieces of them, but even though I enjoy the subjects (mostly math), I haven't succeeded in getting through even one of them. Without a course to push me through it, it's just too difficult. And I'm the sort of person who learns well from books... many people have a learning style that works better with classroom instruction.
No, just buying the books and reading them is not easier.
Re:I agree (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yes, it matters. (Score:2, Insightful)
Lunatics running the asylum (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
True.
Computer Science teaches you how to program computers, while Computer Engineering teaches you how to program computers properly.
That's a pretty bold statement, and it leaves out a lot. First of all, CS tends to be more concerned with the software side, which is inherently more mathematical -- a good CS program will teach you not only how to program, but why you should do certain things certain ways -- while CE tends to be closer to the hardware side. Both are important, and ideally any programmer should have some understanding of both, but they are fundamentally different skills with different areas of application. You probably don't want the typical CS grad writing code for embedded systems, but neither do you want the typical CE grad writing code for large-scale business and scientific apps.
Writing code for a typical desktop application probably doesn't matter, but knowing the Engineering approach is important if you are programming a fly by wire avionics system or the controller for a nuclear power plant.
Ah yes, the old "nuclear power plant" canard. Here's something you might want to consider: code that is developed on a multi-year timescale, that performs a few simple, repetitive tasks for highly critical systems, is not the be-all and end-all of programming. Modern desktop and (especially) server apps may not kill anyone if they break, but they're at least as challenging to write, because they do a great many more things and have to be written on tight deadlines
[wipes froth off mouth]
Anyway. You missed my point, I think, so I'll spell it out. Engineering, as a discipline, far predates the modern culture of engineering. For most of human history, engineers were people who did things by trial and error (often very dramatic error) and who basically played around with a problem until they got it right. They operated by gut feeling, by rule of thumb, by experience and raw talent. And very often, they did astonishingly good work, some of which has endured for thousands of years.
Does this mean I think modern engineering is a bad thing? Of course not. I'm very glad to know that the buildings where I live and work, the car I drive, the roads I drive it on, the chips that run my car and my computer and my TV and my microwave and damn near everything else, were all designed by people who used the careful, systematic modern approach. But there are still significant areas of technical endeavor -- and I'd say a lot of programming is included here -- in which to do good work, the intuitive, trial-and-error approach is still the best way to go.