Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera
coursera.orgAlso of note - this appears to be the UK-style of master's vs. the typical path a lot of us may be more familiar with, in the sense of very strong undergrads complete a 4th year and earn a Master's vs. finish an undergrad and then spend 2+ years (1 year classes, 1 year lab/thesis) as an in-betweener before Doctoral programs.
It seems very expensive for 2-yrs of part-time, online work. I did a MSc in Canada part time and it took me almost three years of year-round effort, completing the course requirements 2 or 3 per semester (which is more than 1/2 time). Because I was P/T I paid full tuition but it was still less than $5K/yr. F/T grad students were almost all on scholarship or covered tuition via RA pr TA duties.
IMO, if you want more than the credentials on your resume this would be an expensive and disappointing grad school experience and of limited value.
One of the important parts of learning at a university is meeting fellow students, exchanging ideas, and building relationships. It seems for 36k USD you’re really overpaying for losing this face to face time with other students, imo video calls just aren’t the same.
I did an MSc online distance learning back in 2003 from Royal Holloway. I built a lot of useful relationships and had great conversations with my fellow online students.
Our lecturers said we were far more social than the campus students, who just went to lectures, the library, or home. Probably because we were all sitting on our own in front of a computer, so actively tried to counteract the loneliness of it...
One thing to note - if you're interested only in pedigree - nobody gives a sh*t about Coursera, Udacity, edX or similar "online" labeled stuff.
An important quote from the FAQ:
> Will my diploma state that I was in an online programme?
> No, your diploma will not state that this is an online degree.
Personally, I find this practice quite questionable and deceptive.
While I also find it questional, perhaps it will lessen the effect of a degree. In the end, you shouldn't need a degree if you have the skills. Nowadays, it can be hard for self-taught developers to get in the industry, just because they don't have a paper from a famous university.
> In the end, you shouldn't need a degree if you have the skills.
A university degree has multiple purposes.
As a student, you want to learn stuff and network with fellow students and get a paper.
As an employer, you see that the applicant has work ethic, knows the cultural norms, can obey orders, can interact with people in the field etc. And also that they have a fundamental knowledge of the field.
However, a university degree in computer science is not and should not be expected to be a developer training course.
It's very feasible to become a developer in a self-taught way and work productively in industry, building websites, CRUD apps, mobile apps etc. No need for a degree here.
It's much less feasible to self-teach computer science and math and so on. A university program will force you to do it even when it's not pleasurable. But it won't teach you practical web design skills etc. because that isn't its purpose.
What we have today is definitely a bad arrangement. Many students study a field they are ultimately aren't interested in and won't use, just to fulfill employers' requirements.
> It's much less feasible to self-teach computer science and math and so on. A university program will force you to do it even when it's not pleasurable.
I'd wager that computing science autodidacts find study pleasurable for it's own sake. Advanced graduate and post-graduate work notwithstanding, the most advanced math you need to master CS fundamentals (and then some) is the predicate calculus and some analysis. These are nontrivial, but certainly much easier than what one would deal with in a typical pure math undergrad program. They are well within the abilities of an enthusiastic hacker with a solid high school education (up to calc 1) to master from textbooks without coercion.
> As an employer, you see that the applicant has work ethic, knows the cultural norms, can obey orders, can interact with people in the field etc. And also that they have a fundamental knowledge of the field.
As an employer, an autodidact who has mastered the subject has demonstrated to me the ability to be passionate and act on his own initiative. I personally value that higher than a proven track record of conformity and trained obedience. That said, organizations differ, and for many large companies where 90% of the work is busywork, the autodidacts will get bored and leave in short order. So don't hire them if the work is fundamentally pointless salary justification.
Out of 100 people who call themselves autodidact CS people, how many are like the ones you describe, who spend years to work their way through CS theory books to the extent that would be required by passing exams with good grades?
Let's ignore for the moment whether it's even needed, whether devs will just code stuff that doesn't need much math anyway etc. as that's a different topic. I want to focus on whether autodidacts get the same level of CS knowledge as university graduates (with good grades).
My CS education did have a lot of difficult math that I enjoyed but in a running-a-marathon way, not in an eat-a-piece-of-cake way. Having regular lectures, homework and topics given to you by experts in a logical order is very important for many people like myself, so they have no gaps and get a well-rounded overview of CS fundamentals. Designing your own curriculum is often how you end up being a crank as well (e.g. see "autodidact physicists").
And it's not just calculus and analysis, but also graph theory, complexity theory, abstract algebra, linear algebra, complex numbers, formal languages and automata, information theory, theory of compression and encryption algorithms, signal processing like Fourier theory, control theory, optimization and machine learning, and various other things you learn here and there, such as Petri nets, quaternions etc.
And also, outside of extraordinary life circumstances, why not get admitted to a university anyway, if you're so enthusiastic about all this theory stuff that you'd learn it to good-grade level just by your own motivation anyway? For example in Germany, university is free and if you prefer you can even skip all the lectures if you don't think they give you value and just take the exams, while studying in your preferred autodidactic fashion.
My default assumption, unless convinced otherwise by evidence, is that self-taught devs can put together functioning code and have familiarity with CS terminology but only a vague folk understanding of the details.
Most people who argue that university is superfluous are usually those who could not pass the exams due to a lack of interest and/or talent (or live in a country with tuition fees they cannot afford, such as the US).
> Out of 100 people who call themselves autodidact CS people, how many are like the ones you describe, who spend years to work their way through CS theory books to the extent that would be required by passing exams with good grades?
Admittedly I've only personally met order dozens of them or so in the course of a decades long career, which is why I try to snap them up when I find them. I said it's a powerful signal, not that it's common or even an advisable path for those with alternatives.
> My CS education did have a lot of difficult math that I enjoyed but in a running-a-marathon way, not in an eat-a-piece-of-cake way.
Makes sense to me, I enjoy it in a hitting-a-new-max-lift kind of way, which I imagine is pretty similar. I prefer to associate with people who, degree or otherwise, derive joy from improving themselves both mentally and physically.
> And it's not just calculus and analysis, but also graph theory, complexity theory, abstract algebra, linear algebra, complex numbers, formal languages and automata, information theory, theory of compression and encryption algorithms, signal processing like Fourier theory, control theory, optimization and machine learning, and various other things you learn here and there, such as Petri nets, quaternions etc.
The predicate calculus[1] plus analysis is sufficient for effective study of every sub-discipline you list. Obviously I assume proficiency in algebra as a prerequisite of analysis. Complex numbers and quaternions become far less intimidating when you realize they're just 2 or 4 dimensional state spaces, which are trivial in scale and potential complexity compared to what any computing scientist deals with.
> And also, outside of extraordinary life circumstances, why not get admitted to a university anyway, if you're so enthusiastic about all this theory stuff that you'd learn it to good-grade level just by your own motivation anyway? For example in Germany, university is free and if you prefer you can even skip all the lectures if you don't think they give you value and just take the exams, while studying in your preferred autodidactic fashion.
Deutschland ist doch voll geil, aber die meisten von uns wohnen nicht da.
> My default assumption, unless convinced otherwise by evidence, is that self-taught devs can put together functioning code and have familiarity with CS terminology but only a vague folk understanding of the details.
Funny, that's my default assumption for all CS grads who have a degree from anywhere other than continental Europe (including Russia) or one of the most elite US or UK programs. I had to stop asking "write a binary search on the whiteboard" as an interview question because after five tries nobody managed it correctly and they all had degrees from good CS programs.
[1] I assume you are German and CS programs in Western Europe are generally, especially with respect to theoretical rigor, superior to most in the USA, so perhaps you'll understand that I mean "predicate calculus" in the sense that Dijkstra and Scholten used in the tradition of Leibniz.
It's possible to complete the equivalent of a decent CS degree on your own, but I've very rarely seen it in practice. For the vast majority of people the fastest and easiest way to acquire the equivalent knowledge and skills is to complete a 4 year CS degree.
Why?
Because they purposefully hide a major aspect of the nature of that education in fear that revealing it would make it seem of lesser value.
> if you're interested only in pedigree - nobody gives a ...
With this program, also Georgia Tech's MSCS program, you get the exact same classes, tests, and degree as students attending in person.
The Georgia Tech program is half the cost of this, is it not? Plus, it's a CS degree from an institution that's known for its CS department. That's likely to carry more weight among employers hiring in AI/ML roles than a "Machine Learning" degree. Those kinds of programs aren't as mature as CS ones and it sort of puts them in the same category as stuff like Udacity's Nanodegree in "[hot tech topic].
I know Imperial College is a well-regarded and selective institution, but I think the point still stands.
Same deal with Stanford SCPD, where I've taken a handful of classes. That was the key differentiator for me versus "pure" online offerings: since you're taking the exact same classes at the exact same time as full-time on-campus students, you have some guarantee of quality/rigor.
You can get degrees not just from ICL but UofI and other legit organizations via Coursera. Essentially they are using the Coursera platform the way Uber runs on AWS. The diploma doesn’t say anything about his and you may have taken some or all of your courses online.
This is different from audacity etc where the courses are essentially from udacity.
I only learned this bc my gf worked for Coursera: I don’t know if that’s because they have some deliberate marketing strategy or just because I didn’t pay attention. As she doesn’t work there any more, I can say it makes me uncomfortable. But to be honest: in the long run why should the online experience inherently be worse?
It could be just chauvinism on my part but I feel my university education could not have been as good had it not been F2F
The "offline" course prices are here. It seems like the roughly equivalent MSc degree offline would be £15.5K for home and EU students and £33,250 for overseas students. You would have to add to that living expenses which are considerable in London (perhaps another £20K) https://www.imperial.ac.uk/students/fees-and-funding/tuition...
I did an MSc in Computer Science at Imperial (long before online courses existed) and it was by far the hardest academic thing I have ever done. Imperial is academically excellent, and likely the best university for science subjects in the UK and perhaps top 5 in the world. Having said that I'm sure much of the value is from being there with other students and teachers, and I don't know how much of that you're getting from an online course.
My INTERNATIONAL FEES for my MSc in Bristol was in 2013 only cost £ 17k. This includes lots of face-to-face contact with lecturers who are research leaders in the field. With living expenses the total would only be £ 30k. Inflation makes the total closer to £ 40k today.
However, for £ 28k, Europeans can study at Imperial in-person and live (albeit on a budget) in London.
What you get:
Imperial College branded online MSc degree.
What you need:
At least a GPA of 3.9 and £28k+.
(This is £14k more expensive than a normal masters degree at Imperial)
Where does it say GPA of 3.9? All I've found is 2:1 for UK universities and anywhere between 3-3.5 for US. Also they say it won't say it's online.
They don't need to say it, but because they said the 'minimum' is a 2:1 / 3 GPA it doesn't mean that you will be considered for an interview. If too many people basically applied with the minimum at Imperial, they will just select those with the higher results.
On the safe side, I intentionally said '3.9' GPA / high 1st because it totally beats their requirement of a 2:1 which the competition will try to match. If anyone is seriously considering this university, they should instead get a 3.9 GPA, not a 3 or 2:1.
3.9 GPA sounds pretty restrictive as well for online program.
University of Colorado has an interesting approach to this for Data Science MSc. A series of placement tests rather than GPA.
https://www.coursera.org/degrees/master-of-science-data-scie...
It's 14k more expensive for a normal degree for UK and EU students. It's cheaper for overseas students (normal price £33k), which presumably who this is aimed at.
You can do this MSc elsewhere for way less than £14k. Is that place Imperial? No. Is that a name brand uni that someone from HR will know? No. But there are lots of good engineering-focused schools in the UK that are known within industry and that charge closer to £7k (and you don't have to live in London).
EDIT: just saw is £28k over two years, the absolute most expensive courses in the UK are £28k over ONE year. This is crazy (Imperial is known for this kind of money grubbing).
I'm not sure I understand - why is 28k over two years worse than over one year? That's cheaper per year.
Yep, the point as said in the original comment is that this kind of degree is usually 7k/year. 28k is the absolute max.
University education in the UK has become increasingly commercialised and increasingly expensive. Undergraduate tuition fees are over £9k a year (it was zero when I went to university 20 years ago). Those fees are capped by government but universities are free to charge what they like to overseas students so they are rather treated as cash cows.
> Undergraduate tuition fees are over £9k a year (it was zero when I went to university 20 years ago).
That's wrong.
In 2000 the fees that the UK student had to pay was £1000 a year (£1700 in today's currency), and the government paid about £3000 - a total of £4000, or £6800 in today's money.
Students had to pay this upfront to study. In 2006 these upfront fees were dropped.
Student fees were introduced september 1998, or just over 21 years ago
Technically they're wrong but it's a very minor change to their point
Not really, they were still £4000, its just that the government paid the full amount rather than 75% (20 years ago)
OK, I was rounding. It was closer to 25 years ago but I try not to think about how old I am.
Shamefully the Univ. of Illinois charges $21k for an online master of CompSci.
https://cs.illinois.edu/academics/graduate/professional-mcs-...
University is just an overpriced IQ test anyway.
We want to delude ourselves that everybody has the capability to be a doctor, programmer, engineer, successful business owner etc. We ban employees from using IQ tests, when SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ. Then the best companies hire from the best universities where the best students with the highest SAT go i.e. they just hire the highest IQ people in each year slot.
To fund this delusion we would then have to make university available to everybody, as if a degree is in a vacuum a token of value and not the fact that a degree is relatively scarce. A degree when everybody has one isn't worth as much as when only 50% of people have one.
And of course the law of supply/demand makes degrees more expensive when everybody has one, but makes the degrees less useful economically when everybody has one. Double-dipped.
> University is just an overpriced IQ test anyway.
Only from the point of view of employment market, and only when job skills and university material are widely disparate. (But universities do have a role beyond the employment market.)
> To fund this delusion we would then have to make university available to everybody,
Do you mean university admission or university degrees? In many European countries admission is unlimited. For example several German computer science programs are open to anyone for free, with no SAT-like test requirement to get admitted. Whether you'll pass your exams is a different question.
And arguably if it's all about IQ testing, it should be for free, so you filter for high IQ instead of for kids of wealthy parents.
You're effectively claiming that university teaches nothing, but good degrees teach independence, critical thinking (analysis, synthesis), research skills, writing, teamworking, presentation skills, and much more.
Added to that, your final grade indicates ability x effort. This is significantly more useful than a narrow measure of ability alone.
> good degrees teach independence, critical thinking (analysis, synthesis), research skills, writing, teamworking, presentation skills, and much more.
Sadly there aren't a lot of those. Most degrees teach regurgitating what a textbook says in a fancy way that means you pass the "I understood it" test.
I was an Econ major in college, which is one of the most popular majors across all schools in the US. I don't remember even having a textbook beyond the first couple of statistics courses. We were only ever graded on problem sets or term papers with some kind of statistical analysis component.
That said, my American Economic History course was easily one of the most eye-opening learning experiences, and absolutely one of those courses where "I understood the reading" was necessary. It greatly expanded by ability to understand why the economic story played out the way it did, and how much of it was based on the societal and political context of the times, and not on the findings of bean counters doing stat analyses.
My middle of the road state school CS program was nothing like that. I can remember exactly 1 CS class where memorizing the text book was remotely useful.
That's about $36,000 US. Honest question... is that crazy expensive? How does it compare to other online and on campus programs? I'm guessing it's HIGH?
It is still beyond expensive. Especially at somewhere like Imperial. First you need to get a BSc degree = $28k+ Then you need to fork an extra $36,000 (USD) £28,000 (GBP) for the online masters which you are paying for the University brand and course. Question is, Is it still worth it?
Apart from the obvious debt. The other Cons? loss of networking opportunities, $14k more expensive, small risk of inferiority to a normal degree. But I guess for some with deep pockets, if the University isn't ranked highly in the world or 'Ivy League' or 'Golden Triangle' then for that price? It is not even worth considering.
In The Netherlands fees are about $12k, so yea. You can do the same thing in Amsterdam, and live here.
It's still one of the reasons why I'm dreaming of starting up a coding school at Dutch prices and market it to US citizens.
If anyone is interested in starting this with me, let me know! I'm Dutch, if you're American and know the market, we might make an interesting team. I taught at the New York Code + Design Academy as a bootcamp instructor in Amsterdam before (some US citizens came here because it was cheaper).
It's cheaper in NL because the government subsidizes universities. How would your private coding bootcamp get that subsidy?
The $12K per year is not from the direct subsidy. That all Dutchies know about. Also, Americans can't get that subsidy. IMO, it's almost always a better play for Americans to study abroad since European uni's are qualitatively high and cheap (compared to US), even unsubsidized.
Maybe there are some subsidies I don't know about, but that would not be general knowledge among Dutch people then.
The subsidies from government work like this:
- A student pays $2k per year (ok euro, whatever, can't find it on keyboard)
- The government pays about $8k per year
That adds up to $10k, bachelors are sligthly cheaper (I only heard the numbers for bachelors).
So if you don't want to pay the subsidy, you need to pay the full $10k (bachelor), or $12k (master)[1].
[1] Prices vary per university between $12k to $25k. About 75% of all education is on the $12k level (I've looked at this a lot), some are at $25k such as dentistry and I think med school is a bit more expensive.
Here are some prices (click on master (pdf) ): https://students.uu.nl/praktische-zaken/geldzaken/collegegel...
I'm now seeing that they have jacked it up since I last checked. I'm wondering what other Dutch universities have done.
In the UK, it is steep. Even a relatively expensive, well-known AI MSc will usually set you back at £14k over 2 years (i.e £7k/year)...this is double.
Maybe this reflects that most employers really have no idea what they are doing and how to evaluate whether a degree from somewhere else is worth the same (afaik, Imperial just teach the same stuff as everyone else).
That's the same as international student fees. UK/EU fees are about half that. Salaries in Europe are lower too. £ 28k is around the median household income in the UK or graduate-level salary outside of London. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
> That's the same as international student fees.
I'd assume that's who it's aimed at - GCN/SEA. All of the prestige for all of the cost, with zero the movement.
In America that's not out of line for an online masters program from a well ranked college. Northwestern has a similar online program for $55k.
I did an MSCS in the US about 10 years ago - I don’t remember what it actually cost because my employer paid for it, but I do remember that there was a $5000/year cap on tuition reimbursement and I never got close to that.
Yes, that is high. Georgia Tech offers an Online M.S. in Computer Science for about $7K USD. [1] Graduates are also conferred the same exact degree as on-campus students. Anecdotally, current and former students seem to like this program. (Source: r/OMSCS, old HN threads.)
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign also offers an Online Master of Computer Science. This one costs $21,440. [2]
I haven't gone through either program so I can't personally vouch for quality. However, as an outside observer, GA Tech in particular seems to be high relative to the dollar cost.
If you wish to earn an online degree in computer science for credentialing purposes, the 'prestige' conferred by Imperial seems to be much more expensive, relatively, than that earned from GATech or UIUC. [3]
[1] http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/
[2] https://cs.illinois.edu/academics/graduate/professional-mcs-...
[3] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/co...
Re: #3: The order of these rankings seems incorrect to me but they should provide directional guidance. TL;DR: GATech #17, Imperial #36, UIUC #57.
USA rankings are: UIUC #5, GATech #8 -- see here: https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch....
Nova Southeastern University has an online Masters in Cybersecurity and Info Assurance for $27,500 ($2,700 x 10 classes). They consider one class = 10 hours a week. It's the one I'm doing now.
Guess they want you to take this seriously!
rip off Britain... nothing new
British people are funny.