Georgia Tech has done the unthinkable: they shaved the price of an online master’s degree in computer science to the absolute minimum – charging $510 per three credit course – offering people a chance to get a top-notch degree without going broke. Some interesting findings:
In theory, on-campus programs offer direct access to professors and peers. Mr. Isbell [a senior associate dean at the College of Computing] began noticing differences in that respect between his residential and online students. He was interacting much more with students who had never set foot on the Atlanta campus.
“I never see students at my office hours,” he said. A few linger after class to ask scheduling questions, but that’s about it.
Many of the thousands of online students, by contrast, are constantly interacting on a website set up for that purpose, where Isbell can log on and help. “I can jump in and say: ‘No, you should be thinking about this,’ ” he said. “I spend more time helping them with assignments online than I ever do on campus. The experience for the students and for me is much richer online.”
The on-campus program enrolls only 300 students or so, nearly all top students from other countries. It isn’t easy to find room for more. Lecture halls and classrooms are expensive, and competition between departments for space is fierce. The online program has nearly 4,000 students, the large majority American. Many have organized study groups in their home cities. At that scale, there is almost always someone else online, day or night, to talk to about a thorny problem in machine learning.
The combination of a prestigious department, traditional degree and drastically lower price was something new in American higher education. Joshua Goodman, an economist at Harvard, decided to study the program, along with Julia Melkers from Georgia Tech and Amanda Pallais from Harvard. They were interested in whether Georgia Tech was simply recruiting students who would have enrolled elsewhere — or if the program was creating something new.
Fortunately, a quirk in the program created a kind of natural experiment. In the first year, Mr. Isbell and his colleagues didn’t want to be overwhelmed by students while working out the inevitable kinks. So they ranked the applicants by their undergraduate grade point average and cut off admission at 3.26, yielding 500 students. Mr. Goodman and his colleagues compared the students just below the cutoff with those just above. Using a national database of college enrollment, they investigated where the rejected students enrolled instead.
Overwhelmingly, the answer was nowhere.
Barely 10 percent chose a different program. The vast majority simply didn’t pursue a master’s degree at all. The demographic profile of the online students shows why. The traditional on-campus students in the Georgia Tech master’s program tend be young and just out college, with an average age of 24. The average age of the online students was 35. A sizable number were 45, 50 and older. Ninety percent were currently employed.
People with jobs and families can’t just pull up stakes and move to Atlanta or Los Angeles for a year or two to study computer science. Nor can they afford to spend $57,000 out of pocket for a credential. Georgia Tech offered a prestigious, high-quality computer science program that was convenient and affordable. It was the only one.
So, if we want to see an additional 10,000 US workers with master’s degrees in computer science, get our universities to follow Georgia Tech’s lead. Perhaps the US government could subsidize the expenses, so that we can get more people working in advanced computing who otherwise have no where to go.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/151378805222
