USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts
91–100 of 261 posts
Re: USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know that USC was that prestigious outside of the sports/marching band arenas. But charging the same price for online is horrible. Honestly, though, it says a lot about CSUs that you can go there, borrow two thirds less, and still make more money than a USC grad.
Their film school is ostensibly great, turning out directors such as Judd Apatow and George Lucas
What is the median student debt for USC film school graduates, and what percentage of them default?
Re: USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is. It's a legitimate degree and they won't let you slack off. Some of the classes have a metric ton of homework and projects, and the deadlines can be pretty rough. I know my coworker was sweating after work a few times (this was pre-pandemic) and told me they'd be spending a few evenings implementing project work.
I remember a coworker telling me he had to learn assembly in a week for a major assignment his very first semester. And that caused a good chunk of his cohort to drop the program.
I'd give 20 to 1 that was CS6035. Project 1 is a ret2libc buffer overflow, and it's a bit of a wake-up call for many students. Certainly was for me, though I got through it.
I can't say enough good things about OMSCS. I'm finishing my 7th class and got an SWE role during my 5th. It's the real deal.
Re: USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Harvard Extension grad here. Even though most people taking Extension School classes are casual class-takers, the liberal arts degree programs for undergraduates and graduate students are well established ( https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/10/7/extension-schoo... ). While the Extension School does offer certificate programs, it's the Harvard Business School that has really benefited IMHO. They are really pushi…
What job can you get after liberal arts degree? I am guessing politics?
Depends on the degree and the person.
I completed a history degree. For my thesis I carried out a computer content analysis of Xinhua (新華社), China’s official news agency, to gauge Beijing’s foreign policy priorities in Southeast Asia during the Deng Xiaoping era. My faculty advisor said that I could get a job as an analyst if I were willing to move to Washington (I was not interested in doing this).
Re: USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts
#95And almost all got loans backed by the US government that they won’t be able to repay and will fall on the US taxpayer to cover. Essentially USC bilked the US taxpayers out of millions, with these poor students serving as the unfortunate middlemen. Solution: make the universities have some skin the game - cover 20% of the principal on defaulted loans.
Your proposal pretty much already exists (although at the 10/90 split level). If your program doesn't have 10% covered by non us government loans in any year you can lose eligibility for any us government loans going forward. It's happened before, in fact I think that is what forced DeVry to shut down.
Re: USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts
#96Colleges have been quietly expanding the last 10-15 years with programs like these. They do it discreetly, sometimes with different campuses across town or simply online. From what I've seen, they may be an entirely separate school so as to not be reported on the same way (a 7% acceptance rate and high job placement rates at blue chip firms makes a difference when the major currency of universities is prestige), sinc…
OTOH, you have schools like (the actual) Georgia Tech offering an online MS in CS for an affordable price: https://omscs.gatech.edu/
They also started an online MS in Cybersecurity in 2019. Three different tracks. The policy track only needs 1 CS'ish class. The Information Security track students would probably be better off just going for the MS in CS instead. A lot of students start in the Information Security track but switch over to Policy once they take the intro to info security class. All the classes in the Info Sec track are the same as the CS degree except they cost more. The energy/power track students don't seem to really exist. I'm done with 7/10 classes.
Re: USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know that USC was that prestigious outside of the sports/marching band arenas. But charging the same price for online is horrible. Honestly, though, it says a lot about CSUs that you can go there, borrow two thirds less, and still make more money than a USC grad.
USC is just as prestigious as UCLA. They've easily got the most prestigious film program in the world.
usc is a money-oriented pay-for-prestige institution, and most folks know it, which is why it always lags ucla (and others) in prestige outside of the cinema school (even that has been bought, by old-money hollywood). other programs, like engineering, are solid, but suffer from the overall shallowness of usc’s image, as well as the many scandals that have further tarnished the brand.
Re: USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
All non-thesis CS master degrees are a bit suspect. They are basically a few more courses, usually at night for professional students, but increasingly online. I'm not really sure what kind of value they add beyond looking good on a resume. Thesis masters are increasingly rare these days as American schools allow you to jump straight to a PhD program (Europe is a bit more rigid here). The other kind of Masters degree…
I've spent a lot of time interviewing data scientists for an entry-level position lately, and it's pretty shocking to hear them describe their master's "capstone project", which often consists of a group project with some pre-cleaned data. A few calls to sklearn later, bam, an M.S.
Seems that all schools added a "data science" specialization a few years ago, but of course they can't suddenly become good at it if they haven't done it before.
My master in a no-name French tech school was mostly a software development curriculum, with some DL and scikit-learn courses tacked on. That was for the paper, the actual skills came on the job and online.
Re: USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts
#99I think the biggest reason why the price is so high (beyond the brand, and the fact that the government policy results in everyone getting whatever loan amount they want) is because they're contractually required to share a huge chunk of that money with 2U (the same company that bought EDx's assets). The article mentions that the old contract stated that about 60% of revenue gets shared with 2U but then there was a r…
The vast majority of elite institutions are completely unwilling to take the risks to capture 100% of the online revenue pie: a) They are unwilling to spend lots of money on upfront content development costs without knowing future revenue. b) They are unwilling to hire a bunch of temporary workers to help spin up new content and then re-allocate them. c) They are unwilling to adopt (aggressive) modern marketing techn…
All of these are true except for d and e. I get multiple calls per week some weeks asking for donations from various deparments, having never donated to my college and demonstrated no willingness to do so. If they can panhandle from alumni, why not call prospective students? Too low of an ROI or are they just playing hard to get?
Re: USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember a coworker telling me he had to learn assembly in a week for a major assignment his very first semester. And that caused a good chunk of his cohort to drop the program.
I'd give 20 to 1 that was CS6035. Project 1 is a ret2libc buffer overflow, and it's a bit of a wake-up call for many students. Certainly was for me, though I got through it. I can't say enough good things about OMSCS. I'm finishing my 7th class and got an SWE role during my 5th. It's the real deal.
My guess was CS6265 which similarly jumps pretty quickly into reverse engineering and binary exploitation. One of my favorite classes!