The $6,600 Master's Degree.

this is huge. I've been saying (as well as probably most other coders), that education should go in this direction. It just seems obvious. I even did a Bachelors paper on this subject (in combination with FOSS) and studied the amount of savings it would lead to if implemented for high school education.

Additionally, I graduated with a BA in 2011 and the entire process felt archaic to me, filled with wasted time, and more importantly costing lots of my hard-earned money. The only way I was able to get the degree was with help of family and by taking CLEP tests for over 70 hours. (rougly equivalent to 23 courses), the CLEP tests only costed in total around $500, and allowed me to skip 2 years of study. (so if anyone hasnt heard of CLEP and is low on funds and wants to get a degree I would highly recommend them :)

I'm definately going to look into this in more detail though, getting a Masters would be nice and if all it costed was $6,600 for the 2 years (and study was remote) I think i'd be able to manage it as a full-time developer with a family.

I'm in favor of furthering online education, moocs, educational content in general and even certification programs along these lines.

But I also have to ask: If this degree costs 20% of a traditional Master's education, is it even worth 20% as much? The degree clearly states "Online Master".

We might see a value developing here, but there is an equal chance that the early students get ripped off big time. They might learn a lot, but are they really getting their money's worth in additional skill marketability?

In Europe school actually cost this much (average), with campus and classroom. Maybe, the question is asked the wrong way in this article. Why does education cost student 50000$ a year in US?

Well in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5757226 a lost of posters were arguing how brain work could never be replaced, nor could technology be used to lower the need for highly-educated creative professionals.

Professor/teacher is pretty much the quintessential example of highly-educated brain work, isn't it ?

> He estimated the school would have to hire one full-time teacher for every 100 online students as opposed to one full-time teacher for every 10 or 20 students who study on campus.

Also from the article:

> Looking back on it now, this experience had far more in common with the Middle Ages than the world of 2013. What's the difference between watching a lecture in an auditorium and watching HD-quality video in one's living room or beach cabana?

This is the situation that was hit at the end of the Roman Empire, the beginning of what would later turn into the dark-ages. Plenty of highly educated people, ever more and more, and ... no reason to have them. No reason to have all that many farmers either. This was a result of using iron-age technology to it's fullest potential. You should see some Roman surgery tools, they're amazing. They're much more specialized than "our" surgery tools. Surgeons today have 10 kinds of knives, syringes, stitches, compresses, all very general tools. Roman surgeons had hundres of tools, each a weird metal thingamabob specifically built for one singular procedure. We use special tools today in some cases, but mostly very general tools like 5 sizes of the same gripper, tweezers, ... that sort of thing.

They used iron to it's fullest potential, and we use computers, but the end result is the same : massive population numbers, yet the economy only justifies ~1% to maybe 5% of the population, with most of even that employed in either the government itself or the military. At some point, even slaves become a losing proposition (better to give those precious jobs to family, and keep in mind that Roman slaves had rights, and were more akin to someone holding a job. I'm not saying slaves in the Roman empire had rights comparable to Americans (they lacked voting, for example), but they certainly couldn't be killed randomly or on a whim). No goods shortages, quite the opposite : almost universal abundance (not for expensive goods, but things like food, clothing, furniture, cutlery, apartments, ... no shortages). Not that anyone was happy with just having what everyone else had, no matter how comfortable it actually was (it evolved - for the better, for almost a century). Unemployment numbers hit ridiculously high proportions and never went back down (like in the poor centers of Euro cities now, 80-90% unemployment in areas the size of towns), and ever more of the famed Roman armies were dedicated purely to keeping order in cities. Enemies, ideological ones and physical ones, which had no hope whatsoever of surviving a single confrontation with a single centuria (the unit a centurion commanded) became able to do large amounts of damage due to help from dissatisfied locals, and the situation just systematically kept getting worse.

So realistically this is just another indication that the middle ages will come back. Expect atheism, or realism in general, to lose a lot of it's appeal, because it's only message to 99% of the population will be what it was just before the dark ages :

The only useful thing you could realistically do for others is to die, right now.

I was going to say the same thing. I come from a country where Higher Education is free(yes yes I know - paid for by the taxpayer), but I have personally studied in the UK paying 3450 pounds a year (~5300 USD) in one of the best universities in that country. Yes I know it went up now to 9000 pounds(~13600 USD) but still, it's a lot less than what they charge for education in the US, which I don't understand.