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Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

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Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#31

Post by gmac »

RomanBob wrote: post #27

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…

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.

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#32

Post by iso1824 »

spzb wrote: post #22

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.

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#33

Post by bonoboTP »

RomanBob wrote: post #27

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…

> 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.

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#34

Post by User23 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #26
skocznymroczny wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unive…

> 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.

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#35

Post by nicoburns »

gmac wrote: post #31
RomanBob wrote: post #27

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…

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.

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#36

Post by shawabawa3 »

iso1824 wrote: post #32
spzb wrote: post #22

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

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#37

Post by hogFeast »

blakesterz wrote: post #6

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?

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).

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#38

Post by rwmj »

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.

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#40

Post by rvz »

arcturus17 wrote: post #30
rvz wrote: post #5

What you get: Imperial College branded online MSc degree. What you need: At least a GPA of 3.9 and £28k+. So, One year for a online masters at £28k also requiring a three year BSc degree at £25k of debt sounds like your really getting your money's worth. /s (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.

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