It comes with the Georgia Tech brand name associated with it. College degrees are 20% content, 80% reputation and branding. For instance, if you want to earn $100k/yr, the way to do so with the least amount of effort is to attend a school with a great reputation. Reputation in academia has much more to do with faculty prestige and research, not actual academic rigor for students, but most companies find it far easier to trust the brand than build effective interview and recruiting processes. Ergo, brands matter.
Agreed. But if GT keeps offering more and more Master degrees this way, I can see them cheapening their reputation. It's a quick way for universities to make money, but at a cost of reputation.
Yes, to an extent, but as strange as it sounds, you can jeopardize your reputation with the companies that hire your graduates and still maintain your status as a prestigious research institution. I think the gamble GT is taking in this context is that this type of degree is terminal and largely self-directed, meaning the primary recipients will be self-educators who want it specifically for practical application. That means they are essentially just people who will learn and apply the material anyway, but they want the paper credentials to go with it. That reduces their risk.
I'm not sure pure numbers will be the issue. Whether GT grants 25 or 2500 MS degrees in Analytics is irrelevant; the quality of the graduates with that degree is what matters.
Provided they do not relax their standards, I don't see there being an issue. An MS appeals to professionals who are unlikely to relocate for a program. I'm in a suburb of NYC; if I wanted an MS, I'd have to consider commuting to Princeton or Yale, at an hour and a half to two hours each way, to the much closer NYU or Columbia but with similar travel times once the intersection of mass transit schedules and class times are considered, or to the state school 15 minutes away with a much less prestigious program.
Meanwhile, GT has a prestigious program at a cost comparable to or better than the state school, with no commuting issues. It's the program I'd go into, and I live close to a surfeit of prestigious CS programs! There are plenty of qualified applicants across the country that don't have the option of "drive to your favorite of the 3 nearby Ivies".
If they keep the admissions process and curriculum/evaluation equivalent between online and in-person, then going online greatly expands their applicant pool but doesn't necessarily dilute it. If the program decides to relax their standards to get even more money, then they'll have problems, but that strikes me as being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Accreditation. Simply put, the Udacity course is just something you do, while the GT Udacity course is an accredited college course from a university whose accreditation and reputation stands behind the course.
One is a Udacity Certification, the other is an Accredited Georgia Tech Masters Degree.
"Udacity is not an accredited institution and we do not directly provide college credit. We have, however, partnered with Georgia Tech to offer an accredited, fully online Master’s Degree in Computer Science. While the courses are hosted on Udacity, the degree is conferred by Georgia Tech. Learn more about our Georgia Tech partnership"
It's another department jumping into the online delivery space. Looks like they're reusing a lot of the same policies that worked for the CS program. They are partnering with edX as Udacity's focus as a company has gone from university partnerships to their nanodegree model.
Just a heads up, but the GA courses on Udacity don't have any of the programming assignments anymore only the multiple choice quizzes and videos. They were removed when the OMCS program was introduced I think because GA wanted to use those assignments internally.
