At least in my university, MS students were usually paying full tuition, with the understanding that they'll take classes and leave for (presumably) high-paying job.
On the other hand, PhD students were usually paying no tuition at all -- instead, after getting their masters-equivalent, they were expected to do the research for a few years and therefore "pay back" by advancing the science.
(of course the fun fact was that one could drop out half-way from PhD program and get a MS degree.. but this did not happen very often)
Indeed, I've been considering getting a PhD. The situation in Sweden is quite different to yours however. To begin with, all university education is free, and we further get a student grant of ca. $300 USD / month and access to an almost free student loan for up to 6 years. PhD students all get a salary of ca. $3k USD / month. Also, here you don't get a PhD "instead" of a master's -- a master's is rather a prerequisite to getting a PhD, in practice if not formally. Generally, the path to a PhD in Sweden is: 3 years for bachelor's degree -> 2 years for master's -> 4 years for PhD.
The Georgia Tech OMSCS program is very good and affordable (10K or less). It's also the 7th ranked CS program in the world. And, you can and do interact with professors, not just TAs. I'm an OMSCS grad. I would do it again and strongly recommend it. I think programs like it are the future of higher education.
OMSCS student here. I agree with the parent. However, the one downside of the program is that since the marginal cost of admitting an additional student is very low relative to the tuition amount, GT has an incentive to not be very selective about who they let in. From a democratization-of-educational-opportunities perspective, that's good: if you can hack it, then you can hack it, regardless of what formal qualifications you might be missing. But this program is the real deal courseware-wise, and that results in a lot of those under-prepared students taking classes that they just can't keep up in. Lots of those students end up washing out of the program... after paying GT a semester or two of tuition.
Example: in the Intro to OS course I'm about to finish, we started with 700+ students and are now down to about 340. The projects are typical schoolhouse stuff for systems programming: C programs that manage memory, use sockets, IPC constructs, pthreads, RPC libraries, etc. One of the guys on the class slack just posted that when testing & debugging the projects, he just printed stuff to stdout... for the whole semester... because he doesn't know - and didn't bother to learn - how to use a debugger.
>One of the guys on the class slack just posted that when testing & debugging the projects, he just printed stuff to stdout... for the whole semester... because he doesn't know - and didn't bother to learn - how to use a debugger.
I really enjoyed Electrical & Computer Engineering, and took CS classes as electives. Felt the math and engineering courses grew my brain, and the CS courses were enough to get me into software. The CS majors I knew seemed to enjoy their choice less!
I did a non-cs undergrad to cs grad path... It was hard. I wasn't admitted to the program without fulfilling almost all the core CS undergrad classes. This meant that between the prerequisites and the actual grad classes, I took over 120 credit hours of pure math and CS classes over the course of 5 years.
Obviously not every school has the same demands as others, and there are certainly a lot of degree farms that take foreign students money and funnel them though, but I'm not sure that the authors points ring very true... certainly not for everyone.
And then there's my old manager who found a negative correlation between a programmer's ability and them holding a PhD in CS. FWIW, he had a MS in Software Engineering himself and he said that the correlation only seemed to hold for CS PhD's, not PhD's in other sciences. My department had a number of PhD's, but only one in CS and that one was hired a few years after that manager left.
Correlation isn't causation and all that, but it does bias you a certain way.
Yeah, past a certain point you realize how shallow degrees are, as they're merely an organization's approval that you studied something and demonstrated some level of aptitude of it.
Which is to say, you don't need a degree to study/learn things.
Though that approval is helpful in opening doors to employment when you're young, it again is not needed when your history of experience, abilities, and work can do the same later in your career...
Readit News
At least in my university, MS students were usually paying full tuition, with the understanding that they'll take classes and leave for (presumably) high-paying job.
On the other hand, PhD students were usually paying no tuition at all -- instead, after getting their masters-equivalent, they were expected to do the research for a few years and therefore "pay back" by advancing the science.
(of course the fun fact was that one could drop out half-way from PhD program and get a MS degree.. but this did not happen very often)
It has paid for itself many, many times over since then.
Example: in the Intro to OS course I'm about to finish, we started with 700+ students and are now down to about 340. The projects are typical schoolhouse stuff for systems programming: C programs that manage memory, use sockets, IPC constructs, pthreads, RPC libraries, etc. One of the guys on the class slack just posted that when testing & debugging the projects, he just printed stuff to stdout... for the whole semester... because he doesn't know - and didn't bother to learn - how to use a debugger.
Lol that's like the best way to debug C
[1]: https://teachyourselfcs.com/
Obviously not every school has the same demands as others, and there are certainly a lot of degree farms that take foreign students money and funnel them though, but I'm not sure that the authors points ring very true... certainly not for everyone.
Correlation isn't causation and all that, but it does bias you a certain way.
Which is to say, you don't need a degree to study/learn things.
Though that approval is helpful in opening doors to employment when you're young, it again is not needed when your history of experience, abilities, and work can do the same later in your career...