An Online Education Breakthrough? A Master's Degree for a Mere $7,000

Posted September 28, 2016

External Article: The New York Times

Julia Melkers, associate professor in the School of Public Policy, was referenced in "An An Online Education Breakthrough? A Master's Degree for a Mere $7,000" by The New York Times with regards to her research on Georgia Tech's online master's program in computer science.

Excerpt:

The on-campus program enrolls only 300 students or so, nearly all top students from other countries. It isn’t easy to find room for more. Lecture halls and classrooms are expensive, and competition between departments for space is fierce. The online program has nearly 4,000 students, the large majority American. Many have organized study groups in their home cities. At that scale, there is almost always someone else online, day or night, to talk to about a thorny problem in machine learning.

The combination of a prestigious department, traditional degree and drastically lower price was something new in American higher education. Joshua Goodman, an economist at Harvard, decided to study the program, along with Julia Melkers from Georgia Tech and Amanda Pallais from Harvard. They were interested in whether Georgia Tech was simply recruiting students who would have enrolled elsewhere — or if the program was creating something new.

For the full article, read here.