Programmers in Bangalore will soon boast Georgia Tech degrees without even having a passport.
There are plenty of online courses available from prestigious universities like MIT and Harvard — most of them free. There are plenty of online degree programs, too — most of them not free and in fact not even discounted. So this Georgia Tech program, made possible by a $2 million grant from AT&T, is something else. It could be the future of technical education. It could be the beginning of the end for elite U.S university programs. Or it might well be both.
The online classes are all free, by the way, it’s just the degree that costs money.
This technical capability has been around for several years but no prestigious U.S. university has made the jump before now because it’s too scary. Georgia Tech is launching its program, I believe, to gain first-mover advantage in this new industry, which I suppose is education, maybe training, but more properly something more like brand sharing or status conferral.