The Declining Value of a CS Master's Degree (2013)

There is very little a MS in CS can teach you that a BS in CS with some free time and books can&#x27;t pick up. Look at this list from UChicago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;masters.cs.uchicago.edu&#x2F;page&#x2F;12-course-ms-specialization-program" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;masters.cs.uchicago.edu&#x2F;page&#x2F;12-course-ms-specializa...</a><p>Basically your masters program is giving you a choice of 9-12 courses split between:<p>1. Algorithms .<p>2. Your choice of a primer in Java, C, Python or Swift .<p>3. Databases, Compilers, Networking, Comp Arch, Functional Programming OS, Distributed Systems .<p>4. IoS, Product Management, UX, Intro to Software Engineering, Advanced C++, OOP, Android Dev, Web Dev Etc. etc.<p>I really don&#x27;t see anything on that list that is worth paying for a years worth of classes for. Half of that list you already take in undergrad, and the other 40% you should be able to pick up with a book and basic experience and not need a class.<p>Maybe 10% of those classes you would be at an advantage in the classroom?

Regehr is beating around the bush. In my MS it was about 65% Indian BS students and 35% local students (various backgrounds). The local students were working professionals and the Indian students just wanted the credential.<p>The cause is simple, an MS is very advantageous when applying for an H-1B.

That&#x27;s a very US centric view, especially: &#x27;Whereas MS degrees used to be a means for departments to begin vetting future PhD students,...&#x27;<p>This was never the case in Europe, where if you have only a bachelor, people assume something went wrong. The target at university always was a Master&#x27;s degree. The PhD, something you did for your mother, or if you wanted to pursue an academic career.

When I read the title I assumed this was going to be a very different piece, as I&#x27;ve recently been discussing with friends and colleagues about how degrees in general are going to be less and less important over time. This is a digression on the topic of the original post, so I&#x27;m sorry if I shouldn&#x27;t be posting it here.<p>The reasoning goes: the reasons why we need degrees are <i>certification</i> and <i>reputation</i>. By certification I mean that we only let people who we all trust practice medicine, as that kills people directly otherwise. So we restrict the people who can to those with the appropriate degrees.<p>The second point is more relevant to most other careers. A degree is nothing but a more reputable institution &#x27;lending&#x27; reputation to its graduates. The reason this is necessary is because nobody&#x27;s got the time to verify whether every person knows Computer Science - we&#x27;re better off just knowing that people from University of X know CS if UoX says so. Even if you&#x27;re going to personally interview every candidate for a job opening, still relying on degrees helps you filter candidates.<p>The thing is our interactions are recorded to the level that we can now reason about individuals in a way that was not possible before. Why do I need to trust UoX if I can <i>mine your entire internet presence</i> with reasonably comparable effort?<p>I thought from the title that, since CS is the field that is making this shift possible, we&#x27;d be the first one to suffer this influence.

Can we get this tagged with a year (2013)? It&#x27;s especially relevant because the article links to a previous HN discussion about the article.

I would only get a masters while working (that’s what I did). I wouldn’t forgo money and experience to get a masters and I wouldn’t go in debt to do it either.

&gt; Wilfra mentions “disdain for people who don’t have a BS CS who want to get an MS CS.” It was certainly not my intent to express disdain for people who follow this path! Many people pull it off admirably. However, it is a difficult path to follow because it skips all of the introductory programming classes<p>As someone who went this path, I&#x27;m troubled by the amount of assumptions and generalization being made here.<p>To my knowledge any legitimate MS program will require that you have completed an appropriate amount of foundational CS courses before starting the program. I obtained an MSCS after getting a bachelor&#x27;s in a different field, and I had to take 6 CS classes to satisfy the prerequisites. Including the MS the total amount of coursework I completed was slightly greater than the requirements of the university&#x27;s Bachelor&#x27;s degree, plus some graduate-level research.<p>Granted, this is not as much coursework as someone who obtained <i>both</i> a BS and and MS, but from my understanding if you&#x27;re not planning to pursue a PhD (or need it for immigration purposes) getting both is usually not a good use of time anyway.<p>It seems he is trying to specifically criticize programs that fall far short of what I went through, which seems valid. But it would be nice to make that distinction instead of writing us all off as inferior.

The moment I started reading the first paragraph the thought in my head went like, &quot;he is pointing to Online Masters By Georgia Tech..it&#x27;s definitely OMSCS he is now ranting about&quot;. Voila. He was indeed. I have a rigorous bachelor&#x27;s degree in CS. Thee are many many topics which were never covered in that Undergrad course which are done in the Masters. Yeah it&#x27;s maybe not useful if you are making a quickfire app for the play store but there are tons of work and research areas and jobs around for which you need the aademic rigor of having studied an MS atleast. Can we have this debate to rest? You are doing well with a BS, good for you! Education is expensive in the US? Dont do it!<p>Now OMSCS is riling up a few heads here and there which it will. At 7000 USD its a fantastic way for a working professional like me to advance my knowledge. You think these kind of MS courses devalue the degree? These courses are not THAT easy to do and this is 2018, there are fresh disruptive ideas in very field , why not Graduate school ? Hey with enough of these courses you will not need the evil H1B sith lords eating up the jobs here right? Its a Win Win. The market will then decide whos the more worthy MS student they wish to hire.

Stuff like this has me scratching my head.<p>Here&#x27;s my situation:<p>I have a PhD, but in a different, non-CS field.<p>Due to my research and experience, I have a ton of stats and programming experience across a range of languages, from lisp to C++ to javascript to python, to name just a few. I have published stats papers for example.<p>However, I kinda find when I&#x27;m looking at jobs, there&#x27;s a heavy focus on CS grads, or people with finance-type degrees, or engineering degrees, or some combination. And to be honest, there are certain things out of a BS in CS that I probably am not that familiar with, especially low-level hardware type stuff, and network stuff.<p>So, I look at what&#x27;s out there, and getting a BS in CS seems a little odd, for various reasons, in part because I feel like there&#x27;s a lot of redundancy with what I have from my career and education already.<p>A MS in CS, on the other hand, is kinda not so strange to me. I might have to take a couple of preparatory courses, like in OSs, but doesn&#x27;t seem too grueling to me.<p>So I read a thing like this, and it comes across as similar to the sort of gatekeeping that I bump into, like if you have a PhD in another field and then get an MS in CS, you aren&#x27;t a &quot;real&quot; CS grad or something. I&#x27;ve supervised honors CS undergrads, and believe me, I feel pretty confident that my skillset is beyond many of theirs, at least in certain areas. At some point it just seems absurd to me.<p>I share some of the implicit concerns about cash cow MSs, that seem to be part of the current employment climate, not unique to CS, but a symptom of problems with hiring practices and also contributing to it. But it also seems misguided to me to start arguing that someone who completes a MS in CS isn&#x27;t as skilled as someone with a BS.<p>There&#x27;s just so much gatekeeping and pissing contest stuff that goes on in STEM, and it drives me crazy sometimes. It is maybe possible that that english grad actually understands programming, math, and algorithms at a pretty high level (I&#x27;m not an english grad, just making a hypothetical argument).

I think your coursework-only MS needs to be further broken down into those programs that require a BS in CS and those that don’t. There are at least 3 types of MS in that sense. Without this distinction, your article is short-sighted, not realizing that there are actually many rigorous academic MS programs in CS that would not be doable by someone lacking deep knowledge already.<p>Erosion of the value of the MS is not isolated to CS.<p>Forget some universities eroding the MS, entire countries are eroding it. If im not mistaken, Italy is a massive supplier of MS degrees.

The problem with getting a masters in CS is that people just don’t care.<p>I’ve had too many technical interviews where the hiring manager will ask me questions about his favorite ORM or dependency injection framework and turn me down if I never used them before.<p>If I would have known that people in this field are so quick to disregard credentials and previous work experience I would have chosen a different technical subject to major in.

While I do get the sentiment, I&#x27;m not sure what&#x27;s the recommendation. I do think there&#x27;s more to it than gatekeeping, but what does someone who&#x27;s REALLY interested in the topic and wants to change fields do? Get a second BS? I&#x27;m not familiar enough with education, but I&#x27;m under the impression that (at least within STEM -&gt; STEM) it doesn&#x27;t seem popular.

If you&#x27;re going to put the time into a research MS degree, you shouldn&#x27;t be paying for it. Period.

I hired software engineers at a big company in Silicon Valley for many years. I interviewed thousands at university career fairs. I hired dozens of summer interns and full-time people.<p>My take on a master&#x27;s degree is that I treat it like a year or two of experience: experience that the poor fool didn&#x27;t get paid for. Of course, a person with an MS is going to be a stronger candidate than one with just a BS, since they&#x27;ve had more experience. But I can take the engineer with the BS and give him the year of experience myself.<p>Perhaps it&#x27;s different in Europe: they seem to value high education credentials more. I didn&#x27;t care about the status of an MS and neither did most of my colleagues.<p>I think the only reason to do an MS in the USA is if you&#x27;re a foreigner trying to get residency through an H1B visa. There&#x27;s a separate quota category for people with an MS degree earned in the USA.

It seems like we&#x27;ve grown to dislike any and all indicators of maturity in a developer. Young people are smarter, plus easier to exploit too. And you don&#x27;t have to pay them as much, as they don&#x27;t have advanced degrees.

As a soon-to-graduate Masters CS student in a top research university, I&#x27;d like to share, for what it seems, a different opinion and experience about this matter.<p>I came here from a 3rd world country that lacks a good education; Most of my CS experience and knowledge, at that time, came from the Internet, books, and personal projects. After working hard, I was accepted to this university as an MSc student.<p>I have never learned this amount of quality content as I&#x27;ve been learning in these past 2 years in this MSc program. Deep topics and subjects like programming language theory, low-level knowledge in distributed systems and machine learning, all this being taught by excellent researchers in their respective fields.<p>This was the first year, the course requirements part of the MSc program. Now I&#x27;m halfway through my research, and again, I&#x27;ve been learning tons. I&#x27;ve been writing <i>very</i> interesting code, building amazing things, writing papers, and working on my own ideas. I&#x27;ve never been this close to amazing scientists and engineers. This is priceless, in my opinion.<p>I&#x27;ve worked in the industry (before the MSc. program), it was super great. But I can confidently say that the MSc. program has made me a better engineer and taught me how to do proper research. I&#x27;m sure this may vary from university to university, department to department, and most importantly, from advisor to advisor. But that has been my experience!

I wonder what he would have to say for my example:<p>I did a 4 year BS CS degree and graduated in 2005. I did calculus, linear algebra, real analysis, mathematical statistics, etc. until 3rd year and then the typical CS curriculum of compilers, distributed systems, programming languages, artificial intelligence, etc.<p>I&#x27;ve been working in industry for 12 years doing typical systems&#x2F;software development, but got involved in more &quot;Data Sciency&quot; things in the last 2 years. I liked it so much that I decided I want to change career directions and move away from just &quot;building software&quot; to more &quot;building software that runs on data as the fuel&quot;, like machine learning&#x2F;deep learning&#x2F;NLP related problems.<p>So okay, I have no real problem with doing anything that involves manipulating the data, building pipelines, or implementing things in Tensorflow or Gensim, etc it&#x27;s just programming. Easy, peasy. I also understand most of the mathematics, and what I forgot was not too hard to &quot;re-learn&quot; very quickly.<p>The problem is it is difficult to apply for jobs as a Data Scientist when you only have a BS CS, even with real world experience. I&#x27;m not &quot;formally qualified&quot; as a Data Scientist.<p>So I enrolled for a 2 year course-based MS (1 year course work, 1 year dissertation). Basically it allows me to slap on my resume that (a) I have done university accredited courses in mathematical optimization, machine and statistical learning, deep learning, ethics, big data, etc. and I suppose the dissertation says that I can do more advanced work on data in an academically rigorous fashion. So basically I&#x27;m using the MS to change career trajectories 10 years after doing a BS CS.<p>I suppose you could do the courses through MOOCs but I appreciate the dissertation part as I am forced to read journal articles and learn how to do things more &quot;rigorously&quot; than I would otherwise in a plain old MOOC.<p>Isn&#x27;t this a viable option for pursuing an MS? I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s necessary directly after an undergraduate, but after a decade or so you might want to &quot;specialize&quot; into something that didn&#x27;t really exist when you did your undergrad. BTW, I did this part time while working (you can kiss away your weekends and evenings).

My masters was a waste of time and money - except that it’s been a job requirement for multiple jobs.<p>None of which asked for proof.<p>I think my bachelors was too besides the social experience of college (I’m from a small town).<p>Most of what I learned was already familiar to me from developing as a hobby and I learned way more from studying stuff I was interested in than bubble-sorting and SAP case studying my way into boredom for an extra year.

UK based here, I have had a mix of friends that got a Bsc and a few that got Masters. In terms of jobs and salary nearly all are on a equal footing. I agree with the guy that said a Master&#x27;s is more a route into research as few employers specifically seek it or reward it and if they do it&#x27;s a very small number.

In my opinion the biggest issue in general is the distance between ”the educational world and the professional world”. There’s so much more to being a great engineer than knowing the ins and outs of x, y or z. In reality you have to compromise, with everything, almost all the time. They don’t teach you that at school, you learn that while working. People who just graduated (atleast here in Sweden) think they are pro’s when graduating, only to realize they’re real green’ies when they start working. If they don’t realize it right away, they do realize it a couple of years in.<p>I’ve been working as an embedded software developer for 7+ years at different #1 in their field companies without a degree. I’ve worked with a lot of newly graduates and the above is my experience.<p>The best technical solution is not always the best solution.

Its very useful if you want to come into this country. If you are in India its hard to get a job in America. If you come here for a master its much easier to get a job here. The salary difference between there and here can be massive.

I was an exception to what regehr said in at least one regard: my public speaking improved pretty dramatically while working toward a coursework-only MS. I don&#x27;t think it was anything more complicated than just needing to hit a lifetime threshold of presenting in front of people some number of times.<p>The rest seems pretty valid, although at this stage, I doubt if there&#x27;s any well-founded way to determine whether a given degree will prove to be worthwhile in a purely financial sense, if there ever was. With rising costs it&#x27;s probably just somewhat less likely...

My MS program was very geared towards giving a foundation to pursue a PhD. There were some aspects of it that were tangentially helpful in my career as a software developer, but it definitely was not the focus. Thinking back I feel like it was that way because that is what all of the professors knew. Few of them had experience outside academia so it makes sense that the program would reflect that. Maybe things were different at other institutions. This was also more than a decade ago, so things could be different now in general.

I’m not sure where I fit into this equation. My employer is paying for me to get a CS M.Eng in ML&#x2F;AI on the side while I work. I’m learning way more than I would have bothered - or had the hardware and guidance - to learn on my own, like parallel processing, CAD, 3D printing, and eventually robotics.<p>I don’t have much interest in a CS MS. I don’t really see the point of it. If my degree goes well and after a few more years in the field I decide I want to specialize much further, I’ll just get a Ph.D.<p>My $.02

I always thought MS in USA was seen as failed PhD (e.g., did not make it past proposal stage). So perhaps these coursework MS degrees are actually increasing the value of the MS!

I&#x27;m a (primarily backend&#x2F;API) web developer, with 5 years of experience at this point, and I&#x27;ve been planning to apply to Georgia Tech OMSCS in order to branch out into different specializations like ML and data science. A better foundation in algorithms etc. wouldn&#x27;t hurt either--my bachelor&#x27;s is not CS-related.<p>This article gave me pause, since I&#x27;ve never heard much skepticism expressed about a Comp Sci MS before. Is it really so overrated?

Tsk tsk—not a single iota of quantitative analysis. How can we know that the value of a CS degree is declining? By what measure of “value”?<p>This is pure “appeal to authority” as the author is a CS professor-—better to discuss Aline Lerner’s research which he references

(2013)<p>Discussion at the time (over 100 comments): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5786720" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5786720</a>

At my alma mater the CS Masters program is a total cash cow for the department. 23K a semester multiplied by a few hundred students and you&#x27;re talking a few million a semester.

Please change the title to have the year in it. This is from 2013.

Still have to write my master thesis.<p>But I have no hopes of instant value.<p>I guess it&#x27;s good to have it when I&#x27;m older to get into a management position or something

The crux of the issue here seems to be that the author believes that a &quot;true&quot; MSCS is one that can only be obtained by those who have first completed a bachelor&#x27;s degree in CS. We might want to consider whether that is a valid definition or not.<p>This isn&#x27;t really a brand-new thing either. One of my best instructors was a seasoned industry vet (former senior architect at a major firm, member of W3C and author of several of their proposals, etc.), and he had a bachelor&#x27;s in Physics followed by an MSCS... from Stanford. Are we to say that his masters is not legitimate or that he is an inferior engineer because he technically did not complete a bachelors in the subject first?<p>To me it seems to be a problem of defining in general what the purpose of a masters degree should really be. In some fields it is used as an extension of a bachelor&#x27;s in the same field, while in others it is used to supplement undergraduate education with skills in a different field, typically for the purposes of better rounding out the student&#x27;s knowledge in preparation for pursuing certain career paths.<p>For instance, consider a professional degree like the MBA, where you can come in having a bachelor&#x27;s in literally any subject.<p>What the author is noticing is that universities are increasingly offering the MSCS as something more like a professional degree instead of solely as an academic-track stepping stone to the PhD. And clearly he does not like this.<p>This issue seems to highlight the dual-purpose nature of universities as vehicles for training both practitioners as well as researchers. On the practitioner side, I think there is immense value in being able to supplement a bachelor&#x27;s degree in one subject with a different set of skills obtained in a second degree. E.g., many people take the track of getting a science or engineering bachelors and then an MBA afterwards. The combination of those two disciplines can provide a very powerful skill set.<p>What seems to be happening is that the increasingly tech-centric nature of our economy is causing the skills offered by CS to start to make a lot of sense for some people as a form of secondary training. Much like business, technology intersects virtually every industry, and those who have training in a specific subject domain <i>in addition to</i> CS can be highly effective problem-solvers, much more so than those trained in just one or the other.<p>Sure, perhaps we can argue about whether an &quot;MSCS&quot; is really the most appropriate vehicle for such people. But being one of those people myself I will say that my experience does not at all reflect what the author claims (see my other comment re: coursework). The reality is that there are an increasing number of people who want to supplement their undergraduate training with CS, and this is a good thing. The author is correct in noting the distinction between this demographic and those who are on a research&#x2F;academic track, but I&#x27;m just not convinced that we can definitively say that an MSCS must always require a bachelors in CS.

(2013)