New online master's degree to train the data scientists of tomorrow

While this program seems interesting, valuable, and a step in the right direction, the minute I read the $60,000 price tag I nearly choked on my gum and quickly pressed the back button. Coursera classes for me at least in the near future, hopefully within the next few years these degree programs will scale a little better and costs will plummet.

Alternatively: 1. Take Coursera's excellent Intro to Data Science for free 2. Spend time doing Kaggle competitions and learning along the way 3. Profit

&gt;&gt; The program will cost $60,000, which school officials &gt;&gt; said compares favorably with other professional degree &gt;&gt; programs. Entry-level data scientists in the San &gt;&gt; Francisco area can command salaries in the $110,000 to &gt;&gt; $130,000 range.<p>$60,000 is laughable. The justification based on salaries in California is laughable.<p>Unless a relocation package to California from anywhere there is internet is included in the fee?<p>Even then......

Here&#x27;s a problem with something like <i>data science</i>:<p>First, the field is not <i>professional</i> like law, medicine, or even some parts of engineering. So, there&#x27;s no licensing, <i>board certification</i>, recognized professional continuing education credits, professional job performance peer-review, legal liability, etc. Instead, you can just say that you have a Master&#x27;s in <i>data science</i> and know some programming, database, statistics, etc.<p>Second, the degree isn&#x27;t really a direct approach to business or entrepreneurship. So, the degree is aimed at making a person an employee. This means that somewhere there must be an employer including one ready to create a job, recruit someone for that job, and pay $120,000+ a year for the person.<p>Now, just who is going to create this job, e.g., put it in their budget and partly bet their career on it? And just why? I mean for what the program taught in programming, database, statistics, something else? And where will the real money actually come from, i.e., who with real P&amp;L responsibility will actually cough up the $120,000 a year plus benefits, office space, travel, etc.? Or, let&#x27;s think about the $120,000 a year: Ballpark, the full cost stands to be twice that, $240,000 a year. After two years on the job, maybe the person has actually delivered some value or is ready to start. So, the two years is $480,000. Heck, guys, even in Silicon Valley, that&#x27;s a large seed round or a small Series A for a whole company and not just one employee slot!<p>I don&#x27;t know but can ask: Are there some people at Berkeley smoking funny stuff?

Given the success of well run hacker schools like Dev Bootcamp and Flatiron Schools, I am surprised no one has yet tried to apply that model to training data scientists. It seems like a sector similarly deprived of properly trained talent and also with a similar initial learning curve to develop the basic skill set.

$60K seems like an awful lot for an on-line program. I think they are getting a lot of internal flack over the pricing. It seems to me that Berkeley should be jumping into on-line learning, as their state funding dries up. The best way to do this consistent with their mission is a mass market approach. By putting in Tiffany pricing, they&#x27;re going to fail both their mission (training data science, educating the public, etc) and they won&#x27;t bring in much money to fill any revenue holes.<p>Harvard&#x27;s online masters degrees are closer to $20K all in.

Do not, do not, do not pay $60,000 for this. If &#x27;data science&#x27; sounds interesting, apply to a strong machine learning program.

Did anyone else notice that about half of the faculty photos are of the person leaning in from the side of the picture?