Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

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What is AT&T allegedly bringing to the table? Are we assuming that there are people who want to work there, who will view this certification as advancing that goal, is that it?

I read the http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/faq/ , and found only this hint:

Why is AT&T the corporate collaborator for this initiative?

As a premier global communications company and a champion for innovation in education, AT&T will provide technology access, connectivity and products at inception, as well as evolving service and platform support. The company will serve on an advisory board and, where appropriate, offer corporate projects for credit, be a source from which Georgia Tech draws curriculum content and guest instructors and offer internship opportunities to select students. AT&T will tap into the program to train its own employees and will recruit graduates.

Technology access, connectivity, service and platform support? Aren't those basically solved problems for Udacity?

Advisory board? Does GaTech have corporate sponsorship on the advisory board of their other Master's programs, setting curriculum? (Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't, but I doubt they think they need to.)

I think the real reason you have AT&T involved is that without that sort of influence, this degree program wouldn't have happened until years later. Universities, and boards of regents, are deeply conservative, risk-averse institutions in some ways. There's also a lot of cost to startup a program like this, and public universities aren't exactly rolling in money right now.

Beyond that, a lot of companies have some kind of tuition assistance for graduate degrees, and a lot of companies are having trouble finding skilled talent to begin with. So it's a way to save money and improve recruiting.

The business models of companies like Udacity and Coursera are probably going to rely heavily on the hunger of companies the size of AT&T, Google, etc. for a steady supply of trained workers. Somebody's got to pay the bills and make the VCs rich.

I like to think of this as shifting part of the cost of the education from the individual to the company that's ultimately benefitting from it. Of course, one might worry about some unspecified negative influence from the corporate sponsors, but in this incredibly transparent educational environment, such influences would be pretty obvious and self-defeating.

Also, "AT&T will be the founding corporate collaborator of the program, contributing $2 million to the initiative..."

They say "AT&T hires about 30,000 employees a year" and that AT&T will provide projects for OMS CS students to work on, as well as internship and job opportunities. It also says they will be having some of their employees get the degree.

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