Mar.08 -- Sebastian Thrun, Udacity co-founder and the first head of the Google car project, discusses Udacity's new hiring partners and President Trump's policies with Bloomberg's Caroline Hyde on "Bloomberg Technology."
Udacity is revolutionary. If you want to work with Machine Learning and AI or work for Google, Amazon, Facebook, or in Self Driving Cars -- it's ALL possible. And anyone from any background in any country of the world can do it.
What Trump and his supporters don't understand is companies go where the talents are. If Trump closes the door to talents, companies will go outside looking for the talents. Udacity is doing a great job educating the world. US should welcome them with open arms. Instead those talents will benefit countries that will turn around to compete with the US.
The robotics nano-degree is $2400, as is the Self-Driving-Car Nano-Degree. Why? How is this democratizing education? This is extremely expensive for non silicon valley folks like myself. I am able to take free courses as a research assistant in my university so taking these courses online from udacity is extremely expensive for me. I get $22k/year as a graduate student and I was still not able to get financial aid. This really seems more like a program to take people who are already making good money in engineering and give them more skills. Valuabl? Yes, but not democratizing education. It is disappointing to me how all the mooc websites; Coursera, Edx, Udacity have turned now to a profit based approach. I am a huge fan of the materials, don't get me wrong, but just don't act like this is charity work.
Adam Stevens Well, lucky you who got your degree for free and now are getting additional education that someone else is paying for it. one more thing, I wonder how you came up with the $2,400 price tag for a Nanodegree. Or have I everything wrong?
Well I did not get my degree for free but even if I were still paying for the courses at my university the in state tuition is $1400 per course. The moocs have the opportunity to reach so many more people than traditional universities. I dont know maybe Udacity is reinvesting the money to provide more services. It is just really difficult for me to afford these nanodegrees as a graduate student. You can check the price for any of the nanodegrees. On the new robotics nanodegree website it says the cost for one term is $1200 and there are two terms bringing the cost to $2400. www.udacity.com/robotics
Adam Stevens Thanks for the info. Perhaps the price is determined by the resources required for the course. I was curious because I registered for the Deep Learning Foundation and it's $400 for a 4 month course, but I guess it requires less physical resources. Maybe I have a different perspective when it comes to education, particularly in these fields which seem so hot. I see it as an investment with a big payoff in a relatively short period. I am not in an environment where I can learn this stuff effectively any cheaper, but you probably have that opportunity and I would suggest that you go for it. I do owe you an apology for not surrounding my comment about the cost of your education with . College education is so damn expensive, it simply doesn't make sense, but some see it as an investment that may help us pay the loan. Hope you chose wisely and get a good return from your career.
I agree with you about investing in education. And I will be honest the material I get from Udacity, Coursera or Edx is superior than the content I get from the university. I only want to suggest that perhaps the price is too high for a mooc. I think the best outcome would be for the best most cutting edge educational resources be easily available to the poorest people. It seems like these companies Udacity, coursera, edx started with this mentality but now they have all changed. Coursera for instance used to provide even the certificates for free. Now you can audit the courses for free but they do not even provide access to the exercises only lectures. I will say that getting financial aid through Coursera is very easy, however, through Udacity it is extremely difficult. Please don't get me wrong, I am extremely grateful for the materials provided by these companies I just think we need to continue to encourage free high level education. Free education should be the way of the future since the robots will ultimately take all our jobs away ;) .... but seriously
www.paysa.com/salaries/self-driving-car-engineer--t Paying $2,400 for a nano-degree that could potentially land you a job at Mercedes Benz, Tesla, etc. and earn you around that amount of money in the link I provided above sound like a pretty sweet deal to me! Greetings from Germany!
