I’ve discovered the University of people(UoPeople) and was wondering if the B.S degree in Computer Science they offer there is accepted and recognized by recruiters, hiring managers or human resources? I know every country and company has different standards, but in general, would it get the check mark?
Should I go to companies that I would like to get hired at and just ask the hiring managers there or is there any better methods?
Indirect answer: who are they accredited by?
The short answer is no. They may have higher standards and better teaching methods than Harvard and MIT put together but nobody will see it that way even if they managed to do that which I seriously doubt. I am not trying to be judgemental, that is just the way the working world works. The only good reason to get a degree from such a place that I know of is if you already have a job and are forced to get a degree from somewhere, anywhere just to fulfill an HR requirement for a promotion that your employee wants to give you anyway. I don’t know if you are in the U.S. but “The People’s…” anything has really bad connotations and negative market value.
There are reputable online degrees but they are typically offered by well-known universities with an actual campus but you do have to pay for them. Some of them do not even note that you attended online on the degree.
If you are looking for an online program, a lot of good schools now offer 100% online degrees. Including state schools - their online programs cost about the same as the traditional degree. And there is nothing to worry about as far as getting hired with those degrees.
University of the People is accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council, which is not one of the regional accreditation bodies that accredit traditional academic programs. That doesn’t mean it’s a diploma-mill; they are reputed to have good standards and reasonable program requirements. But classes from UofP are unlikely to transfer to traditional schools or be eligible for graduate study requirements.
What a particular HR department thinks of such a degree is hard to predict.
You didn’t give any specifics about why you think you need such a degree, what you are trying to achieve or where you are but I work in IT and have for many years. Degrees still aren’t strictly required for entry level positions as long as you have proof of demonstrated skills. Employers will often take someone with a good portfolio of projects that they completed on their own and no degree over someone with a reputable degree that only did it because they thought it gave them a good shot at a high paying job. That applies to everything from web design to programming. Information technolgy is a largely self-motivated discipline and changes so fast that they look for self-starters and self-teachers more than anything.
Many people get an entry level job and then get their employer to pay for their classes after hours and move up after a number of years if they want a job that strictly requires a degree. Even then, it doesn’t necessarily have to be in Computer Science. I have worked in the industry for over 20 years and I could count the number of people that had actual Computer Science or even Information Systems degrees that I have worked with on one hand.
Computer Science is an academic discipline that doesn’t have a whole lot of practical, real-world relevance. Much of it involves pure theory rather than hands-on work. There is a (limited) non-academic market for those types of skills but there is a much bigger demand for people that can program business systems, do project management or support incredibly complex systems that only exist in one company so they expect you to hit the ground running and learn theirs. The only way to do that is to build experience by working hands-on with a lot of different technologies.
You can’t learn it from a lecture or textbook any more than you can learn plumbing or open heart surgery that way.
Looking at their website, UofP seems very proud of its “partnerships” (whatever that means) with, among others, Microsoft and HP.
Maybe you could just shoot an email to their HR departments and ask if they’ve ever actually hired a UofP graduate.
Looking at Wiki is downright mind-altering.
First, we have "In May 2014, The Bayelsa State Government of Nigeria’’
And Microsoft’s involvement is via its Microsot4Africa arm.
And it uses 3000 VOLUNTEER instructors with the staff being a virtual Who’s Who of American Universities.
Looks like it was founded with a sincere desire to bring higher education into places it sorely needs to be.
If the Degree worth the paper (which you probably download and print, if you are old-fashioned enough to want a physical document)?
Call the HR departments of typical companies you might find attractive, explain you want to get the best and most applicable education in (whatever field). See what they think of a FREE college education.
Go from there, and good luck!
I understand this is neither here nor there, but have you considered if you might actually, not know, kinda learn anything at the UofP?
Probably a stupid consideration in retrospect, that whole education thing. Sorry I brought it up. Let’s just forget this post.
In North America, yes. In much of Europe university education, including distance learning, is not subject to tuition fees. For certain higher degrees (such as doctoral degrees) it’s not always even necessary to enrol as a student, let alone pay anything.
In the UK we have The Open University which is the premier distance learning university. http://www.open.ac.uk/ This is not free, but it is subsidised and its degrees are as well regarded as most second tier university degrees. You may well have seen some of the top quality TV information films they produce in partnership with the BBC like Bang Goes the Theory. BBC One - Bang Goes the Theory
Does the US not have anything similar? In any case, I imagine there is no bar to an American signing up for an OU course.
Western Governors University is an independent, degree-granting, online school accredited by a genuine regional accreditation organization. Tuition for their IT program is $2,890 per semester – dirt cheap by U.S. standards.
I’ve done a fair amount of interviewing potential hires for computer software positions. A “degree” from a diploma mill, or something looking like a diploma mill, would automatically be 2 strikes against you. It would say to me “this person 1) isn’t smart enough to get a real computer science degree, and 2) thinks I’m not smart enough recognize this as hogwash”.
On the other hand, if this person comes in without a degree, but with good experience, that person has no strikes against him/her and still has a good chance of getting the job. Alternatively, if the person comes in with some coursework, but not a degree, from a reputable school, online or brick and mortar, they are still in the running.
Being honest is MUCH better than lying or trying to trick the interviewer.
J.
Right.
I was surprised to find out that DeVry, long one of the “so bad it’s almost fraud” schools, is regionally accredited.
I apologize for not talking about my situation. I’m currently enrolled at the uofm in Canada, and I’m currently taking a Computer Science B.S degree program. I’m taking it because I want to work in the video game industry as a programmer or software developer. When I went to a lot of video game companies, almost all of them had the requirement of a B.S degree of Computer Science or equivalent experience. I didn’t know how I could get experience, so I went to school.
Although now I’m convinced UoPeople isn’t the way to go, and I should just stick to the school I’m currently at. Reading some of your posts however is making curious about a few things. At my school we need to learn a crap load of material in 3 months, write exams, rinse and repeat for 4 years.
Funny how 2 sentences can hit home. Over 90% of the my studies I do is self teaching myself to learn the material. Watching a guy program and talk about programming for 1 hour doesn’t help me. I’ve learned that getting good with programming and web design for example, is playing around with it till you know how it works. I don’t need the pressures of assignments and exams to “discipline” me to learn the material…so why do I need school when I can discipline myself? I do it so I can get a B.S degree. But if experience is more valued, shouldn’t I be trying to get experience rather than study for 4 years and then have to get experience after anyway?
I’m confused. Are you saying that people who come from academic backgrounds have a bigger demand than people who have a non-academic background? Also, you said companies expect you to learn their computer systems? Color me naive, but do some companies create their own programming languages and expect you to learn and use them? Like if I knew 10 programming languages and got hired by a company that uses their own programming language, I’m expected to learn theirs? Is this common in the workforce?
No, companies almost never come up with their own programming languages (I’m not sure I’ve heard of any). There are a bunch of programming languages being taught and various companies use what works for them. A company’s system may be cobbled together or very standard and that’s probably what the other poster was referring to. The company may use very standard tools or only some tools, very standard PCs or very unique PCs they bought from Nigeria. They could be a total mess or very on the ball with rigorous standards for machines or somewhere in between. What you have to do is decide what computer language you want to learn and learn it and then find companies that program with it. You can also learn a particular language on the job if that’s not something you’ve learned before. Go with the most popular stuff and ones that have standards if that interests you and you should mostly be fine. There’s always the possibility that one will get stuck with an archaic language that’s barely used, but that’s usually within the Government because it doesn’t move very fast.
I actually worked for a company which ran in-house-modified version of CICS (mainframe terminal protocol).
Only one person in the shop knew how it worked, but it was slick.
With the explosion on languages available on the micro side, the best idea I can come up with is to take an assembler-level course and learn the basic instruction set that the hardware supports - then the high-level languages all start to look the same - one may call it a “getnext”, one may call it a “read”, one might get cute and call it “fetch” - they all get translated to “set current record pointer to next logical record in buffer”.
Once you see them in that light, the name of the command becomes trivial.
I’d like to mildly take issue with this a little. (I don’t want to get in an argument, just give a different point of view.)
When I was doing my CS degree, I agreed with you that a lot of this “theory” didn’t seem very practical for the “real world”. After I had been working in the field for quite a few years, I was surprised at how often this “theory” came up.
What are the different methods of sorting and searching? When is one method better than another? This question comes up very often in my work. I actually still refer to the Knuth books (often, just to steal the algorithms given. 
)
What are the different parts of a compiler? What are the different ways of implementing each of those parts? This came in very handy when, a decade or two out of University, I started working on a compiler.
What is Order Notation, and what good is it? This gives a very good approximation of the efficiency of a sorting or searching algorithm. I’ve used this pretty often in deciding on an implementation.
What is hashing and when would you use it? I’ve used this method several times in my career.
What are sparse arrays, and how do you efficiently represent them? Used several times.
Why would you choose a list over an array over a map? A very common decision I’ve had to make.
I’ve implemented real-world solutions using a “nodes and edges” graph structure.
There are a lot of other “theory” aspects that I’ve found useful in quite unintended circumstances.
I agree with you that real-world work and experience are important, and are different than what you learn at a University. The theory you learn in a CS program provides a strong theoretical basis of the implementations you choose and the decisions you make.
J.
Hello, I work with University of the People and I noticed this post – Firstly, great comments that everyone has contributed to the discussion. Indeed, students around the world are asking the same question – what is the UoPeople degree worth, and is it for me?
I would encourage you to speak directly with UoPeople students and alumni to hear firsthand about their experience studying at UoPeople and how the degree has impacted their lives.
If you would like to be connected with a student or alumni, kindly write an email to outreach@uopeople.edu and we will be happy to connect you! We do it all the time. Another option would be to talk to people in our FB page (facebook.com/UoPeople) with over 1.2M fans who would love to share their experience.
To refer to the original question regarding employment, it’s an extremely important one:
Preparing students for the workforce is a high priority of UoPeople. Beginning in the classroom, the rigor of the accredited degree programs is ensured by world-class academic leaders and academic partners. Leaders come from universities such as the University of Oxford, Columbia University and Yale University, and partners include organizations such as the United Nations, UNESCO, and the Clinton Global Initiative, among others. Outside of the classroom, UoPeople students receive internships, mentorships, and job opportunities from global corporate partners, including Microsoft and Hewlett Packard. Finally, by focusing on career planning, resume writing, interviewing, and job searching skills, UoPeople’s Career Service Center prepares students to find jobs after graduation. Given all of these options, UoPeople feels confident that its students will be able to find jobs or advance in their current jobs.
I hope this has served to shed some more light on your question and give you additional angles to consider when choosing the university that is right for you. Should you have further questions, please do not hesitate to comment here or email UoPeople. You can reach the Office of Admissions at: admissions@uopeople.edu
grabs popcorn