[WhitneyLand]

Don’t want to be cynical. Why don’t the top 5 CS program online undergrad or masters degrees?

The cynical view is the De Beers conjecture. Artificial scarcity is used to maintain prestige, brand equity for the university (http://aei.org/publication/on-the-economics-of-diamonds-the-...).

The generous view is that they are just trying to find a way to ensure a high bar of quality and experience, and as soon as that’s possible they’ll all have options.

I believed MIT has come closest - you can in principal enter a program without a 99% percentile GRE score (or any GRE score) if you can do the work. You have to spend some time on campus, but in the end it’s an MIT degree without an asterisk. For some reason they’ve not picked Computer Science as one of the first programs.

Berkeley’s data science programs do not offer computer science degrees, and unfortunately are not even in the college of engineering. It’s a shame because a lot of the math/work there is a starting foundation for machine learning.