For many college students, money is a constant concern. That fancy degree is expensive! But MIT just took a big step toward making certain degree programs more affordable and accessible.
Yahoo! Finance reports that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has offered free online courses to students for the past four years, will now allow for those courses to be counted toward a degree. The STEM oriented school will let students take a semester of free courses in one of MIT’s 24 graduate programs, including microbiology, real estate development and oceanography. After paying a fee of $1,500 and passing an exam, students can then receive a MicroMaster’s credential, which counts as half of the college’s one-year master’s degree program in supply chain management.
Students who succeed in the first online half of the program can take another exam to apply for the second semester on campus. For that semester, they’ll have to pay $33,000 (about half the cost of program’s yearlong tuition).
“Anyone who wants to be here now has a shot to be here,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif told Yahoo!. “They have a chance to prove in advance that they can do the work.”
The courses are scheduled to begin this winter, and the program hopes to bring about 40 students to campus each semester from the online program.
MIT is not the first university to begin the transfer of free online programs to school certified credential. Arizona State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois all have similar programs.
Hopefully, these programs will help in maintaining the balance between finances and academics, because as any collegiette knows, trying to find the money to for takeout during those all-nighters is struggle enough.