The Georgia Tech OMSCS program is very good and affordable (10K or less). It's also the 7th ranked CS program in the world. And, you can and do interact with professors, not just TAs. I'm an OMSCS grad. I would do it again and strongly recommend it. I think programs like it are the future of higher education.
OMSCS student here. I agree with the parent. However, the one downside of the program is that since the marginal cost of admitting an additional student is very low relative to the tuition amount, GT has an incentive to not be very selective about who they let in. From a democratization-of-educational-opportunities perspective, that's good: if you can hack it, then you can hack it, regardless of what formal qualifications you might be missing. But this program is the real deal courseware-wise, and that results in a lot of those under-prepared students taking classes that they just can't keep up in. Lots of those students end up washing out of the program... after paying GT a semester or two of tuition.
Example: in the Intro to OS course I'm about to finish, we started with 700+ students and are now down to about 340. The projects are typical schoolhouse stuff for systems programming: C programs that manage memory, use sockets, IPC constructs, pthreads, RPC libraries, etc. One of the guys on the class slack just posted that when testing & debugging the projects, he just printed stuff to stdout... for the whole semester... because he doesn't know - and didn't bother to learn - how to use a debugger.
>One of the guys on the class slack just posted that when testing & debugging the projects, he just printed stuff to stdout... for the whole semester... because he doesn't know - and didn't bother to learn - how to use a debugger.
