<i>I am not against having a hacker ethos and personally am happy to research and learn on my own, but I fail to see the logic in charging money to tell people to Google.</i><p>I&#x27;m about halfway through the JHU Data Science program and I agree that there&#x27;s a fair amount of &quot;extra&quot; work you have to do.  But still, coming into it as somebody who had never used R at all before, I&#x27;ve learned a ton and have definitely found it to be worth the money I&#x27;ve spent (I plan to actually do the entire track and get the certificate and everything).<p>Now that said, I probably woulnd&#x27;t pay much more than what they&#x27;re charging now (I think most of these classes have been $49.00 &#x2F; class so far), but at that rate, I definitely feel that it&#x27;s been worthwhile.  And even if it isn&#x27;t a formal degree, it still gives me the ability to legitimately mention JHU on my resume.  So if somebody is just quick skimming my resume to make a decision on which pile to sort it into, that probably gives mine a small nudge in favor of the &quot;look deeper&quot; pile.