Online Master's Degree from Stanford University anyone?

There are a lot of smart people at my workplace who got jobs in Silicon Valley straight out of college at age 22. While their friends were working on their graduate degrees full-time, they got their own degrees part-time. Their full-time peers took 2 years to complete their MS programs, while the part-timers took 3 years to complete their Master's degrees. I heard someone compare 2 such people saying, "In 5 years X got a PhD from Stanford, while his classmate Y got a part-time MS from Stanford and bought a house in the Valley with all the money he saved."

Advantages
- Work experience is a fairly big contributor to career growth and salary growth. Working for 2 more years than your peers gives you a pretty big edge. One of my friends who did a part-time MS in EE from Stanford is the youngest manager at our company.
- The biggest advantage of this avenue is the amount of money saved. Usually the degree was completely sponsored by the employer. If your company rewards performance with stock options, those extra 2 years could mean a huge payoff if your company's performing well.
- At Silicon Valley employers like Intel, Cisco, NVIDIA this happens to be a degree from Stanford, through the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD). I know someone who worked for Motorola and got a part-time degree from IIT Chicago. Some Indian employers sponsor degrees from BITS Pilani to be completed remotely.
- SCPD is an excellent way to get a degree from a top-flight university like Stanford... The choices for majors range from Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Management Science and Engineering. If your odds of getting into a school in the top 50 aren't looking too good, IIT Chicago is not a bad place to get a degree from.
- The other advantage is completing a degree on your own schedule. You could watch all classes on Saturday or Sunday, instead of watching after work everyday.

Disadvantages
- The cost is high if you plan to pay out of pocket for some of these American programs.
- Online degrees may not allow you develop as many close relationships with either your classmates or professors.
- Doing a PhD after a part-time MS may not be very easy, because a lot of PhD programs would require a thesis from students with a Master's degree, usually not possible remotely.
- It is a lot of work. Doing a full-time job and taking a course from a good school every quarter is very time-consuming.