Coursera Reviews

In the past month, I’ve seen 6 coworkers break down in tears due to overwork and physical fatigue. That’s right. Grown men and women. Crying. At work. For an education company. Coursera is a company in growth mode; hard work and stress should be expected. Where it gets weird is how employees are pressured to exude high levels of positivity, “wokeness”and inspiration while working long hours into the night, fighting for more help, and having their work criticized in public under the toxic mantra of “learn, change, grow”. If you were to sit down and talk with any employee in private they would admit that they flat out hate their job and are actively looking for a new one. So why aren’t there more bad Glassdoor reviews you ask? It’s because most employees have stock allocations and don’t want to post anything negative publicly that affect the perception/value of Coursera.

The good people I met at Coursera joined to make a difference in the world. They, like me, wanted to provide affordable, high quality education at scale. Degrees from universities were not designed to be affordable or even a useful credential in the market. Chose the wrong degree, the wrong university or some combination of the two and you're stuck with a worthless degree and a ton of student loans. Coursera started off disrupting the university degree system, but, under the reign of the CEO Rick and now Jeff, Coursera embraces the very system it was designed to disrupt. Why? Because of the MONEY. Coursera can offer 5x or more university expensive degrees than a university could. For example, under the original co-founders Daphne and Andrew, Coursera launched was University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC)'s Masters of Data Science, a top 5 ranked Computer Science degree program, priced at very affordably $20,000. Coursera is now pressuring UIUC to increase the price of their degree program, so that Coursera could increase its profit margins. If you love the mission of education, Coursera is not a good fit for you, because it tricks learners out of their hard earned money and flood the market with lower quality degrees (Remember University of Phoenix?). If you don't care about the mission and just want to make money, Coursera is not a good fit for you either. Don't think for a second any of that money Coursera is pocketing will end up your bank account. Coursera has a terrible leveling system designed to keep you in the lowest possible level and lowest pay. Working harder will NOT get you promoted, but your manager is happy to lie to you that it will. Every company has problems, but having worked in over a dozen big and small companies, Coursera is by far in the worse shape. The problems are so systemic, there will need to be a massive overhaul in leadership and management at all levels. I am planning my exit and so are most individual contributors. Heed my warning. Coursera survives by suckering good people into working for the company. You will either be brainwashed into a soulless minion or leave disgusted with the company you once loved.