Anecdotally, a lot of the people taking these classes totally lack the background or intuition needed and aren't getting any real training in machine learning. They're learning some very rudimentary bits of data cleaning and how to use basic machine learning libraries.
I recently interviewed someone taking a (reputable) online masters in machine learning, and they couldn't describe how or why any of the models they were using worked, nor could they answer most basic questions about the problems / data they were working on.
I recently interviewed someone taking a (reputable) online masters in machine learning, and they couldn't describe how or why any of the models they were using worked, nor could they answer most basic questions about the problems / data they were working on.