Welcome to Campus. Here Is Your Diploma. Come Back Soon!

Four hours before he walked across a stage and accepted his master’s degree in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Yingnan Song took an elevator up to the 12th floor of a nearby Hilton Garden Inn and met his classmates and professors for the first time.

He wore a gray cardigan and black sneakers with blue trim. In his pocket he held a Georgia Tech student ID that he had picked up the previous day. He had also bought a Georgia Tech coat, a few T-shirts, some magnets, and a bag. But the small plastic card was his prize souvenir.

“Without a student ID,” he says, “I can’t call myself a real student.”

It had been a week of firsts for Mr. Song: first trip to the United States from smoggy Beijing, where he lives and works as a software engineer for a Chinese Internet company. First visit to the U.S. capital, where he skipped sightseeing in order to take his last two final examinations in a hotel room while nursing the worst jet lag of his life.

And, now, a first trip to the real-life version of Georgia Tech, an institution that for the past two years had existed only within the four walls of his computer screen.

Mr. Song learned about Georgia Tech’s online master’s degree in computer science when it was unveiled, in 2013. He flew to Cambodia in order to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language in time for the application deadline.

After all, the program was a big deal. Everybody had been wondering how massive open online courses might change higher education at top universities. Georgia Tech had an answer: It would team up with Udacity, an upstart company led by Sebastian Thrun, the “godfather of the MOOC,” to create a graduate program based on the same technology as the massive courses.

Rather than being open to all, the program would restrict admission to students who met the high standards of the university’s traditional computer-science program. Students would pay $6,600, about one-seventh of the costs for students in the traditional program, and would receive the same degree. And, because the courses were fully online, the university could accommodate hundreds more qualified students than it did in its highly ranked program on the campus.

Tapping into MOOC mania was a publicity boon for Georgia Tech. Members of Congress praised Georgia Tech administrators for managing to create the new program swiftly and without running afoul of its accreditor. President Obama applauded the university for envisioning a low-cost program that would be “just as rigorous” as a traditional program while producing graduates who were “just as good.”

And now, two years later, here they were: the online program’s first graduates.

Eleven of them gathered here at the Hilton, where the College of Computing had arranged for a reception so they could finally meet at least once before the graduation ceremony. They milled around the bar and the buffet, peering at name tags and trying to match faces to the virtual avatars they had been chatting with online. “It’s kind of like online dating,” said Mr. Song, scanning the room.

There was Tianxiao Huang, the Quantcast modeling scientist who claimed to have taken more than 100 MOOCs in addition to his Georgia Tech coursework. There was Sandip Agrawal, the Google software engineer with curly black hair past his shoulders. There was Murali Raju, the financial consultant from Ohio, for whom the trip doubled as a chance to tour the campus with his high-school-age daughter.

And there was Nathaniel Payne, the Canadian data analyst. Like the online program itself, Mr. Payne seemed to exist outside the normal limits of time and space. He had completed the Georgia Tech program while teaching at Simon Fraser University and the British Columbia Institute of Technology, and working full time as a data analyst.

Mr. Payne nevertheless had found the time and energy to throw himself into the program, serving both as a teaching assistant and an unofficial champion of all things Georgia Tech. In October, after the university’s football team won a close game on an improbable touchdown, he posted the highlight on his Facebook page, writing, “Proud to be a Yellow Jacket!” He now buzzed around the room in plum-colored pants while his wife, Sam, took photos with a Nikon camera.

Georgia Tech’s online master’s program is not about lifting up the downtrodden or reaching out to the disempowered. Unlike other MOOC-related experiments, such as San Jose State University’s failed attempt to use Udacity courses to teach community-college and high-school students, the Georgia Tech program took aim at successful professionals in their prime who wanted to become even more successful. Almost all of the applicants already had jobs, often at tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and AT&T.

The first graduating class was full of students who already held enviable positions in the industry. For them, the low price of tuition was not as valuable as the ability to take the courses without quitting their well-paying jobs and relocating to Atlanta.

“This is not proof-of-concept of education for the masses,” says Joshua S. Goodman, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard who has studied the program. “What this is proof-of-concept for is that there are groups of Americans for whom the online option can make a big difference.”

And not just Americans. For a young professional in China, that difference can be profound. “There are two kinds of people” in Beijing, says Mr. Song. “One kind that has never been abroad for study, and the other kind who graduated from U.S. universities.”

He now finds himself strangely in between those camps. About a year ago, Georgia Tech held a gathering in Beijing to publicize the online program. Mr. Song attended, as did several China-based alumni of the university, including Stephon Marbury, the former National Basketball Association star who now plays point guard for the Beijing Ducks. (Mr. Marbury, who turned pro after his freshman year, wanted to know if he could use the online program to finish his undergraduate degree. He was told he could not.)

The alumni had questions about the workload. Mr. Song now says he often spent more than 20 hours a week on his assignments and took the same exams as the students in Atlanta. “I think Georgia Tech treated us as real students,” he says. “We are real students.” He hopes his Georgia Tech degree, if not time spent on the campus, will be sufficient to ingratiate him to the U.S.-educated professional class.

The sun was beginning to set over Georgia Tech’s basketball arena, where final preparations for the graduation ceremony were underway. Two blocks away, in the hotel meeting room, Mr. Song was giddy. He talked to his software-development professor about circumventing China’s Internet restrictions so he could watch his lectures on YouTube. He asked classmates about life in the Bay Area, America’s tech mecca. He chatted with Zvi Galil, dean of the College of Computing, an ebullient man with an Israeli accent. “Bring us more students from China,” the dean told him.

About an hour into the event, Mr. Galil grabbed a microphone and called for attention. The dean was used to speaking to crowds. Already an influential mathematician and computer-science researcher, he was now somewhat famous as an administrator because of the program. “Seven hundred fifty-plus newspaper articles,” said Mr. Galil, “and probably 20 more this week.” He had received speaking invitations from Jerusalem, Zurich, Brisbane, The Hague. “I’ve never been such a frequent flier,” he said.

The dean pivoted to his fund-raising pitch. “You got the deal of your life,” he said. “You paid this ridiculous tuition. So one day, when you make it big, you should come to us and say, ‘I’ll pay you 10 times the tuition.’”

There was a group photograph. Mr. Song held a Georgia Tech pennant and smiled. Then it was time to go. Several students unwrapped their regalia and hastily tried to smooth out the creases in their robes. Mr. Payne carried his, already pressed, in a garment bag. They crowded into an elevator and then piled into a van.

The back of the van was black leather bathed in pale green light. The classmates sat knee to knee and chuckled about how it felt like a party bus. They compared stories about picking up their student IDs. There was chit-chat about jobs and tech stuff, and provisional offers to crash on one another’s couches. They were strangers, but they were in it together.

Before arriving at the arena, they leaned in and smiled for one last group photograph. Then they walked up to the pavilion and blended into a sea of black robes.

Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.