How Should College Work? 4/22

an alternative higher education platform ISO CEO

Heather Heying writes,

The haphazardness, in the undergraduate’s haphazard walk through ideas, is an intrinsic part of the value. It’s like finding a book in the stacks at an actual library, and then walking down the row while keeping your eyes open, turning right, then left, then left again, until you are in a wholly different section, but your eyes are still open, and you find something you did not know that you were looking for. In the 21st century, electronic search is ever more common than physical search, so our algorithms do much of our work for us. But algorithms are quite the opposite of haphazard. They point you to what, on the basis of your past, they think your future should hold. Algorithms are restricted and narrow, and are no match for the expansive, infinite curiosity of the human mind.

I agree that college should not be about narrowing the range of experience. That was my concern with Minerva, an interesting experiment that started a few years go.

the message of Minerva is that order comes from strong central planning.

. . .I would prefer to see higher education reform move in a different direction. I like to say that the future belongs to auto-didacts. If anything, auto-didacts could make use of an educational process that is even less formal and less centrally planned than what we see at typical universities today.

I am in the process of fleshing out an idea that is the opposite—a highly decentralized approach that would allow students and mentors considerable independence in designing the course of study.

I invite you to read and comment on the fictional future press release below. Perhaps if paid subscribers are interested, we can discuss on Zoom.

I should point out that I think that breaking into the business of higher education is a unique problem. In other industries, you can break in by offering an inexpensive product to a low-end niche, and then get good results that impress people in the more luxury markets. But in this case, the low-end niche means young people who are deficient in cognitive skills and/or conscientiousness, and you are not going to generate impressive outcomes for them.

As of now, upper-middle-class parents are convinced that college is magic fairy-dust for preserving high social status, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when all of the high-aptitude kids go to college. The challenge is to peel some high-aptitude children away from the college route and to demonstrate that the alternative does not cost them a loss of status.

Executing something like my vision requires a CEO. The ideal person would be an experienced entrepreneur who wants to take on a passion project inspired by the ideas here. My shortcomings as a possible CEO include age and a limited network. You don’t ignite something like this at age 68. And I think to make it work you need a lot more business contacts than I have.

PRESS RELEASE

September 25, 2025

NetUniv21 enrolls 5000th student

NetUniv21, the networked university for the 21st century founded three years ago, announced today that it has enrolled its 5000th student. Funded by corporate sponsors, including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, and Stripe, the university with no campus attracts talented, hard-working students from around the world.

NetUniv21 offers no degrees, but instead provides students with letters of recommendation and letters of introduction. Faculty are renowned for their connections in business, think tanks, and public policy. Students have offered glowing accounts of placements that they have obtained through connections formed at NetUniv21.

NetUniv21 is highly decentralized. It has sometimes been called “the Substack of college.”

Although courses are taught remotely, students and faculty bond with one another at conferences, held six times a year. These are 4-day events attended by 500-700 students and about 200 faculty. With small breakout sessions and shared meals, they get to know one another. Many students say that these conferences are the most valuable part of NetUniv21. They make friends and discover new interests while at the conferences. After they return home, they stay connected with many of the people that they meet at the conferences with online interaction.

Students tend to cluster into two groups, both of which include large numbers from outside the United States. One group are young people just out of high school, whose parents want them to try NetUniv21 for at least a year, while also working and living on their own. Over a period of a year, these students will take about ten courses. Many of these students eventually choose to bypass opportunities to attend Ivy League colleges, relying on NetUniv21 instead.

The other cluster consists of recent college graduates who are looking for an alternative to graduate school as a way to accelerate their careers or pursue topics in which they are interested. They are often working full time, so that they will be more likely to take only four or five courses over a period of a year.

Each student is motivated by curiosity. They have no need to be sheltered or coddled by an army of administrators. Students value faculty for their suggested readings and projects, for the feedback that they provide, and for the network of connections that they supply.

When prospective students approach NetUniv21, they state goals. These might be broad goals, such as “take courses to discover my interests and talents” or narrow goals, such as “study financial modeling.” Admissions staff suggest specific topics for the student to study and connect students with faculty who have subject-matter expertise in those topics.

Admission is provided on a course-by-course basis and is determined by the faculty member to whom the student has been advised to connect. The faculty member determines whether the student is capable of handling the sort of course that the faculty member can provide. If the student appears capable, the next step is to work with the student to tailor the course to that student.

There is enough commonality in student preparation and goals that most courses end up in a seminar format, with a handful of students in each. Many seminars meet weekly over Zoom.

Faculty are independent service providers, not permanently attached to NetUniv21. For most of them, teaching at NetUniv21 is not their primary source of income. Many also work in business or teach elsewhere.

Faculty serve as guides or mentors. In class meetings, they act as facilitators, not as lecturers. They evaluate student work not for purpose of grading but for providing feedback and for developing enough knowledge about the student to be able to write well-informed letters of recommendation and letters of introduction.

Each faculty member decides what to charge for participation in a course. Not all faculty charge a fee. Some executives derive benefit from access to talent, taking advantage of the opportunity to recruit good students into their firms. Other faculty may derive satisfaction from teaching talented, motivated students.

For each course, a typical faculty member might devote 4 hours a week to planning and conducting each seminar. In addition, the faculty member will spend 1 hour a week with each student, providing individual feedback and guidance. If time is valued at $50 an hour, a seminar with 5 students that lasts 10 weeks would work out to $4500 in cost.

NetUniv21 also has overhead costs. Recruiting, screening, and sorting students and faculty takes time and effort. Suppose that for each 500 students, the required number of staff-hours for recruiting, screening and sorting students and faculty is 3000. If time is valued at $50 an hour, this is $150,000.

Conferences are another driver of overhead costs. If each conference of 500 students includes 100 faculty, and the average cost per person attending the conference is $1000 (not including travel and lodging costs), then each conference will cost $600,000. At six conferences per year, this comes to $3.6 million for every 500 students, or $7200 per year per student.

Although NetUniv21 has considered charging application fees and tuition to cover this overhead, it currently uses a model in which corporate sponsors provide support. Corporate sponsors benefit by being able to pitch to talented students to join their firms. Some corporate sponsors derive satisfaction from being part of a project that helps curious people from around the world obtain knowledge more effectively than at established institutions of higher education.

When it first launched, the faculty were drawn primarily from business. It turned out that many of them were interested in teaching standard academic subjects, including the Classics, history, and mathematics.

The first cohort of students were planning only to use this program for one year, and then go on to college. Their parents saw an opportunity to enhance the maturity of their children by having them take on jobs and study independently in this fashion. But almost half of those students who took courses in the first year found this method of learning congenial, found the letters of recommendation/letters of introduction more valuable than grades, and found the conferences more stimulating than ordinary campus activities. These young people chose to bypass college and continue with NetUniv21 until they connected to job opportunities through the faculty network.