How to start a school with your friends
prigoose.substack.com157 points by geverett 5 days ago
157 points by geverett 5 days ago
Love to see it!
Wonder how to reconcile the description of almost-negligible admin overhead with this description of a similar effort that warns, "We wanted to keep costs extremely low, so we had parent volunteers do all admin for the school. It's going really well, but it's an insane amount of work."
From my experience both teaching kids and organizing things, that seems like a much more likely outcome.
FractalU isn't a school. It doesn't need to keep records, comply with miles of state regulations (employee and volunteer background checks, record keeping, mandatory exams, ...). It doesn't need to be able to demonstrate to other schools (or universities) what the students achieved. It doesn't need to demonstrate to the state that it's actually teaching the students something. It doesn't handle any money, so it doesn't need an accountant. It doesn't employ anyone. It doesn't need to worry about firing anyone.
My kids attended a small co-op school when they were young--5 employees (4 teachers + "director" who was mostly a floating assistant/substitute), everything else handled by parent volunteers. There's really an enormous amount of administrative overhead.
FractalU doesn't have any of that because it's not actually a school.
As a note, they do handle money. They charge $600 for a course on how to replicate their community elsewhere. I don’t know about tuition for other courses because the links are broken.
Some skepticism for me creeps in the more I peruse the fractal sites. Course links for the summer semester are broken, and a lot of the working content seems to be somewhat self-indulgent, reading more like a normal unremarkable friend group.
The MLM/cult vibes I’m getting are that the main purpose and monetary incentive seems to be in the mere existence of the “community” itself, and selling that aspiration as a $600 course. The website for the course (fractalcampus.com) is a bog-standard tech startup marketing landing page including “as seen on…”, testimonials, and other calls to action to buy this $600 course.
Notable with that course, we are talking about a paid course being sold where the only person with a true success story is the person selling the course. The Boston iteration seems to only consist of a weekly dinner so far.
Doesn’t that sound familiar, like every other influencer selling a self-help course we’ve ever seen?
I think if the paid course and stated analogy to YCombinator wasn’t a part of it I would be more enthusiastic, like, “yeah this thing is awesome, a real community that goes deeper than small talk, you’re all getting together and learning from each other and truly engaging.” But then the more I think about what they’re actually doing as actions rather than words, the more I feel like this whole thing isn’t 100% honest.
The founders’ biographies support the idea that they are a tech couple who exited with lucrative equity and are now landlords as their main job and that this is a glorified real estate course. “Co-living” is just a drop-in word for “landlord.”
“FractalU isn't a business or a nonprofit. In fact, it's not a formal organization at all.”
I’d put five bucks down that there’s an LLC or trust involved somewhere.
Idk, maybe I’m reading too deep into this, but there are a lot of scams in this world and I think this might be one of them.
The instructor for each course handles the money for their own course:
> So instructors must deal with collecting money and managing taxes on their own.
Not for the Fractal Campus Accelerator Program, which is the part of this that feels like an MLM to me.
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I don't really agree in the sense that I don't find a problem with some tuition money being involved, that's going to be the case even with stuff you do through your local parks and recreation department.
The part that rubbed me the wrong way was specifically the way the community co-living university idea itself is being sold as an accelerator course along with all the negative aspects I described about why it feels like an MLM or a cult.
Here we've got a former software engineer and former serial startup founder basically quitting their jobs, almost certainly with big windfalls, and becoming co-living landlords selling an "accelerator" for others to start a similar scheme just feels a lot like trust fund kids who started a real estate empire from their trust fund money selling real estate courses on how you too can be just like them.
In other words, I think most people who enter the accelerator program will fail and the only winner are the founders who collect $600.
Sure, the individual professors handle tuition money and presumably the founders of this community thing don't take a cut, but IMO these volunteers are basically shoving value at them via the co-living rent and the accelerator course so that our happy-go-lucky founders are able to live a passive income lifestyle.
And again I realize I've made a lot of assumptions but when you're being literally sold something (a $600 course) skepticism is warranted.
> There's really an enormous amount of administrative overhead.
What kind of work does this administrative overhead in particular consist of?
a school is an institution that teaches people
your definition of "actually a school" seems to arbitrarily include a lot of reporting and paperwork and commerce that have nothing to do with the bit where you teach people stuff
Education does not operate in a vacuum. Many students are incentivized by the social accreditation of completing a program. Institutions need some way to qualify that teaching is actually being done. Whether it be an examination, a certification, or bringing a project to completion.
The reporting and paperwork are regulatory requirements imposed by the state, they aren’t arbitrary.
It sounds like this approach is more like home school pods whereas the person you quoted was trying to actually form a "school" and keep the state happy? If the focus is just on teaching, what kind of admin work is there to do? Since she says parents volunteered, I assume this is for kids, and operating under a homeschool model (i.e. the parents just tell the state they're the instructor) would be a viable way to avoid regulatory burden even if you hire an outside tutor/instructor.
Honestly yeah, it seems like a great experience since you have a more-engaged student group.
The Recurse Center[1] folks (also YC) started an un-school with friends!
I’ve been intrigued by recurse for a long time because the alums I’ve met are all very impressive.
But when I think about applying, I worry that it’s just tapping into my addiction to external validation and credential-seeking rather than just learning something on my own.
Or… that’s what I tell myself because I’m not nearly as bright as the recursers I’ve met
I always wondered why no one creates new universities in the US. It seems like in the 1800s every rich guy started their own university, many with unique missions.
The existing university model in the US seems like it's ripe for disruption so I'm surprised no one has tried to create their own.
I'm guessing it's at least partially too high risk from a students perspective.
Much of the point of an established university is credentials, a new one cannot give the same recognition.
This means that to attract new students, and build a reputation, you have to have some other draw; either some world renowned experts, or cheap (even free or scholarships) tuition. Probably both.
And if you want your graduates to be outstanding, then you need to offer the best incoming candidates a reason to choose your school, because the truth is the school has less impact than the individual.
You’re spot on. Bootstrapping a reputation is really hard (and expensive), and the very painful accreditation process makes it much harder (need students to get accredited, can’t offer degree to students without accreditation).
Two good colleges who’ve overcome the challenges recently are Olin (engineering school in Boston) and Minerva (globally distributed college).
Olin did it by offering full rides to every student. Now that they’ve established their reputation, they only offer 50% tuition.
I forget his name or even when an where it was or how it ended but some kid wanted to start his own school. People were skeptical to say the least but he put in the work.
It turned out more than a few professional teachers were more than a little bit tired of how things work in the usual institutions. You can't even call it new ideas I think, they knew exactly what was wrong. The funny part was that that automatically became the main selling point.
These are the sorts of hurdles that a wealthy, powerful, amd/or famous person could overcome. If Buffett University or Gates University opened tomorrow you'd have people clamoring to support it and attend it.
As for a draw, the US jniversity system is so flawed at this point that it wouldn't be hard to come up with something better.
Also in the 1800s it was primarily other rich guys going in as part of their social upbringing, so it would be more like friends setting up a new social club.
Because it’s all about the brand, nobody wants to go to Gorben University.
They get created if there is specific market pressures I.e visa fraud. Then suddenly every ceramic and pottery class becomes a university.
There's a bunch of new "universities" but they don't follow the old model, all those online learning platforms are the new wave of "universities". Khan academy, udemy, etc, for a while everyone was starting another platform like that. So I'd say we did already have a second wave of it. Probably a third wave with practically fully AI tutoring / coursework already starting.
It seems like all we’ve been able to do is churn out diploma mills with dubious (or outright fraudulent) accreditation.
Or predatory/misleading payment schemes, a la Lambda School
What is predatory and misleading about it? I just looked it up and it's 17% of your next two years income. Seems pretty simple to me.
This thread is worth a read regarding Lambda school:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067939
- the “dupe” post with a title that specifically refers BloomTech aka Lambda School CEO Austen Allred being banned from all consumer-lending activities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40071694
*edit to add “dupe” link.
We should extort grown-ups to pay for the younglings. 1-2% of your earnings forever.
That way we get professionals who aren't a pack of hyenas looking to put the squeeze on everything an everyone. Those will rip you appart like a sheep with no effort at all.
About 1-2% of earnings forever, tech workers will be on a path for this anyway, it just won't pay for younglings at all. Suppose you need a bunch of certs to remain accredited in a competitive field. Several of the relevant certs are always expiring on any given year, the costs go up but the wages don't, and the field just gets more competitive so you need all the certs and a degree. If wages also go down because of AI, if you find it difficult to retire.. then yeah, even when you've paid in full for your education once already, you're kind of doomed to keep renting it. Employers tend tend to pay this (for now), but if you're ever not employed you'll have eat the costs yourself as a prerequisite for ever getting employed
I neither have a CS degree nor have ever got a single certification and it's never hurt my ability go get SWE jobs, so I really don't know what you are talking about.
You may never be affected, it depends on what you do and how we as an industry decide to approach credentialism in the future. From the standpoint of many vendors though, it's just another possible source of revenue, so they aren't going to just leave the money on the table if they can find any way around it. Employers already have LOTS of applications for every job and are happy to filter with useless bullshit whether it makes sense or not.
I'd say it's currently the worst for SecOps people, senior data-engineers working closely with infrastructure, cloud engineers who specifically prefer to not focus on one platform, etc. Three main clouds each offering many cert levels, plus the major vendors in your adjacent spaces, it can add up pretty quick.
And just to be clear.. keeping up with changes is something I do consider table-stakes for working with tech. But I really do not like the hassle/expense of yet another bullshit administrative burden forever when life is full of such things as it is.
If it were that straightforward, then yes, I agree, but it wasn't, see e.g. [1] or the various articles written at the time
Quality of instruction was poor, instructors were often students from bootcamps with no work experience. They misrepresented the nature of the debt agreement that students were entering into:
> The contracts stated,[45] "this extension of credit is a qualified educational loan and is subject to the limitations on dischargeability in bankruptcy contained in Section 523(a)(8) of the United States Bankruptcy Code." This was false, and lead students to believe that it was impossible to discharge their debt.
It turned out that they sold the ISA contracts -- the "X% for next two years income" contracts -- to third parties before the students had finished their education. This means their claim about alignment of incentives with the student was bogus.
They ended up getting fined for deceptive practices by the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, also sued by former students for misrepresenting job placement rates (claiming 86% to prospective students but in internal memos claimed around 50%).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Institute_of_Technology#...
Peter diamondis and ray kerzweil tried with singularity University but the accreditation process priced to much.
Learning isn't really a virtue of the culture. Most people go to school to get ahead of others. As such, there's two prongs that determine the worth of an education: is the institution accredited, and how prestigious is the institution/degree? The answer to these questions for FractalU is "no" and "not prestigious at all."
Not that that's a bad thing for FractalU. They seem like they know what they want it to be, and they're happy with it in its current state. I certainly think it's a great idea, though admittedly it does only really cater to a specific niche of people. In a better culture that values education I could see this almost being a universally enjoyed activity.
You can go to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
And then sort by year.
They weren't all started in the 1800s, they were all started in the past and you're squishing 300 years of history into a single chunk of time, ignoring that there were decades-long gaps between foundings.
In my state there were four waves of foundings: colonial pre-USA land grant institutions, rich guy vanity projects a century later, post-WWII expansions 80 years after that, and biotech/health care market growth in the 2000s.
The university accreditation system is a cartel. You can't gain accreditation until you have already graduated students! So basically you have to find a group of students who are willing to risk studying at an unofficial university, then operate the university for several years before you can even apply for the stupid credential that allows you to issue degrees that anybody else recognizes. It clearly should be illegal, but like in so many other areas, the university system gets special treatment while continuing to suck up more and more resources for an ever diminishing return.
Here's the question: who cares about accreditation?
I'm not trying to be flippant, this is an actual question.
Sure, getting a higher degree at another institution will have that requirement, as would a professional certification (medicine, law, professional engineering), but those are relatively narrow scopes.
Isn't it true that in most cases nobody is going to care or even know enough to check accreditation?
Maybe this is news to people in the software industry, but a whole bunch of highly regulated (for good reasons) industries like medicine, teaching, and industries reworking professional licenses industries like civil engineering.
You don’t want someone designing a bridge, performing open heart surgery, or flying a plane with 300 people on it who were trained by unverified schools.
The majority of college students are not studying something that falls into these categories though.
It is completely absurd we have not built an alternative, online liberal arts 4 year degree that basically cost nothing.
There is absolutely no reason this could not be done for less than $1k a year right now.
I suspect a large reason is because the people who benefit from the cartel, basically every professional educator, like things as is. The massive education inflation cost is a feature for the cartel, not a bug.
The people designing the plane aren't licensed. Engineers working on public infrastructure are licensed (at least one of them to sign off) as well as most buildings. But that is mostly it. Across the vast majority of industries, engineers aren't licensed in the US.
> You don’t want someone designing a bridge, performing open heart surgery, or flying a plane with 300 people on it who were trained by unverified schools.
The risk tolerance varies a lot between people.
Sure, but you can logically figure out why many of those professions sought professional licensure and accreditation in the first place.
It’s the same concept as “regulations are written in blood.”
Don't a lot of regulated industries have a test you can take like the Bar or PE so it doesn't matter where you get a degree?
It varies. In most states, you need to graduate law school in order to take the bar, but there are some exceptions.
Getting a pilot's license requires a certain number of hours of flight experience, which one gets as a student.
No state issues a medical license without completing an accredited residency program.
I mean, Carnegie Mellon was #2 in computer science in the nation at one point despite not being an accredited program because of their lack of mandatory calculus requirements
It’s easier to give to an existing one or start a parallel organization (e.g., think tank, the Thiel Fellowship, or Y Combinator).
If you think undergrad education should move in a certain direction, it’s probably easier to find a university on the way there and give them a donation to do more of what you like.
Because we already have too many.
You should ask why we don't close them instead.
Would the world be a better or worse place if all university business programs were shut down tomorrow? Follow the thought regarding advertising, marketing and psychology.
America did try this with moderation with all the online certificate programs and self-directed learning in the 2010s.
It would be interesting to look at the impact, success, and failure.
Here are a couple of recently formed, Silicon Valley adjacent universities:
The goal is never learning. You don't need to go to a university to learn effectively.It is credentials.
Trump created one. And he was not the only one. You just do not hear about them on the news all that often. Edit: I am not saying Trump created a good university. I am saying they exist and are created. They are not culturally important and often frauds.
Good teachers are expensive, but on top of that, so are all the facilities. Being accredited is required for Pell Grants and student loans. Can’t be accredited without a lot of horse shit like fully staffed research libraries loaded with books no one will ever read. Yet another higher ed racket
Who decides these standards and what right do they have to do so?
Also, are employers really looking into if a prospect's school was accredited or not?
> Who decides
Councils formed by the currently accredited schools decide.
> what right
The government started relying on these accrediting bodies with the GI Bill in 1952. They did not want the GIs to spend the money on bad educations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_accreditation...
> are employers really looking into
Didn’t yours? If they’re not body shops, companies will rely on the reputation of the school or pick out people from their own school. Unaccredited schools typically have poor reputations and usually churn out “graduates” who can’t attract the money to start businesses and hire people from those schools.
That looks very cool.
As someone that has given a number of classes and seminars, it gets fairly discouraging, how few folks want to learn.
I think that establishing a learning-focused community (like this) would probably really get a lot of people engaged.
Geeks like learning. Many others don't. It's always fairly demoralizing, when I encounter it.
A coliving house in NYC started a 'university' that has taught thousands of students in the last two years.
Any more details on this?
That's what the submitted link is about. GP posted a comment about the thing they submitted in addition to submitting it.
Ah, thank you. I had, admittedly, not read the article in OP. I thought this was very vaguely referencing another situation.
I do find it a bit funny how all of these "democratized" and "decentralized" things always seem to come out the most centralized places, mostly New York. Of course, that's where the people are, so you know, it makes sense. Just funny.
This is such a refreshing inversion of the ‘edtech’ trend—rather than trying to scale education through software, FractalU scales motivation through community. Makes me wonder: instead of designing better UIs for MOOCs or LLM tutors, maybe the real unlock is designing better social containers for learning.
> the real unlock is designing better social containers
FTFY.
Note - a lot of the classic social containers have been systematically disappearing since the 1970s in anything but rural areas for a variety of reasons. I'm not qualified to hypothesize the causes, but I do see the effects.
I love these sort of 'high agency', 'you can just do stuff' posts.
I've been very inspired by FractalU. We've started something similar in London, UK, called Shoshin College [1]
I read "How to Live Near your Friends"[1] article linked from this article, and I can't help but be amused by the author's attitude of "my friends should all move near me because that's the way we can all live near friends"
I mean they're not wrong, but also they could have made friends with their neighbours like the Stoop Coffee[2] author, or moved to be nearer to a friend group also. It's nice to see them really embracing their main character bias though (in this case, in a way that seemed to have successfully built a geographically aligned community)
[1]: https://prigoose.substack.com/p/how-to-live-near-your-friend...
The thing that stuck out to me was that they said there were 22 friends nearby.
I have no idea how you’d maintain relationships with that many people that would be strong enough to justify “I’ll uproot my living situation to be by this person”. Maybe they actually just have 22 acquaintances that like their roommate matchmaking and apartment hunting skills?
Something to do while AI take care of other chores.
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D O P E !
There are HN readers who really do not understand that "dope" is a positive exclamation?