Community colleges are not immune to the current challenges facing higher education. Student enrollment is declining, while institutions continue to raise tuition fees, leading to students failing to complete their programs. Clearly, it's time for the industry to try something new.
Tade Oyelinde thinks startups can help. Oyelinde is founder and CEO of Campus, a venture-backed, fully accredited online community college. Campus pays its professors higher salaries than other universities, but students pay less for tuition and get laptops and mentoring. Oyelinde said the system allows him to keep costs low for students while attracting top professors, and many students can attend for free thanks to subsidies, creating a better environment for both sides to succeed.
During a recent episode of TechCrunch's Found podcast, Oyelinde said he came up with the idea for Campus while working on an early version of CampusWire, a startup that develops online learning software. As he was meeting with professors face-to-face to sell the software, Oyelinde learned how poorly these professors were paid and how many of them taught at multiple schools to make a living. He was surprised to learn that many of them also worked at community colleges. After researching the current state of community colleges, the next version of CampusWire started to take shape.
“We thought, what if we could use software to make community colleges run more efficiently and keep tuition so low that you could pay your tuition in full with federal and state grants, without having to take out debt,” Oyelinde says. “Let's fill in the first few years of college by learning from great professors at top schools. That was the idea.”
The campus was born, and Oyelinde talked about what happened next: from finding and acquiring an already accredited community college, to determining what subjects to focus on first and how to get students involved.
“Initially it was very difficult [to get students to enroll]”I think it's because people assumed we were a scam,” Oyelinde said, “There are a lot of bad actors in the for-profit higher education space. I think it's become a lot easier to get students and engage them because we have more graduates and more students coming into our programs. So I think the more good we do over time, the easier it becomes.”
Oyerinde also spoke about how he became interested in education, having launched an edtech startup since his college days, and said that despite coming from a family with a long history of education in both the US and Nigeria, he ended up in the field largely by chance.
He also talked about what it was like recruiting and building a culture around a workforce made up of two very different industries: tech startup executives and people from academia.
The company recently raised $23 million in an extended Series A round, and Oyelinde said Campus is ready to expand its course offerings and locations.
“My hope is that in the next five years, anyone in the United States, and ultimately anyone around the world, can come to a campus and get the support they need to build the life they want,” Oyelinde said.