Like many 18-year-olds, Josie Lenter had only a vague idea of what she might study when she enrolled at the University of Central Florida. She thought she might want to be a doctor, and for a year and a half she followed a pre-med track before dropping out for a job in financial sales. Lenter and her family could no longer afford her $17,000 bill. “I always wanted to continue my education, but I didn’t know how much of a possibility that would be,” she says. Then Lenter, now 26, discovered Campus.
Campus is a new online community college that offers students the chance to take classes from faculty at top colleges like Stanford and Princeton, and earn an associates degree in business administration. To be accepted, applicants must have completed high school or a GED and pass Campus’s college readiness assessment, which ensures they are prepared for the college-level work. The company is the brainchild of Tade Oyerinde, a 31-year-old edtech entrepreneur who was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021 for his Slack and Discord-inspired online schooling platform Campuswire. The online college is Oyerinde’s answer to two of higher education’s most pervasive problems: the shortage of well-paid teaching opportunities for even Ivy-caliber adjunct professors, and the sky-high cost to students who want to learn from those faculty.
“We take faculty from top 50 universities who are charismatic, awesome, inspirational, and [bring them to] a distributed online community college alternative where it’s cheap to attend,” says Oyerinde. “That’s the vision.”
Oyerinde’s vision has blue chip supporters—it’s taken in $55 million in funding from investors, including initial seed funding from Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures and City Light Capital, and support from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Discord CEO and founder Jason Citron, who first met Oyerinde while he was building Campuswire in 2016. Campuswire was never designed to be a college itself, but to serve as an all-in-one platform for professors to host discussion forums, online classes, grades, assignments and messaging.
“There were lots of parallels between Campuswire and what I was building at Discord—a social platform for players and friends to hangout before, during, and after gaming. We spent a lot of time talking about how chat was going to disrupt the way we communicate, work, learn and play,” says Citron. “When he was raising money for Campuswire, I put in a small amount. Then, in 2020, when Tade presented me with the big idea behind Campus, I got really excited.”
Campus’s enrollment has grown from 16 students in its first 2023 cohort, which Lenter was part of, to more than 2,000 active students today. The online college is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which also accredits Cal Tech, Stanford and Pomona College. Campus only offers one degree: an Associate Degree in Business Administration with an optional “Applied AI” concentration. The cost is $7,200 per year, or $200 per credit hour, which happens to fall below the maximum Pell grant award, which is $7,395 for the 2024-25 academic year, so that low-income students can attend at no cost.
Only a couple dozen students have graduated from Campus so far, and most have parlayed their 2-year degree into four-year degree programs (Lenter is now pursuing her bachelor’s degree in business administration at Penn State). Oyerinde expects the alumni population to climb rapidly. “We graduate students every quarter now because we start students every quarter,” says Oyerinde, noting that Spring 2025 already has 500 new students enrolled.
The son of Nigerian immigrants, Oyerinde got the idea for pairing top teaching talent with a larger online schooling audience while he was selling Campuswire, the discussion platform Campus is built on. Oyerinde quickly became aware of what he describes as an “adjunct faculty crisis.” “I actually met one professor at UCLA who was living out of his office, and he told me, ‘I’m an adjunct, I make 50 grand a year, and I can’t afford to live anywhere near Westwood.’ I was super, super floored,” says Oyerinde.
Recruiting teaching talent has been “the only thing about building Campus that’s been easy,” he says. A 2022 survey from the labor union American Federation of Teachers found that more than a quarter of adjuncts earn less than $26,500 annually. Most adjuncts work on short-term, one-year or one-semester contracts and earn about $4,000 per three-credit class. At Campus, professors earn $8,000 per class per quarter—double the typical rate. Oyerinde’s growing roster includes 127 scholars from schools including Princeton, Stanford, Cornell University, Carnegie Mellon University and Brown University.
Todd Fitch, Campus’s first professor hired, works as a lecturer at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. He teaches Campus’s introduction to business course, and has also taught microeconomics, introduction to design and strategic management classes. Another is Brandon Middleton, a lecturer at Stanford, who teaches AI for business at Campus and also happens to work for AWS as one of its generative AI leaders.
Feeling stifled by the bureaucracies endemic in academia, Fitch was attracted by the prospect of working for a college with Silicon Valley ethos. “I was particularly excited about Campus being a startup,” he says.
Fitch says the types of students he teaches at Berkeley’s business school and Campus are very different. At Berkeley, where only 11% of applicants were admitted this academic year, “the students I teach don’t generally struggle with how to be students. They also tend to be much more grade-focused because they’re trying to get internships and jobs at top firms and the competition is fierce,” he notes. “The students we see at Campus haven’t had the same level of prior preparation or support. We also have a lot of students who are returning to school after a long absence. They’re often parents, taking care of parents, unhoused and/or food insecure. I’m not sure I would have been able to get through school if I had had to face the same challenges many of our students do. Their resilience is inspirational.”
But Fitch insists that he doesn’t dumb down the coursework. Lenter admits that the work at Campus was harder than what she’d done before, but that “it made me realize that I am capable of getting an education from [more prestigious] institutions because I was able to keep up with the curriculum.”
Like Fitch, Middleton was also accustomed to teaching graduate business courses but he’s adapted his expectations for the younger, less-credentialed students at Campus, which he says come to his video classrooms with a lighter attitude and tend to be less anxious about grades than his students at Berkley. “Teaching Campus students is fun,” he says. “They never hold back any of their questions.”
Campus class sizes average about 80 students, and for every 25 students, Campus offers a teaching assistant who helps the professor with grading and fielding student questions. Teaching assistants get paid $2,000 per class. The large classes Campus offers—including Spreadsheets & Databases, English Composition, Macroeconomics and Entrepreneurship—allow Oyerinde to pay the adjunct professors competitive rates, he explains. “If you have fewer than 50 students, then the economics don’t work if you want to pay the professors well. And you never need to go above 150 to 200 [students]. You never need to have more than that,” he says. All students are also matched with a success coach, who serves as an advisor throughout their studies at Campus.
As part of a recent applied entrepreneurship class, Campus put together a Shark Tank-esque YouTube miniseries called The Grind. Over three episodes, eight students pitch their startup ideas to a panel of expert judges, including businessman and NBA star Shaquille O’Neal; Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of data analytics company Palantir; Jennifer Hyman, founder and CEO of Rent the Runway; and Poppy Thorpe, the former head of brand at cosmetics company Glossier and board member at Snap. The pitches ranged from a dating app that matches users based on their last played song, to a clothing brand for tall men, to an “Uber for photography” app that matches clients with last-minute photographers for events. Out of the eight entries, four students left with prize money, ranging from $10,000 for third and fourth place, to $25,000 for first place. Ashley Byington took home the top prize with her idea Forward Path Edu, an online marketplace where schools can purchase materials and services related to workforce development curriculum.
Though Campus charges students less than the maximum Pell grant, annual tuition is still higher than the national average for public, two-year colleges, which costs $4,050 per year, according to the latest data from the College Board. According to Oyerinde, the premium price pays for the top teaching talent.
Another plus for Campus is that, unlike most community colleges, Oyerinde specifically designed the business administration program to meet the general education requirements at prestigious four year colleges in the University of California system, the California State University system, the University of Texas system, the University of Florida system and the State University of New York System. Campus has also secured guaranteed admissions agreements with ten schools, including Arizona State University, Butler University, and Florida International University, meaning that any Campus graduate that earns at least a 2.5 GPA could be automatically admitted with full credit transfer.
“When you’re making an admissions decision about someone coming straight out of high school, it’s a little bit of a risk. … Our students have actually demonstrated they can do rigorous college-level work in classes taught by high-standard, rigorous faculty,” Oyerinde says. For the transfer institutions, “It’s almost like you’ve got to try before you buy with these students.”