Shai Reshef
speaker
99 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Shai Reshef’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
When you educate one person, you can change a life. But if you educate many, you can change the world.
I read a UNESCO statement that in 2025 there will be 100 million students without universities to serve them. So I felt that it's my turn to give back. University of the People is for the people who have no other alternatives. We are tuition free. We have more refugees than any university in the world. We have 19,000 refugees.
We have 4,300 Afghan women hiding at home, studying with us, because they're not allowed to study under the Taliban rule. These are the people that we started the university for. The two hardest things for me is, first of all...
Thank you for inviting me.
It's interesting because I grew up in a modest family and I went to school. I was not the best school in class. I had other things that were more interesting than studying. I worked from very early age, kind of like, you know, supplement the study that I did, the school with some work.
But I think that after completing my bachelor degree, I went to Michigan to do my master level in Chinese politics in the University of Michigan. And then I became exposed to, through studying China, on the importance of education. Because what happened in China is that Mao and the Communist Party tried to change the culture of a nation, largely by educating the kids. And I was fascinated by it.
I read about China and I learned about what happened in the last hundred few years from being an amazing empire, how it collapsed because it was not ready for the developed world and was not ready to accept that they are inferior. And at the same time, the Communist Party came and said, well, we are going to change it.
And they created a mass movement, took over China and said, we are going to create a different country and a different culture and different nation. And I was, really? How do you do that? And, you know, we're not talking about a country of 100,000 or a million people, right? This is the biggest country in the world. And I start following what's going on and I was shocked.
It took me to get into it to understand that it didn't really work all the way as they wanted. And when we see, we look at China today, it's clear that it didn't work. But also I realized that No doubt that China will become the largest and the strongest power on Earth, which we are experiencing happening. We're seeing it.
And I said, OK, not a lot of people know China. And I decided that I will be one of the few who really know. Wow.
So I studied Chinese politics, and through my PhD studies, I also realized that while I love China, I'm not academic, and I'm not going to be a professor, and I'm not going to spend my life doing research, which I highly appreciate, and I think it's extremely important, except that I don't think it is me. So I learned about a test prep company, SAT.
test prep company and I became involved and I became the CEO of the company and it became an international company with tens of programs in education with hundreds of thousands of students. And among other things, we learned about actually University of Phoenix and other universities who started offering online education, which was really new.
And we decided that we are going to do the same outside of the U.S. And we were the first online university in Europe through partnership with the University of Liverpool. So we were the first university to have white, we were white labeling University of Liverpool offering their online master degrees from Europe. We operated it from Amsterdam.
And that's where I learned how powerful online learning can be.
Well, starting in 2000.
the growth was very, very small for two reasons. First of all, it was for profit at the time. University of the People is non-profit, but that was for profit, and it cost money, significant amount of money. In the U.S., people used to pay, always paid for higher education, not in the amount that they pay right now, but they still paid for higher education outside of the U.S.,
people did not pay for higher education. So the concept of paying for higher education was new. Second, online was new. Look, even now, we're talking about over 20 years from that. Still, people say, online learning, is that good? Is that serious? Is it doable? Is it real? And then people look at us like, what is it? So we had a hard time. We had a hard time with that company. It was successful.
For me, the major thing that I got out of it is to learn that there is a tool to educate people wherever they are. So we had students, let's say, from Singapore. We operated from Amsterdam. But they stayed home, kept their job, stayed with their family, and still get University of Liverpool online degrees. So it was an amazing tool, except that I also realized that most people cannot afford it.
I think it was true then and it is true now when University of the People experiencing exponential growth. You never know what's next. So I think that I always spend my time trying to realize what is not going to work well. What should we keep fixing? What might go wrong? And If it doesn't go wrong, we're lucky. If it goes wrong, you're ready for it.
But yeah, but I think that growing, you know, it's everything from marketing to finance to operation to human resources to culture. It's everything.
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