Shai Reshef
Appearances
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Well, the first time I met the accreditation agency, I felt like it's really easy because what they said, look, here are the standards. Just follow the standards and you can get accredited. Sure. Okay. Sounds very easy. I remember going out, calling to my co-CEO at KIT and say, wow, you know how easy it is to get accredited. You're just following the standards. It was a long road.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
We received our initial accreditation in 2014 by the DEAC, stands for Distance Education Accreditation Commission, which is a national accreditation. A lot of the institutions are like ourselves for distance. And you need to meet a lot of standards because in order to get accredited, All your courses need to be evaluated, that they meet the standards.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
They need to see that you have all the procedures to accept the students, to serve the students, and to verify that they meet the standards. Then they check the learning outcomes. So it really checks every single element of your operation. It took us actually, you know, from 2010 or 11 when we started until 2014, when we got initially accredited, which was a huge thing for us.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
We had about 500 students when we had our initial accreditation. Now we have 153,000 10 years later. So it was a long, a long road. While having the DAC, which is a great accreditation, we get a lot of push from our students or requests from our students to get regional accreditation as well. Because in the U.S. system, there are national and there are regional.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
And regional, they are older, they are more traditional, and they are perceived by many as better accreditation. And, you know, we're there not for ourselves. We're there for our students. And if the students want, we need to do it. One of the challenges that we had with our initial accreditation is that, for example, Canada do not accept our accreditation for master level.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So there was a need for another accreditation. So for the last five years, we worked on another accreditation. And two weeks ago, we got it. It's WASC, stands for Western Accreditation Secondary Commission, which is a regional accreditation. And now we have the same accreditation as Stanford and Berkeley and UCLA. You can't get any higher academic accreditation in the U.S.,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
This is a major milestone for us that actually puts us in line with the best universities in the world, which is important because again, being online, Well, I don't think that there is a single university in the U.S. They do not offer at least one course online. Still, people are not 100% sure that that's the right thing and the real thing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So you need legitimacy and you need credibility, and that's exactly what accreditation gives us.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
University of the People is for the people who have no other alternatives. We do not want refugees. to have the people who can get into Harvard or Stanford, Yale, and others. We want to open the gates for those who have no other opportunities. By definition, we have people in the U.S. that are homeless, stay-at-home immigrants.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
We have survivors of the genocide in Rwanda, the earthquake in Haiti, people who sell fruits on the streets. So we're opening the gates to those who have nobody else is willing to accept them. Among them, we have refugees. As a university, we have more refugees than any university in the world. We have 19,000 refugees. We have 4,300 Afghan women who are studying, hiding at home, studying with us,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
because they're not allowed to study under the Taliban rule. Moreover, what we just learned is that they start graduating, and 60% of our graduates in Afghanistan work remotely as programmers with international companies. It's amazing stories. These are the people that we started the university for. And we have, in 2012, we started witnessing
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Tens of thousands of Syrians knocking on our doors, trying to study, but could not make it because of the language. You know, the war in Syria and all the universities were closed. They were knocking on our door. They couldn't make it. So we said, OK, let's develop a program in Arabic. We developed a program in Arabic. Now we have 30,000 students studying in Arabic, and many of them are refugees.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So we are there for these people. And actually, our next project is to develop your people in Spanish, again, for Venezuelan refugees, because there are millions of them that do not have opportunities. And we can and we should open the gates to them. And that's what we do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
We have students from 209 countries, you're right. We have students in Gaza. What we learned, and we are a year and a half after when the war started in October, we had 17 students in Gaza. Nine of them are still studying even now. We had 11 professors from Gaza. The professors are volunteers, as you know. Five of them are still teaching with us, which means that they are daily in the class.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So we decided and we raised, we got scholarships for students from Gaza. And now we are enabling Gazan students to study with us again because all the universities are closed and we are their opportunity to continue their studies. That's our mission, to open the gates. I would say another thing. You know, we are tuition-free. we are not free.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
We expect the students to pay $140 per each end-of-course assessment. So a full BA would cost $5,600 for as long as it takes the students. And we let the students actually up to 10 years to complete a bachelor degree. But they have to pay $140 by the end of each course. Those who cannot afford it, we offer them scholarships.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So over half of the students pay nothing whatsoever in order to study with us. Because this is our mission. Give them the chance. And that's what we do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Thank you for inviting me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
The two hardest thing for me is is first of all to spread the word. Because even though, you know, we have 150,000 students and our students are amazing ambassadors to our mission and they're really doing a lot online, most people who need us don't know that we exist. So how do you spread the word? And being tuition-free means that we don't have a big budget to spread the word.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Yeah, marketing budget. But when they come to study and when they hear about us and they want to study, We need the money to make sure that we can take them. And this is a challenge. Both things will challenge from day one. And, you know, we have 150,000 students. We are very proud of it. But the demand out there is way larger than that. But we can take all of them.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
You know, I'm very proud to have 4,300 Afghan women studying with us. But we have over 20,000 applicants. in Afghanistan, and we simply cannot accommodate all of them. So yes, I'm actually from day one raising donations to enable us. We are from almost, after very few years, we became financially sustainable, the operation.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So we don't need donations in order to operate, but we do need the donations in order to get more students. So it goes for scholarships or for new programs, etc. And from day one, I'm raising the money. Coming from the for-profit world, I did not understand what fundraising is and actually how hard it is. And when I started the university, I said, Well, it's such an amazing idea.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
The money will flow in. Obviously, I mean, we will never have any problem raising money. Well, it took me some time to realize that it doesn't really work this way. And raising money is a profession. And knowing how to build a philanthropic community is hard. So we're doing it, and I do it a large part of my time, and we have now a great team that is working on it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
But it is true that we are not doing as well as we should, and we don't raise as much as we should because, you know, I mentioned scholarships, but if we had enough money, we can turn half of the university to operate with AI. And if we operate with AI, we can serve even more students. So, but again, you need money for that. And so, yeah, there are challenges out there.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
We need help spreading the word, as I said, in any way that anyone can help us either spread because they have a lot of followers or they know others or they know organization that can partner with us. All of it is more than welcome. Moreover, we are also working on a project in Africa.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
The challenge in Africa is that in every single country in Africa, there aren't enough seats in the universities to accommodate the demand. So take Nigeria. It's the largest country, but still 10.5 million students graduate high school every year. A million and a half out of them take and pass the university entrance exams, which means qualified for higher education.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
But there are seats available for half a million. So by definition, a million qualified students will stay out. And what we're saying, use our model. Because in online, you can take any number of students and there is no shortage of seats.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So we are looking for a government in Africa to work together with us to solve the shortage of seats and to show the other countries that solution is there and to be like the cell phone did to the landline. Instead of having more and more lines, they just jump to cell phones. And the same with universities.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Instead of building more and more and more physical universities, go online and you can serve everyone. So our project right now, we identify seven countries where they are relatively politically stable and have strong international companies' presence. And we want the companies to team up with us.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
And the idea is to work with the government and with the companies to identify what education the companies need in order to hire local people. We are going to offer this education to educated people. And together, we are going to educate the people, offer them jobs, and show how We educate many people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So if your companies operate in Africa and if you want to do good to Africa and to yourself there, because you will hire people, we are more than open to talk to you. And obviously, anyone who wants to help us sponsor any type of students that need help, sure, come along.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Your other question was about sustainability and about how you continue doing it, even though it's getting hard sometimes, et cetera. I believe from day one that any NGO should be sustainable, try to be sustainable from its revenues rather than from donations. Because if you depend on donations, one day and you are gone. I mean, look at what happened right now. Trump cutting a lot of...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
quite a few NGOs will close down. Well, I felt that we should charge minimum from the students, from those who can pay, and this amount should enable us to operate, be sustainable operationally, which means that if we don't get donations, maybe we won't be able to serve as many students, but we will continue working.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Now, your third question was about how do you continue doing it, and the answer there is actually... I think it's partially personality. I never give up. I'm like, you know, the energizer bunny. But more than that, I guess that it's the belief in the mission and the belief that if you will continue doing, it will eventually work. And it does.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
It's yes and no. And let me explain. First of all, if you compare our degree students. Refugees are all free, totally free. They do better than the other students. So the fact that they don't pay does not mean that they are not serious. However, that's after they became degree-seeking. When we started, and we evolved a long time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
At the beginning, we let everyone in, and we didn't even ask them for their English, which was really stupid, because if you can't speak English, you can't study with us. So we evolved, and we put bars, and we put, actually. But one of the things that we did, we introduced two foundation courses.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So when you come to us, as long as you speak English and you have a high school diploma, you're welcome to start. And when you start with us, we ask you to take two courses. It's two academic courses. One course is online strategies, which teach you how you study online, how to write an essay, etc. The second one is the field of your choice.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
And we only teach business administration, computer science and health science undergraduate, as well as MBA, master in education and master in IT, MA level courses. So you come to us and we say, take two courses. See if you like it. See if you have the motivation. See if you like our pedagogy. If you have the discipline. If you have all this, continue. Show us that you meet our standards.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
You pass the courses. You get credit for them and continue with us. You don't pass the courses, sorry, you can't continue with us. But we lose over half of the students in these two courses for the very reason that you mentioned, because a lot of students say, oh, it's tuition free. I'll come in and get a degree by mail.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Or we tell the students every single course that you take requires 20 hours a week. And the human nature is to say, well, 20 hours a week is for him. I can do it in an hour a week. Well, one hour goes by and you're gone. You can do it in one hour a week. And then, you know, it's the discipline of spending every night. You're sitting in front of the computer and you're by yourself.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
It's not that you sit with your peers.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So it's really hard. So a lot of people simply cannot make it. So it's a screening that only the serious students come. After they come and after they pass, we have amazing results and they continue and graduate. But yeah.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
I think that you shouldn't start any project if you don't understand the subject matter or you have someone who understands it. Because if you want to produce a new car and you have no idea what it means to produce a car, most likely you're going to fail unless you have people around you that will help you. So this is one very important thing. Second, you need pretty much to know the process.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
and plan for it, what it takes, what are the stages, how much money you need in order to do it. So you need to know all the details before you launch it. I think that you must have experts on your side, unless you know it, experts on your side in every aspect. I'm not a financial person. I will never be one. But I always had great financial people next to me to tell me, don't do that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
You don't have the money to do it or you need to do it this way or the other way. You need to think about what other parts you need that you don't have such as marketing. Do you know how to market? And you need to know how much it will cost you to market because otherwise it won't work. So I think that it takes a lot of learning before you go into it. Then you need to try to test your product
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
As soon as you can get feedback all the time, get feedback, what you do. You know, when we started, when I, we started the university, we thought that we are going to develop our learning management system by ourselves. Even though I had a university and we never developed it by ourselves. You bought one, you rent one actually. And it took me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
A few months that a friend of mine who is actually understand much more than I am in technology and in universities technology said, you're crazy. You will never be able to make it this way because it's so costly. You know, that's not your business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Yeah. So to understand what you do and what you buy and what you rent and what are you focusing on. And last but not least, and probably the most important thing is never giving up. I think that you should be ready to make mistakes. You can't succeed without making mistakes. But accept them and learn from them and change. I'll give you an example, actually with KIT. The concept of KIT was B2B.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
that we are going to test centers and convince them, tech test centers, when you want certification, et cetera, you go and take the exams, and to convince the people who's coming there to get academic degree, which sounds great, except the people who sell this product sell days in a center. They don't sell degrees. And this is a different product, which...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
They did not know how to sell and they were not interested. So it was a total failure. So pretty much the entire concept of that university collapsed. And then we said, OK, but there is another market, the private market. Let's go for the private market. And we switched 180% degrees the way we operate. And we went to a different market and it worked. So be open. See if it doesn't work.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Is there another way?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Well, first of all, I take the stress on myself, not necessarily on my team. So And I like being under stress. I don't think that I'm the easiest person to work with. I want everything to be done yesterday. I'm really, really pushing hard and always deadlines and always, okay, why do you think it will take you a month? Why can't you do it in a week?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
You know, and I'm always pushing people to the limit. which I think makes it hard to work with me. On the other hand, I think that people appreciate, first of all, I don't do it for the sake of making their life miserable. There is a reason for that. And second, I'm the first person to accept mistakes. I'll give you an example from, again, history. We had a marketing, VP marketing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
When we were three people, one of them was already VP marketing because I'm a strong believer in marketing. And he was a kid like myself. And one day I see a truck coming to our office and download doggy bags, just bags, thousands of them. And I said, did you order that? He said, why? We're a test prep company. And he said, you know what? I still don't remember.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Probably he said something, but it wasn't... Good enough for me to remember what he said. But I said, you know, he's an amazing VP marketing and he's doing amazing things. And he made a mistake. That's okay. We all, we're a human being and you accept the mistakes. And I think that people appreciate it. So it goes both ways.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
I won't say names because I wouldn't give any name without their permission, but I'll tell you a few stories. Sure. Well, it's a story of a young woman that at the age of 14 became homeless. At the age of 16, she was homeless with a kid, single mom with a kid. At the age of 18, single mom, homeless with two kids. And she said, my only way to get out of it is through education.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So she went to a college, graduated after four years with tens of thousands of debt and couldn't find a job. And she said, I'm not giving up. I'm going to master the degree. And she came to us. And she did her MBA. And when I met her, she said, I'm now a manager at Amazon. I have my own home. I have my own pool. I have my vintage car. I'm the American dream. And it's all because of you people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So this is one story. Another story, which is actually, you know, it goes to a different direction, but it's very important. I met one of our students who started studying also.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
He grew up in a family who came from Mexico, and he grew up in a poor neighborhood, and he couldn't afford going to college until he found us, started studying computer science with us, and after nine months got a job with IBM while studying with us. And again, you know, these are people that we help even if they don't complete the degree. So we have hundreds of thousands of stories like this.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
We have graduated to work with Amazon and Google and IBM and Microsoft and JP Morgan and World Bank. Most of our students actually work while studying with us, the population. A lot of them are working adults. But 70% of them say that they got promotion while studying with us. So we are really giving them a better future. And it is important.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
When you help someone to get a better job and a better future, you don't help them, their families, their communities. And if it's a lot of them, it's their countries. And if many of them, it's the world.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
It's interesting because I think that if I've started... nonprofit earlier, I could have done more. However, the fact that I came there when I can afford doing that and I'm not depending on a salary or anyone to let me do that is a great benefit. So from that perspective, you know, I feel that maybe I could have done more. But on the other hand, I'm very happy that I started it where I started.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
I feel that the world should appreciate philanthropy in general more. I hope the world would have been more philanthropic. I think that I would love more people to go into NGOs because the world needs NGOs. I think that I myself, I wish that I would be able to contribute to the realization how online is powerful. So more people will take the opportunity for their own benefit, obviously.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
But I'm very happy with where I am and I would just wish to continue doing what I do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Yeah, we are just at the beginning. That's true. I hope.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Thank you for inviting me. It was a great conversation and thanks for doing it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
When you educate one person, you can change a life. But if you educate many, you can change the world.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
And that's where I learned how powerful online learning can be.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Well, starting in 2000.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.,
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So here it is. KIT was a great company. We decided to sell it to L'Oreal. Their name was not L'Oreal at the time. It was Sylvan Learning. Then they changed their name. And I went to New York, semi-retired. But Very fast, I realized and my family realized that I'm not the retired person. I'm too hyper. And I felt that I want to continue.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
But it was also clear to me that I don't want to do more of the same. I sold two businesses. I felt that it's my turn to give back. And for me to give back was, and that's my personality, I want to do it in a way that will have an impact on the world. And having impact on the world is obviously education. Because when you think about it, when you educate one person, you can change a life.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
But if you educate many, you can change the world. So I start looking around and I wasn't sure how to do it and what exactly I want to do. But then through a friend, I met a company that wanted me to become involved. And I met them, two young kids, not that young, but, you know, in their early 20s, young. And I said, what do you do?
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
And they said, you know, we have a website, obviously in education, where students come every day. with their homework online and professors come online and offer them help to help them with their homework. And I said, and what do the professor do? They said, well, they get nothing. They get karma points, which worth nothing. It's just a prestige.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
I said, listen, I know the world and I know education and I understand a little bit psychology. If you help students with their homework, You are a tutor. If you're a tutor, why won't you take money? I said, well, you don't understand the internet. I said, okay, I'm willing to learn.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
And I came to their website and I realized that every time students come online, there are hundreds of professors who are willing to help them for free. What they get in return is karma points, which worth nothing. And I said, wait a second. By now, if you look at what makes higher education
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
You need content, but there was already open educational resources, which means content that professors put online for free. There is open source technology, free technology. And if there are professors that are willing to teach for free, actually, this is what you need for a university. All I had to do is to put it together and create tuition-free university. So that's where the idea came from.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
So I said, okay, it was open source technology, open educational resources and volunteers. I said, this is a university. All I have to do, as I said, is to put it together. So I went to a conference in Munich. And I announced that I'm going to start a tuition-free university.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
And by the way, I should have said that when I was in KIT, I realized that the main problem is that so many people need education. but they can't afford it. And when I was thinking about creating University of the People, I realized I read a UNESCO statement on that year in 2009 that in 2025, right now, there will be 100 million students without universities to serve them. So I said, okay.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
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...
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
I announced the university in Munich. The next day, the New York Times wrote a page about it. And the following day, I already had hundreds of emails from professors who said, wow, we want to help. And they built the New York City.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
When I announced the University of the People, I knew what it takes to build a university because I had a university in Europe and I knew what it takes, which was a great plus because otherwise, what do you need in order to create a university?
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
Second, from the very beginning, I had amazing people who came to help from our provost, who came from Columbia University and the vice provost, from deans who came from NYU and Princeton. And those people taught me what I need in order to build a university, and they built it. So most of the manpower was volunteers, which saves millions of dollars along the years. We did need capital.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
I invested some money originally, but we worked extremely fast because the idea was we are not going to become a regular university. We are going to give the students what they need in order to succeed, do it in the most efficient way that it can be done, and the fastest way. So I announced the university on the 27th of January. By April, we start enrolling students.
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How Shai Reshef Is Empowering Refugees and Underserved Students with Free College Education | E96
By September, we already started teaching. It was extremely fast. We built the courses while teaching. All were built by volunteers. And Technology, we use open source technology. So it was very, very fast and efficient. And luckily, I had amazing people on my side who did it.