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
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.
So you need legitimacy and you need credibility, and that's exactly what accreditation gives us.
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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