Israeli Entrepreneur's Online University Now Enrolls 271,000 Students

University of the People opened the academic year last week with roughly 271,000 students from 216 countries and territories, making the online institution the largest university in the United States by enrollment. Its founder, Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef, has a target of one million students. "And our goal is one million students. The demand is even greater," he told Calcalist's Dror Feuer in a rare interview.

According to UNESCO, about 270 million students attend university worldwide, meaning roughly one in every thousand studies with Reshef's institution. UoPeople sits at the intersection of two crises. Developed nations face stagnant or declining enrollment driven by cost, falling birth rates, the rise of AI, and political instability; the United States has lost more than 1.5 million students since 2010, and Western European institutions face financial difficulties. In the developing world, demand far exceeds supply. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where the youth population has grown more than 60% over the last decade, fewer than 10% of young people attend university, compared with 80% in North America and Western Europe and a global average of 43%, according to UNESCO.

Reshef founded the university in 2009 after two education-sector exits. Instruction is free; students pay only for assessments and other fees. Exams for a single course cost around $180, and a full degree costs approximately $7,200. Only about a third of students pay the full amount — the rest receive scholarships. For comparison, a bachelor's degree year at an Israeli university costs about NIS 12,000, while in the United States costs range from $11,000 to $100,000.

The student body skews toward those with no alternatives. About 15% are American. Forty thousand come from Arab countries, including 15,000 Syrians. Nearly a quarter — about 50,000 students — are refugees or displaced persons. About a third are African, including 80,000 from Nigeria. More than 7,000 Afghan women study in secret, using pseudonyms such as "Jane from California" so that not even the teacher knows their location. Students also come from Yemen, the Rohingya community in Myanmar, Ukraine, South America — and Gaza.

"Last year we had 130 students there; this year, the number has doubled. We currently have eight lecturers in the Strip. We had more, but four left for Egypt and four disappeared, two were killed, according to their families, and we do not know the fate of the other two," Reshef said. Gaza students study in Arabic, as do some 20,000 others; the rest study in English. The university offers degrees in business administration, computer science, and health sciences, plus professional certification courses in partnership with IBM.

The economics are stark. Last year, with 170,000 students, the university's budget was $25 million. "It's a joke," says Reshef. About a third of that budget came from donations, including the Gates Foundation, Coca-Cola, Intel, HP, SAP, and Pfizer. More than 2,000 lecturers work as volunteers, receiving $5 an hour to cover expenses. The rector, dean, board members, and Reshef himself also serve without pay. The university has no offices; its technology development center is based in Rawabi, near Ramallah.

"We are efficient and focused. Few degree programs, lots of technology, we use technology for everything. The courses are asynchronous, and the material is available both as lectures and as text-only readings," Reshef said.

On artificial intelligence, Reshef rejects the defensive posture much of academia has taken. "I am a firm believer in artificial intelligence, and we use it extensively. It saves us a fortune that can be invested in the students," he said. The university has deployed a purpose-trained AI teaching assistant and relies on AI for plagiarism prevention. "Trying to ban students from using AI is a lost cause, a battle that cannot be won. The key is simply using it correctly." He hopes to teach in multiple languages within a year, envisioning an Israeli student learning in Hebrew while a lecturer asks questions in English.

The path to UoPeople ran through two exits. Reshef, who holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Tel Aviv University and pursued a master's in Chinese politics at the University of Michigan, took over Kidum, a Psychometric Entrance Test prep company, as CEO in 1989. Revenues grew from approximately NIS 450,000 in 1988 to more than NIS 100 million in 2004. In Amsterdam, he founded K.I.T. eLearning, the first online university outside the United States, offering University of Liverpool master's degrees; he sold it to Laureate in 2004 for $9.4 million in cash plus up to $10 million tied to performance. A year later he sold Kidum to Kaplan, then part of The Washington Post Company, for an estimated $30 million.

The idea for a free university crystallized after Reshef invested in Cramster, a homework-help startup where tutors worked for free for "karma points." "The realization hit me: all I had to do was put it all together, and you'd have a university that was free, or virtually free," he said. He announced the venture at Yossi Verdi's conference in January 2009; the New York Times devoted a page to it the next day, and hundreds of lecturers volunteered.

Recognition has followed. Reshef and the university received the $4 million Yidan Prize in September 2023 — "Reshef's model reimagines higher education and opens the door to those previously excluded from it," the judges wrote. Next month he receives the McGraw Prize, the field's oldest award. He has become a UN advisor on establishing an online university for less developed nations. "What does 'advisor' mean? It means I tell them what to do, and they don't listen," he said.

Reshef, 71, divides his time between New York and Tel Aviv and draws a hard line between his work and the Israeli state. "What I do isn't affiliated with the state, nor is it done thanks to or on behalf of Israel; rather, it happens despite Israel," he said. "I have 40,000 Arab students; I'm proud of that and believe it's my contribution to peace in the Middle East and the world at large. That's why I work in Gaza. I believe they deserve an education, regardless of what others might think."

His ambitions remain expansive. As he told Haitian students after the 2010 earthquake: "We will keep growing and growing, until one morning we wake up knowing we can provide a solution for every student in the world. And then we'll go to sleep and wake up with a new dream."