For elite students, college has never looked like a worse deal. Tuition is nearly half a million dollars, AI is threatening to destroy the entry-level jobs a degree used to guarantee, and now in the hottest industry—tech—it’s cool to skip school entirely. So on Tuesday, Andreessen Horowitz became the first venture capital firm to sell an alternative.
“The bet is that there’s an opportunity to educate the next generation in a way that is more future-forward, and that’s a big market opportunity,” Gagan Biyani, a cofounder of $3.2 billion ed-tech unicorn Udemy who is now running the new Horowitz Andreessen Academy, told Fortune. Higher education, he noted, is a $2 trillion industry. “We think there are lots of ways to turn this into a successful business.”
