‘We believe in college’: inside Andreessen Horowitz’s $42m unaccredited academy that will charge Harvard prices without degrees

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.” The Academy is putting $42 million from a16z and a group of individual investors into the one-year San Francisco-based program.

It is a separate for-profit company from the VC firm.

It is not accredited, will award no degree, will not take federal student aid, and does not guarantee a job or a paid internship.

The founding class will be about 50 students starting Sept.

2027, and it’s tuition-free—plus every student will get $50,000 in compute credits and a $5,000 travel budget.

The Academy then intends to seek regulatory approval for a two-year program starting in 2028.

If approved, Biyani said, it expects “to charge something similar to elite private universities”—in the range of $60,000 to $90,000 a year.

Biyani insisted that the school isn’t a rejection of the premise of higher education—”we believe in college,” he said.

Instead, it’s rejecting the idea that 18-year-olds in SF are only valuable insofar as they have a startup idea to dedicate a decade to.