Interview
Jeremy Rossmann of Make School on Income Share Agreements and the Future of College
- MakeSchool is an accredited, full-service college in San Francisco offering a Bachelor of Science in Applied Computer Science, featuring on-campus dorms, full-time industry-expert faculty, and a curriculum located near Union Square.
- The school utilizes a project-based curriculum where students attend a 40-hour work-week schedule (9:30 AM start) involving daily stand-ups, project work, and labs, rather than traditional lectures and self-directed gaps.
- Students can complete the bachelor's degree in two years via an intensive track by accumulating credits through the intensive daily workload and project output, contrasting with the typical four-year timeline.
- MakeSchool operates on an Income Share Agreement (ISA) model where students pay no upfront tuition; the school assumes the debt and risk, only receiving payment once a student is employed and earning.
- The school has five years of operational data (since 2014) demonstrating students securing roles at major tech companies including Facebook, Google, Tesla, and Amazon, validating the ISA financial model.
- The student demographic is primarily lower-to-mid-income (inverse of elite private universities like Stanford or MIT, where 60-75% come from the top 20% income bracket), aiming to democratize access to high-earning technical careers.
- MakeSchool challenges the "autodidact" myth, noting that MOOCs have low completion rates (2-5%) and that 90-95% of people require structured mentorship and curriculum to become excellent engineers, as evidenced by Rossman's own inability to self-teach effectively without a mentor.
- Faculty serve as live mentors and "unblockers" rather than information transmitters, a model the founder claims accelerates learning speed by 10x compared to self-study.
- The curriculum integrates liberal arts concepts (critical thinking, communication, cultural skills) within technical project work, arguing that employers value these soft skills and that a purely career-focused education is necessary for non-privileged students.
- MakeSchool is accredited by WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges), the same body accrediting Stanford and UC Berkeley, under new 2014 regulations allowing flexible, outcome-based programs.
- The founder predicts a higher education shift where traditional colleges will face pressure to align incentives with student outcomes, potentially leading to a "higher ed bubble" where ineffective colleges close and ISAs become more common.
- While some companies (e.g., Google, Apple) have dropped degree requirements in PR, structural university recruiting pipelines still prioritize degree-granting programs; the founder notes only a small fraction of hires are non-degree holders, mostly from privileged backgrounds with safety nets.
- The school anticipates a future of "lifelong learning" rather than "stacked degrees," where students enter the workforce early after a 2-year program and return later for refreshers or new specializations like machine learning.
- Rossman advises aspiring entrepreneurs to avoid "fake work," ignore optimization games around fundraising, and focus on becoming "default alive" (financially sustainable) rather than "default dead" (relying on future funding).
- The school notes that successful entrepreneurs typically emerge later (late 20s/early 30s) after real-world product experience, and MakeSchool mitigates this by forcing students to launch and acquire users for their projects during school.
- Concerns regarding predatory ISAs exist, specifically where schools replace scholarships with ISAs to increase revenue while still collecting upfront payments, undermining the incentive alignment the model is designed to create.