Welcome to Elton University. Accepting students now in all programs.
Welcome to Elton University. Accepting students now in all programs.
Picking a university is a big commitment — of time, money, and trust. A new university asks even more of you. This page exists to answer the questions you should be asking: who founded Elton, who teaches here, what we believe, and why.
Learn MOREElton is an Old English name meaning "from the old town." That is exactly what we are.
The oldest universities in the world — Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the original Oxford and Cambridge — were not built around course catalogues, credits, and curricula designed by committee. They were built around direct relationships between teachers and students, around curiosity-driven inquiry, around learning that moved at the pace of the person doing the learning. In other words, they looked a lot like Elton.
Somewhere along the way, higher education lost that tradition. It traded the tutorial for the lecture hall, the individual for the cohort, the question for the credential. Elton is a return to what universities were always supposed to be — reimagined for the world as it is today.
New school. Old town.
Higher education hasn't meaningfully changed in over a century. The lecture hall. The four-year timeline. The crushing debt. The degree that may or may not lead anywhere. Generations of students have accepted this as simply how college works.
We didn't accept it.
Elton was founded in 2021 by educator and researcher Adam Braus with one question at its center: what if we started from scratch and built a university based entirely on what the evidence actually says? Not on tradition, not on administrative convenience, not on the preferences of tenured faculty — but on the best scientific research into how human beings actually learn.
The answer looked nothing like what already existed. So we built it.
The mission of Elton University is to serve its students and the public by cultivating the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that support free people living in a free society. We believe a great education does not just prepare you for a job — it prepares you for a life. One with purpose, fellowship, and the capacity to keep growing long after you leave us.
We hold ourselves to that mission with specific, measurable commitments: high student satisfaction, a strong rate of graduates achieving their next career or educational goal within six months, a high graduation rate, and a near-zero rate of students leaving unhappy. We track all of these, openly, because we believe a university that cannot measure its own success has no business claiming it.
Elton's motto is the Latin phrase Per Studium Sapiens, which means "through study, one gains wisdom" — or more precisely, "by following our deepest curiosities and highest motivations, we become more fully human."
The Latin word studium does not simply mean "study." In classical Latin it means eager desire — the feeling of being pulled toward something because you cannot help it. Wisdom, we believe, is not transferred through lectures and examinations. It is earned through curiosity, through pursuit, through caring about something enough to go after it.
Great universities have always expressed their commitments in their mottos. Harvard's is Veritas — truth. Yale's is Lux et Veritas — light and truth. Elton's says something different: not just what we seek, but how we seek it. And it shapes everything about how we teach. If wisdom comes through eager pursuit, then our job is to help each student discover what they are most eager about — and provide the finest possible guidance for that journey.
By following your deepest curiosities, you do not just gain knowledge. You become more fully yourself, more fully free, and more fully human.
Elton has a growing team of highly trained, experienced, and visionary leadership.
Adam Braus is a researcher, educator, and institution-builder with expertise spanning ethics, higher education, and technology. He began designing Elton when he wrote the book Motivate, on evidence-based education. He took action after he conducted quantitative research in analyses of the rising costs and falling quality of American universities. As an educator and leader, he built the Department of Applied Computer Science at Dominican University of California from the ground up. He founded Elton to put everything he had researched, written, and discovered into a single institution — one designed from first principles around what the evidence says actually works in education.
Dr. Justine Meyr serves as Dean of the PhD by Publication program at Elton University, where she leads the development of innovative doctoral pathways that recognize diverse forms of scholarly and professional work. With over 20 years of experience in higher education, she brings expertise in curriculum design, applied linguistics, and digital learning. Her work at Elton focuses on expanding access to rigorous doctoral education while maintaining high standards of academic quality.
Tolgay Kizilelma brings nearly 30 years of experience across the full spectrum of business and information technology, with deep expertise in cybersecurity strategy, enterprise risk, governance, and digital transformation. He has worked across education, healthcare, research, and the public and private sectors, and was recognized as one of the top 100 CISOs in the United States in 2022 by CISOs Connect. He holds an exceptional range of professional certifications across cybersecurity, privacy, risk, and project management, and has been teaching cybersecurity at the graduate level for over 12 years. At Elton, he leads the Master's in Cybersecurity program, bringing real-world depth and academic rigor to one of the most in-demand fields of our time.
Colin Lumsden is a higher education and education technology executive with nearly 30 years of experience building programs, partnerships, and institutions that deliver results for learners. He has been part of the management teams behind two of the four largest edtech acquisitions in history, led a portfolio generating over $110 million in annual revenue across more than 25 university partners, and has launched and scaled operations across multiple countries and markets. His career spans both private sector edtech companies and public higher education institutions, with a consistent focus on one thing: student outcomes. He is currently completing his PhD. At Elton, he brings that rare combination of academic commitment and real-world executive experience to the College of Business.
You would not go to a hospital where the staff told you they had never heard of evidence-based medicine or had heard of it but still preferred to rely on tradition and whatever happened to be fashionable this decade. And yet this is effectively the norm in higher education. Universities largely ignore decades of groundbreaking research into what works in teaching and learning.
Elton is based, from its founding moment to its present day, on using the best up-to-date evidence for what works in education. Every decision we make about how students learn — how we teach, how we assess, how we support — is grounded in the best research we can find. When better evidence emerges, we change. As far as we know, Elton is the only explictly and publicly evidence-based university in the world. We hope others soon follow suit!
Universities teach the way they teach because that is how they have always taught — lectures that research shows are among the least effective ways to learn, rigid curricula that ignore decades of study on motivation and retention, assessment methods designed for administrative convenience rather than student growth.
Elton instead follows what the best evidence shows. And as the evidence evolves, so will Elton.
Here are some of the evidence-based educational methods Elton uses today:
Research by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that students who learn through 1-on-1 tutoring perform two full standard deviations above students in a traditional classroom — meaning a student at the 50th percentile in a lecture hall performs at the 98th percentile when taught one-on-one. Every Elton student works directly with an expert professor, not a teaching assistant or a recorded video.
Elton professors are trained to give growth mindset feedback — responding to student work in ways that emphasize effort, strategy, and progress rather than fixed ability. Research shows this approach helps students learn as much as 60% more effectively than traditional evaluative feedback.
Elton students do not sit and absorb — they make things, solve problems, and apply what they are learning to real projects from day one. Decades of research confirm that active learning produces significantly better retention and deeper understanding than passive instruction.
Students who study what they are genuinely curious about learn nearly twice as fast as students working through a compulsory curriculum. At Elton, every student builds a learning plan around their own goals, interests, and pace — not a syllabus designed for the average student.
Rather than points-based or percentage grading, Elton uses clear, transparent rubrics for grading Evidence shows that rubric-based grading is more accurate, fairer, and — critically — motivates students to engage more deeply with their work because they understand exactly what excellence looks like before they begin.
Research consistently shows that students learn faster and more deeply when they have clear, specific goals and receive frequent, detailed feedback on their progress. At Elton, every sprint begins with explicit learning goals and ends with substantive feedback — so students always know where they are, where they are going, and how to get there.
TEACHING METHOD: 1-ON-1 TUTORING
AGILE AND PERSONALIZED CURRICULUM
YOUR CURIOSITY MATTERS
