Accepting students now in all programs.
Accepting students now in all programs.
I need to come clean about something.
I have spent years inside the higher education system. I know how it works. I know why it's broken. And I've stayed quiet long enough.
Today I'm blowing the whistle—and then I'm going to tell you what my team and I are building to fix it.
Here's the dirty secret at the center of American higher education: a small group of existing colleges and universities effectively controls who gets to become a new college or university.
They do it through accreditation.
Accreditation is the gatekeeping process that determines whether an institution can access federal financial aid—which, in practice, determines whether students can afford to attend. Without accreditation, a school is essentially invisible to most prospective students. And the accreditors? They're run by the very universities they're supposed to oversee.
I interviewed some of the most powerful people in accreditation and higher education and wrote a book about it called the Caging of the American Mind.
Multiple policy researchers across the political spectrum now describe this as a cartel. The analysis is straightforward: very few colleges lose accreditation and very few new colleges obtain accreditation—consistent with accreditors applying different standards to existing colleges versus new ones, exactly what you'd expect from a cartel that tries to protect incumbents and prevent new competition.
Even government officials agree. Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent has stated that the existing accreditation system "shields existing players," with Department of Education staff and overly burdensome regulations creating substantial barriers to entry for new accreditors.
The result? The number of degree-granting nonprofit colleges is no higher today than it was in 1990, even as the number of students has swelled. Student demand ballooned. Supply stayed frozen. And when supply is frozen and demand grows, prices do one thing: they go up.
With no competitive pressure to keep costs down, universities didn't invest their extra revenue in better teaching. They hired armies of administrators.
There are now three times as many administrators and staffers as there are teaching faculty at leading schools, according to a 2023 report from the Progressive Policy Institute.
The numbers are staggering. From 1977 to 2024, college tuition rose by 1,513%, at an average inflation rate of 6.1% per year—almost double the overall inflation rate of 3.56% during the same period. Meanwhile, administrative salaries rose 5.1% in 2024—the highest annual increase since 2014—while faculty saw only a 3.4% increase, roughly in line with inflation.
The percent of total university spending accounted for by instruction has decreased from 41% to 29% since 1980. Students are paying more. They're getting less teaching.
And what do universities do with all those extra administrators? They send emails. They run committees. They write reports for accreditors—who then use those reports to justify the existence of the whole system.
This is not a conspiracy. It's just monopoly economics doing what monopoly economics always does.
Here's what makes me the most angry.
Since roughly the year 2000, cognitive scientists and educational researchers have produced a revolution in our understanding of how humans learn. Techniques like spaced repetition, retrieval practice, interleaving, and elaborative interrogation have moved from lab curiosities to robust, replicated findings with enormous practical implications.
Researchers have identified six specific cognitive strategies with robust support from decades of research: spaced practice, interleaving, retrieval practice, elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding—and the field has made significant advances in applying these to education with specific recommendations for students to maximize their learning efficiency.
Strong evidence supports spaced repetition as a key component of effective learning. Compared with massed learning ("cramming"), studying material over spaced intervals significantly improves long-term retention, even when total studying time is the same.
And yet walk into nearly any lecture hall at a legacy university today. What do you see? A professor at a podium. A hundred and fifty students taking notes. One exam at the end of the semester. The same model that existed in 1950.
The universities that have monopolized higher education have no competitive incentive to change. Changing is hard. Change requires investment, retraining, and admitting that what you've been doing wasn't optimal. So they don't change. And students keep cramming, keep forgetting, and keep graduating with degrees that cost a fortune and skills that don't stick.
Before I tell you what we're building, let me introduce you to Benjamin Bloom.
In 1984, Bloom—one of the most important educational psychologists of the 20th century—published a landmark paper in Educational Researcher that should have upended every classroom in the world. It didn't. Legacy institutions made sure of that.
Bloom's finding was simple and devastating: students who received one-on-one tutoring performed two standard deviations—or "2 sigma"—better than those who learned via traditional classroom methods. In simple terms, the average tutored student outperformed 98% of the students in a conventional classroom.
Two. Standard. Deviations. That's roughly two whole letter grades—a C becoming an A.
Bloom and his graduate students at the University of Chicago sorted students into three groups: conventional classroom with 30 students per teacher; mastery learning with the same class size but frequent feedback; and one-on-one tutoring with a tutor working with up to three students at a time. The tutored students did not just edge out the others—they blew past them.
Bloom called this "the 2 Sigma Problem" because he believed one-on-one tutoring was too expensive to scale. He challenged researchers to find a group instruction method that could match it.
We accepted that challenge. And we built Elton University.
Elton University is a 501(c)3 nonprofit university that takes the last quarter century of learning science seriously—and builds a university around it.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
1-on-1 tutoring as the core model. Every Elton student works directly with expert professors and professional coaches. Not in a lecture hall. Not on a Zoom recording. With a real human being who knows your name, your goals, and where you're stuck. Oxford University has used this tutorial model for centuries. We've made it accessible and affordable for everyone.
Personalized, mastery-based learning. At a legacy university, the semester ends whether or not you've mastered the material. At Elton, you advance when you've actually learned the content. This is what the research demands, and it's what our students get.
Recognition of prior learning. One of our founding principles is "Don't Waste Anyone's Time." If you've learned something—through work, through community college, through life—we credit it and build forward. You don't repeat what you already know.
Affordable by design. Because we invest in people, not buildings, we keep costs low. Our tuition is lower than most public colleges before financial aid. Ninety-two percent of our students receive financial aid. We don't extract monopoly rents because we actually have to earn your enrollment.
The result: students complete bachelor's degrees in 2–3 years, MBAs in one year, and certificates in as few as 12–16 weeks.
This isn't just about saving money on tuition—though you will save money on tuition.
The accreditation cartel has frozen American higher education at a 1970s model while the cost has exploded by 1,500%. A generation of students carries debt that shadows their entire adult lives. Employers complain constantly that graduates lack practical skills. And the research on how to actually teach people—genuinely transformative research—sits ignored on academic shelves.
We built Elton to prove something: that a university designed around the science of learning, built for the student rather than the bureaucracy, and run as a genuine nonprofit can provide a world-class education that is also affordable.
That's not a pitch. That's a proof of concept.
If you're a prospective student tired of paying monopoly prices for a pre-industrial teaching model—apply to Elton.
If you're a donor or supporter who believes education is too important to be controlled by a cartel—consider supporting our mission.
And if you're a fellow educator who's read this and found yourself nodding—we'd love to talk.
The insider is no longer staying quiet.
Elton University is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization (EIN 86-2426898) based in San Francisco, CA. Learn more at elton.university.
