Why I’m building DIY Degree
A short version of the story, the family of projects this belongs to, and what we actually believe about learning.
The founder story
I did everything I was told to do. Good grades, the traditional path, the degree at the end of it. My dad told me early that there was no money for college, so I chased scholarships and worked, and I still walked away with over $100,000 in debt. The part that stuck with me was not the number. It was realizing, years later, that the most valuable things I have learned were self-taught — and that almost none of them came from the thing I paid for.
So I tried to fix it from the inside. I co-founded College Factual to help students find the right college and the right major, so they would not waste the time and money I had. We helped a lot of people. But the longer I did it, the clearer it became that I was answering the wrong question. For most people, the problem was not picking the right college. It was that college was not the right answer at all.
Then COVID put all four of my kids at home, and everything I believed in theory got very concrete. Teachers were doing their best with tools that were never designed for this. The curriculum did not survive the trip through a screen. And the alternatives we tried were fragmented and impersonal — plenty of content, almost no guidance, nothing that adapted to a kid who was ahead in one thing and lost in another. The gaps were not just in school. They were in remote learning too.
Then AI arrived and took away the excuse of time. Whole categories of work are being rewritten, the skills that matter are changing faster than any curriculum committee can meet, and my oldest was starting high school on a path built for a world that no longer exists. I have believed education needed rethinking for a long time. AI is what convinced me it could not wait — so I am building the thing I wish had existed, in the open, at a price a family can carry.
The eCollective family
DIY Degree is one of three related projects. They share a goal: take the parts of education that were locked up by cost and gatekeeping, and open them.
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The parent company
eCollective
The company behind this work, building tools that make learning and teaching cheaper, faster, and more open than the institutions they grew up alongside.
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Open source education
OpenDegree
Open learning modules that anyone can use, improve, and reuse. OpenDegree will supply open modules to DIY Degree as one provider among many, competing on merit with everything else we surface.
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The platform
DIY Degree
The learning platform itself: pick a topic, learn it fast from the best material anywhere, prove it, and get the next best thing. Today, the open directory and the writing behind it.
What we believe
- Every learner has unique strengths. Education should find the thing you are unusually good at and build on it, not average it away.
- Mastery matters more than grades. A grade is a summary of how you compared to a room on one day. Mastery is whether you can actually do the thing.
- Real education happens through curiosity, autonomy, and action. People learn what they chose to learn, and they learn it by doing something with it.
- Learning fast is the ultimate skill. In an AI age, the ability to pick up something new and be useful with it quickly outlasts any specific credential.
- Teachers and schools are allies. Not obstacles, and never obsolete. Anyone with expertise and heart can teach — our job is to give them tools that let them do it at scale and get paid for it.
- AI is an accelerator, not a threat. It is not here to replace teachers. It is here to remove their busy work, personalize what they cannot personalize alone, and get a learner unstuck at midnight.
- You don’t need permission to learn. Education shouldn’t delay your life — it should accelerate it.