How to start a school with your friends

I always wondered why no one creates new universities in the US. It seems like in the 1800s every rich guy started their own university, many with unique missions.<p>The existing university model in the US seems like it&#x27;s ripe for disruption so I&#x27;m surprised no one has tried to create their own.

The Recurse Center[1] folks (also YC) started an un-school with friends!<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recurse.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recurse.com&#x2F;</a>

Love to see it!<p>Wonder how to reconcile the description of almost-negligible admin overhead with this description of a similar effort that warns, &quot;We wanted to keep costs extremely low, so we had parent volunteers do all admin for the school. It&#x27;s going really well, but it&#x27;s an insane amount of work.&quot;<p>From my experience both teaching kids and organizing things, that seems like a much more likely outcome.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;KelseyTuoc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1917287461027459239" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;KelseyTuoc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1917287461027459239</a>

This is such a refreshing inversion of the ‘edtech’ trend—rather than trying to scale education through software, FractalU scales motivation through community. Makes me wonder: instead of designing better UIs for MOOCs or LLM tutors, maybe the real unlock is designing better social containers for learning.

That looks very cool.<p>As someone that has given a number of classes and seminars, it gets fairly discouraging, how few folks want to learn.<p>I think that establishing a learning-focused community (like this) would probably really get a lot of people engaged.<p>Geeks like learning. Many others don&#x27;t. It&#x27;s always fairly demoralizing, when I encounter it.

I read &quot;How to Live Near your Friends&quot;[1] article linked from this article, and I can&#x27;t help but be amused by the author&#x27;s attitude of &quot;my friends should all move near me because that&#x27;s the way we can all live near friends&quot;<p>I mean they&#x27;re not wrong, but also they could have made friends with their neighbours like the Stoop Coffee[2] author, or moved to be nearer to a friend group also. It&#x27;s nice to see them really embracing their main character bias though (in this case, in a way that seemed to have successfully built a geographically aligned community)<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prigoose.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;how-to-live-near-your-friends" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prigoose.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;how-to-live-near-your-friend...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43473618">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43473618</a>

Something to do while AI take care of other chores.

I love these sort of &#x27;high agency&#x27;, &#x27;you can just do stuff&#x27; posts.

A coliving house in NYC started a &#x27;university&#x27; that has taught thousands of students in the last two years.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;nsiBo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;nsiBo</a>

D O P E !