Scaling the Impossible: How University of the People Grew from 137 to 150,000 Students in Just 15 Years

This episode is sponsored by Student Growth Partners, your trusted partner in helping universities grow their enrollments. If you enjoy this podcast, please like, subscribe and share it with friends who might find it valuable. Your support helps us reach more listeners and continue bringing you expert insights from the world of higher education. Welcome to the latest episode of the Enrollment Clinic. My guest today is Asaf Wulf. He is the senior VP of Enrollment at University of the People. Welcome, Asaf. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's so great to have you here as I was saying prior to Hidden Record. This is going to be a very interesting discussion because your space is the online learning space and we don't really get to interview a lot of guests here in that space. There's been a tremendous growth at University of People in the past 15 years. I think in 2010 you only had about 137 students and you're projecting to be at 150,000 or a little bit over that in 2025. That's an insane growth. Now, I'm going to spend the next 30 minutes really dissecting into how did you get from 135 to 135,000 in less than 15 years. How did you get in the industry? I was working in a test program company and I was an SAT and a GMAT chair and I was studying in law school and every time I got promoted and I started to manage the instructors and so when at some point I get to be a deputy CEO and I decided that I'm not going to pursue in law and then the owner of that company who sold it to Kaplan approached me and told me that he's starting a university. So I said, "Okay, I'll hear the guy out. Let's see what he's talking about." So I'm going to the interview and off to the meeting and I'm calling his secretary and I'm telling him, "Look, I'm not going to make it to the interview. I don't know where you are but there's no university in the address you gave me. Maybe I have the wrong one." And she said, "No, no, it's if come to the basement." So I come down, the basement, five people, back then like you said, I'm 100 students and this guy is telling me how he's going to change the world and create a new model of higher education. My first reaction was, "Thank you, not for me. I was already walking in an outflow in a tower and I didn't want to move to a basement with five employees." But the moment I stepped out of that door, I felt that I'm doing a mistake and I owe it to my inner child to try and change the world and make it a better place. So the next day I called him and said, "Okay, I mean since then I'm in the sleep." That's fantastic. I have a similar story because I started in higher eds about less than 10 years ago but I came from CPG, from packaging and branding and the president of a small university just reached out and said, "Hey, do you want to see what we're doing here?" And again, I was in the same situation. I said, "No, not for me. I don't think I want to work in a basement." But then you kind of go in and you realize this is a fascinating industry. It's a fascinating growth aspect. So what's speaking about growth? I was doing some research on online education and I was looking at some articles back in 2014. In 2014, they were estimating that the online education, higher education business was going to be close to about $300 and $350 billion. If you look at the numbers now, it's closer to $40 billion. It seems to me like there was a disconnect on what they thought it was going to be 10 years ago on what it is now. Given that you're in that space, what would you think would be a reason for such a high expectation for this market and really where we are right now? Yeah. I'm not sure because I don't know what information they rely on when they made those projections. They just tell you that when we started, there were articles about us explaining why our model will never work and why we don't have just to survive. Here we are like 12 years later when I started and we're over 150,000 students. I think that many universities are approaching online in the wrong way. I think they're trying to open a Zoom and teach and that's not online learning. I think there's a lot of transformation that needs to be made. I still see organizations and universities working in the old ways and don't really adjust to what's happening today and to the audience that needs online education. You know there are 50 million people in the US who have some educational college, right? And 80% of them want to go back to universities. Most of them don't do it because they don't believe that they can do it with their life and work and for the costs. And I think that still universities are working in the old fashion ways, even the online universities. You see universities that require essays. When I started and I saw that you know, a funnel you talked about the golf in our application funnel. We had conversion rates of around 0.12%. And I noticed when I started as a one-man show and I looked at the data and I worked with it and I saw that the main button was the essays. And I saw that we tell people, we tell our applicants basically, "If the application go right to essays and come back and you know, you're working marketing, you know, that's not going to work." So I asked academic affairs, "What is the percentage of those who submit their essays and then being denied?" Because they're not qualified. And the answer was 0.1%. So 99.9% of those submitted essays were actually qualified. So why do you need essays if they're not really screening? So we leave it in the essays. Obviously we monitor carefully, you know, completion, graduation, so on. But that's just one example. I think that the entire industry is still thinking in traditional ways, in traditional approaches and it's really time to shake things up and move forward. Maybe that's the main reason for the gap. The need is there. The audience is there. And they are ready for online. They want online. I looked at the numbers who start courses at the MOOCs. They want to study online. But something in the model, for the end of the course, just doesn't work. Yeah. Walk me back through the process of starting university to the people. When you look at right now, 15 years later, right, I think I have the time correct. So 15 years later, you still have a very limited number of degrees that you offer. You have a limited number of areas of study that you offer as well. However, you have a dramatic explosion of students that are signing up, right? And the traditional, my traditional mind things, well, you need to have 2,000 areas of study, right, if you want to grow. So walk me a little bit about, you know, what the strategy was. And how are you able to stick to that strategy 15 years on? Yeah. Well, you know, the university was started by Shiret Rechef, who is the founder of the president. And it's his strategy. The idea was we are going to walk like a business and operate like a startup. So we will start with the minimum offering and products that we know that there's a high demand for. And we know that the graduates will be able to find jobs with those things, right? So those were most in demand in job markets. So we started only with computer science and business administration. Only undergrad. Later we offered all the other degrees, I think, we have today what? 8 or maybe more. And it's every time we add another degree, we make sure that it makes sense for us business wise. And on profit, we want to maximize our, let's call them profits, right? In the lack of a better world and bring them back into our model. So we can support more students who cannot afford even the minimal fees that we do charge because we are a tuition free university. So basically that, that how it works and, and yeah, and you're right, many universities the way for them to go is to offer a lot of degrees and different, you know, segmentations of programs and so on. And no, our goal is different because we know that there isn't need. We know that people want to study in a new model, in a new approach. The fact that students can study with a tuition free and pay only at the end of each course, a minimal assessment fee. And they're not committed to anything. There's not that. They don't need to take any loan. And if they cannot afford even these fees, we got them, right? We have organizations and foundations that supports them. The demand for that is so big that if you take the most popular programs out there and you offer them, that's enough for you to go. Yes, we will keep and always look for additional degrees. We have added quite a few in the last 10 years and we will add more in the coming years. But every time we choose a degree, it will be only if we know that this is those high demand. It's going to change our graduate's life, it will make an impact, it's a language omission. Yeah. Yeah. The toughest part, as you know, very well, from a business perspective of really launching anything new, whether it's a school or whether it's a startup, is getting the word out. Right? And I look at your trajectory and you've basically grown by 100% practically every year. Right? How were you able to get that done? Like, how were you able to build the brand? Was there some specific tools? Was there some specific methodology that you thought were best than, you know, the traditional ways into it? I think that it's our biggest superpower was the fact that we didn't have resources. So about how many organizations are trying to throw money at the problem, we didn't have that money. So as I said, the first thing I've done is to look at the funnel with my fingers, like we opened it, and said, "Okay, the best." And those two, the first thing we eliminate in order to grow was just the conversion rates. We are actually around, yeah, today we are around 20% conversion rates. Think about that moving terms of goal from 0.1 to 20.0, you know, that's the first part of that. So but then like you're saying, we ask ourselves, how can we continue and go? And I still remember the days. Okay, we bought this year 1000 students, how the hell are we going to bring 2000X here? And then, okay, we bought this year 2000, how the hell are we going to bring 4000X here? Every day, you know, we have 150,000 students now. Yeah, we're going to have 300,000 in a few years. So those discussions keep coming. And it's every time about finding the next path to make the next jump. So version rates was the first. And then we said, okay, we need to bring more people to the final. What do we do? The only option we really had was content marketing. And you know, someone tells you, you know, search engine optimization, you need to create content. And you need, it's good for you. It's like going to the gym, right? It's, therefore, it's a long-term investment. You don't see the impact. So who's going to the gym? We didn't have any other choice. So that's what we did. And until this day, 80% of the traffic coming to our website is organic traffic. And we built a very strong foundation there. And you see the acceleration of the growth in terms of organic traffic. Thanks to that, what we did back in the days. And it helped us realize how important it is. So we're still doing it until these days. And maybe we should talk about how Gen.A.I is changing organic searches. Because that's a new challenge. But for the side for a second, that was the next jump. And then we said, okay, so that's great. And we see the acceleration. And we see the improvement in conversion rates. But how can we continue and expedite the rate of growth? Because there are millions of midsars. And they have no idea we exist, right? So then the next step was, let's go into paid media. Now we cannot compete with other universities. I think Purdue is spending what? $140 million a year on Google Ads, Western Government, what? $80 million a year and so on. So our model is very different. So we said, okay, what can we do and how can we do it? So we decided to use data. And we looked at our data and we tried to identify the blue oceans. All those students who may be interested in studying with us. But other universities may not target. So if it's educational deserts or other specific segmentations. And every time we played with it, we made sure that we invest money until we get to a certain level of a CPA, cost per acquisition. And once we got to that number that was our red line, we moved to another channel or another segment to maximize that. So that's basically the idea. So today we spent $1 million on ads, that's it. And that's what enabled us to go. Now we are looking ahead. So we are thinking about the creator's economy and how to be more active with micro influencers. We are looking into we started piloting with CTV, connected TV ads that enable you to do small amounts, campaigns and be very targeted. We are looking into affiliate marketing, which we have not done yet. There's another potential growth channel. So there's still a lot to do. And obviously the additional programs you mentioned. And one of the most interesting things we have done recently is that we opened the website in Spanish. So we took our website and we translated it into Spanish. And we are slowly expanding that. And we want to do content marketing in Spanish, although we are teaching English. But we believe that it can help us spread the world and create a bigger, upper funnel pipeline. So that's another example. So it's a horizontal goal, a vertical goal. Yeah. And when you're focusing on the Spanish language advertising, Spanish language content, do you have a certain type of student in mind? Or is it the parent you're targeting? Who is the audience of this non-English speaking content? So our students are usually adult learners, average age, somewhere around 35, 80, 90% of them have a job, 70% of them are parents, very different from the traditional universities. Our mission is to be the opportunity for those with no other alternatives. We don't look at the traditional go-to market and the other universities are doing. We're not here to replace or take students from any other university. There are millions out there who are deprived from higher education. We are out to get them and to enable them to study. That's basically the idea. So I want to get a little granular here because this is kind of fascinating to me. So when we're talking about not getting students from other universities and you gave the example of Purdue or let's say what's their governor's association. How do you figure out exactly what is it that who is it that they're targeting and where that blue ocean is for you? Because if I'm Purdue and I have a hundred million dollar budget, I'm going to do a spray and pray. I'm going to go after everyone. Right? Well, I would use the money differently, but I guess that's I don't know what they're doing. I wish them best of luck. I think that it's so funny. I always say that if you do marketing, you can do marketing everywhere. Because when you learn how to work with small amounts of money, imagine what happens if you learn more. To us, it's it look, the information is there. If you're if you're looking let's take a simple example right in the trenches that look at Google ads, you can easily see in each keyword the level of competition you have. You can see the cost per bid you'll have. So you know, you can play with it and you can see and you can find the blue ocean. May take time. It may be frustrating, but the data is there. When you look at the search engine optimization analysis, keyword analysis of your competitors, right? We don't have a competitor, but you know, theoretically, you can definitely see again, where is the high competition and how to find. I'll give you a funny example. One of the we chose following the keyword research we've done, the competitor analysis, one of the areas we chose seven years ago for content marketing was. I think it was how to write academic essays, you know, properly in terms of the, you know, the balance. So this is a completely off side of why that's not the, but we saw the high volume and low competition. So that was a motion and we've done that and that really helped us to build that upper funnel awareness. So the data is there and if you find the right vendors, the right team members and if you give it enough time and attention, you will know the answers and you know where to go. Yeah, if you're trying to promote an MBA degree, then, you know, if you'll try to, to be on MBA or build content directly about MBA, you may have a challenge, but there are so many different ways you need to think creatively. So let's go back to university of the people and specifically the model that you have, which is this free tuition model. Tell me a little bit more about that model and how it works. Yeah. So basically we're going to go to the next one. We build a model that eliminates most of the costs for the institution that are on our buildings, even our papers, like everyone works from home. Everything is done online. All software is open code, open source software. All educational materials are open, educational resources. Our workforce is minimal because we build everything on automation. I don't want to say AI, I'll say automation, and the bit of machine learning. And when we do need to hire team members, we hire them across the globe to make it as affordable as possible for us. We have today around 2,000 team members globally. Our instructors are basically volunteers who join to support the mission, but they're not only volunteers. We have over 40,000 people who offer to volunteer, even our president is a volunteer. We have high level advisors volunteers in our entire academic affairs department until five years ago, maybe six were all volunteers. So the CFO was in the previous days, like we started based on volunteers as we grow and had more resources added more in house full time positions. So the model is very different from other universities. And our students basically can choose if they want to pay or not. We teach in small classes, 20 students a class. They get a personal advisor from the moment they joined the university all the way to graduation. And after that in the Career Service Center. And we don't have extra curricular, we don't have athletic teams. And we keep it minimal, very few electives. We get you to graduate and then we get you, we hopefully get you employed. And I think that's kind of our graduate self-employed. So that's the idea. It's like keeping it minimal, keeping it very focused. And yeah. - Well, how do you get people to volunteer? - You know, that's amazing. When you're doing something good in the world, people just want to help. And I think Shai tells the story so much better, but after he announced the university, there was the next day a huge article about us in the front page of the New York Times. And so many amazing people contacted him and said, "I want to help." That's how the entire volunteer model started. Right? Just came in and said, "I want to help." And I was so fortunate in those in that last decade to work with amazing presidents of universities and deans and provosts that are all volunteering to help us because they believe that education should be right and not a privilege and that everyone should have access to our education. That many issues we see today in the world. Those origins may be in the lack of access to our education, a global phenomenon. So yeah, it's amazing. And I can tell you, sometimes when you just ask people, they say yes. And that's, you know, what? - Yeah, and all the lessons that I had is that I don't. So yeah, people want to help. And without them, we couldn't do anything. - So if I remember correctly, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation gave $160 million or something like that to the university, no? - No, they are, they are, no, so you said 160, right? No, so I wish, but they are, they are amazing partners. They have to see how we share our accreditation, they donated money, they are helping us now. We have now a collaboration with them and a project with them in order to see how we can scale our model different amounts completely than what you mentioned. But definitely, definitely amazing and important partner, yeah. And there are others in the fourth foundation and other corporations. We at some point we had an agreement with Microsoft who came and said we will give scholarships to everyone in Africa who wants to study with you. That didn't last for long because they replaced their CEO back then shortly after. But you know, but you see that everyone understands it's an issue and most of those corporations, by the way, they need great, the great employees, especially coders and with each computer science. So do you know, there's something there? Or our master in education with the IB was created in collaboration because the IB basically came and said we need more teachers in the world. And the access to master in education in many places around the globe is too expensive so people don't get the master level in the education so they can teach for us, but we need teachers. So we open the master in education program. Anyone can study it anywhere anytime to issue and free. So that's basically the, yeah, it's a community. It's by the people too. - Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that you had mentioned initially when we started was to talk a little bit about generative AI and that kind of leads me to the future of education, right? Because one of the things about our job is we don't just percute for the next semester. We also think about what we're doing 10 years from now. From a product development standpoint, you know, you mentioned coding is very important. When I think of Chad, GPT and AI, I think there's not going to be any coders anymore in the next five years, right? So how do you evolve from a higher ed institution standpoint to keep up with these new technologies that are coming up and making a lot of the jobs that were in high demand irrelevant? - I don't know. I can, I'm telling you. - I don't know. I'll tell you in a little in a few ways. First, I would say, I think that already 10 years ago people told us that any minute now we stopped driving cars, right? - Yeah. - And here we are today. The second thing I'll tell you is that we had that the similar strategic discussion about AI and road maps. And I said that it's less about, you know, how are we going to use AI as a title? And it's all about, it's going to be everywhere. So every tool we're using, every conversation we're having, every activity we are doing, it's going to have AI combined. It's already there, at least in marketing, it's almost everywhere. - Yeah. - So I don't know what it means for higher education in terms of what we will teach the students and what tools they need to have. And how can you really change the curriculum so fast? No accreditation processes and so on to keep up with the industry, if the industry is changing like on a weekly basis, really, right? I don't know. But I think I do know that we are going to keep our eyes and attention on it. And we are talking about it. We have a department that is, you know, building our strategy around it, form the risks and all the way to the opportunities. And I think everyone in the world really will need to just pay attention and see what's going to happen. Then just yesterday, CHGPT released their search engine, which I also don't understand. We talked about marketing. I don't know what it will mean and how it's going to change the world. So yeah, a lot of unknowns. And we need to get used to that. We're going to live in error of, you know, a lot of unknowns. Yeah, one of the things that I noticed that recently on people posting about it, I haven't had a chance to go and actually look at the CHGPT's search capability yet. But everybody's predicted the death of Google. And with the death of Google comes the death of SEO and SCM. So, you know, I think it makes it hard for those agencies that are the Google is their bread and butter, you know, because they have to figure out how to work with CHGPT. But my thinking is it's really hard to dethrone the king. You know, it's really hard to dethrone the king. And obviously Google has their own AI, not as famous as CHGPT, but I'll be surprised if they just kind of go, here you can have our, you know, 80% of our revenue source, it's now yours. So that would be that will be interesting. One of the questions that I like to ask in this podcast as we come close to the end of it is, what is something in the industry that we're not talking about? You mean the idea is to? Just any, it could be anything that you notice in the higher ed industry that we're not talking about or we're not talking enough about. I think we, so I don't know if we're not talking enough about it, but I don't think we're doing enough about it and it's still not dead. I think it's in every time I see the data, it's insane. I don't think it makes any sense. Honestly, as a father of all, 15 year old and a world-of-year-old, I see the numbers and I'm, I'm whole-fied. And someone in the industry and I kind of think that most of the people would agree, at least secretly, it doesn't make any sense. And I think that we need to make sure, I mean, there's room for everyone. If you can, for those fees, absolutely. And if you want to take loans, absolutely. But it doesn't make sense that this will be the only way. And I think that there must be a scheme and border approach to scalable solutions. University of the Pippaillies, therefore anyone who is deprived from higher education, not everyone are deprived for costs. We have refugees in asylum seekers, we have women in Afghanistan, we're starting with us secretly. We have, people who are deprived for cultural reasons and so many, and just not enough seats in universities, just Nigeria, for example, every year, 1.5 million graduate high school and pass entrance exams for universities, only half a million seats available. So every year, 1 million people are deprived from higher education, only in Nigeria, so fuck up seats. Think about that, you're next contact about 100 million people at this point, because the globe. So, I think that the access to higher education should be a concern for our soul. I think that if the world wants to solve this issue, we're going to face more serious issues in the future. And again, I think that we already see some of them. And yeah, if you want to make the world a better place, we need to make sure that everyone who wants to get into higher education will have the opportunity to do so without selling their souls. Yeah. So speaking about access to education, I know that you recently launched the Arabic language, kind of a mini version of the University of the People, is your kind of growth strategy in the future to kind of expand to different languages, expand to different markets, and what do you think could be the top two or three markets that really need access to what University of the People is offering? We, our job is to eliminate barriers for towards higher education. One of the barriers is language. And so Arabic programs started because we saw that there are millions of Syrian refugees, while life has been turned upside down and they have no way to get into higher education. So that's why we started the programs in Arabic. We may decide to do more, you know, and open, you know, open other programs in other languages, but just like the answer I gave before about programs in general, it's part of the analysis, it's part of the discussion, it's part of understanding the needs and the barriers that are out there. So there's nothing specific I can say about our plans moving forward, it's mainly about researching and learning and understanding where is the need, where is the barrier, and how can we help, you know? Connect or sort of the two? Yeah, and finally, because I know one of the things, the final things that you're working on, no, as an institution is the accreditation, and you're a WASC candidate now. How long is that process once you get the candidacy? I think it's three years to three years, something like that? Honestly, I don't know. I don't remember the numbers, and I don't want to say something that is not right. I can just say that as you said, we are in the process. And I don't know what I'm allowed to say or not. Yeah, no, no, that's fine, but it's great to, it's great to hear, you know, university's kind of making sure that they're able to back up what they offered to students with, you know, a lot of these accreditations and licenses and things like that. But I will mention that we are accredited by the DACs and so far in, yeah, we always pursue, you know, additional processes to make sure that we are, you know, in the highest quality possible and standard, the best and requirements out there. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much. Asaf, this has been a great conversation. And, you know, I'd love to have you back some point in the future to talk about some of the cool new things that the University of People is working on. Thank you so much. It was really fun. Thank you.