Tim Draper explains why Draper University skipped formal accreditation. His lawyer outlined burdensome requirements, but staying unaccredited gave him freedom to innovate: no tenure, team-based grading, focus on entrepreneurship. He plans to partner with an accredited school to handle visas and financial aid.
Chapters
I was just wondering if there was any kind of certifications that you tried to go through in order to get your school approved by something. Not that I mean that I think it is important you do, but just curious about it.
It's a perfect setup question because I have a great story about it. And these guys, a lot of them may have already heard it. I went to my lawyer and I said, hey, I'm starting a school. What do I need to do? And he starts giving me this laundry list of all the things I have to do to be accredited. This and this and this and this. And I was just about to give up on becoming a school because it just looked like it was going to be boring and expensive. And I'd be a school just like all the others. And the government would have this carrot that they just kept dangling in front of me, which is called accreditation. But then I remembered that I went to Andover, and Andover, top high school in the country, Andover is not accredited, or it wasn't at the time I went. And I went, well, wait, what if I don't want to be accredited? My lawyer goes, oh, then you don't have to do any of this stuff. And so it opened the floodgate. It opened the whole— the universe opened up for me. And I started to think, wow, I can do anything with this school. And this— and I don't need this accreditation. Now, in order to get— if you have accreditation, it's much easier for people to get visas. It's much easier for people to get financial aid. And so we're working on something that probably will come together next year where another accredited school— What's the name of the school? is the front, is the face where we can take people and give them their visas and give them financial aid, and then they can come here. So as a result, I've had to foot a lot of the financial aid, and it's gotten pretty expensive for me. So you guys can thank me later. By building great companies and then becoming big donors Draper University down the road. I think that, that we might have that nailed, but we definitely don't want the accreditation because we'd never be able to pull off survival. We'd never be able to— we'd have to have permanent tenured professors teaching history here. So part of my list is I go through that list and I think, are we— if they say you have to have permanent tenured professors teaching history, I think, okay, we're only going to teach future and no professor is going to be tenured. And then you have to have a grading system that individually grades people. And so I just got rid of that and I said, no, no, everybody's going to be graded as a team. They're going to live and die by that team. And that's going to be— those teams are going to get points for extraordinary behavior, up or down. So anyway, yeah, it's a big issue. And long-term, I don't know what we're going to do there, whether we just team up with somebody who's accredited or— I don't know. Somehow we've got to be able to keep— What we're doing going while still having the financial aid and the visas.
