Online higher education platform Outlier.org announced today it closed on a $11.7 million Series A round, bringing its total funding raised to $16 million.
“The mission of Outlier is to provide access to high-quality education and reduce student debt,” said Aaron Rasmussen, the founder and CEO. “The best way to do that is to make very high-quality education and charge very little for it. So, that’s exactly what we do.”
The current student loan debt index in the U.S. is more than $1.5 trillion, with an estimated 44.7 million people paying an average of $37,172 for a college degree. Rasmussen says a lot of that money can be attributed to intro-level courses, citing a famous lecture from MIT professor Woodie Flowers.
“I’m updating the numbers here, but there’s about a million Calculus 1 students every year at the college level and they spend, on average, $2,500 per course. That means Calculus 1 in the United States at the college level alone is $2.5 billion, which is just way too much money,” Rasmussen explained. “Then we went and looked at the top 25 courses in college by student population. They’re exactly what you’d expect them to be — calculus, physics, chemistry, micro-economics, psychology. They, all together, account for about $50 billion in student spending a year, which was just an extraordinary amount of money.”
So, Outlier provides that intro-level education for a fraction of the cost online, with professionally produced lectures by professors from schools like Yale and MIT. Students also get one-on-one tutoring, AI-proctored assessments and dynamic problem sets for math courses. All of this sets a student back $400 a class, one-sixth of the cost at a traditional university.
Rasmussen also co-founded the popular education website MasterClass in 2015. However, he says the two platforms are very different. “MasterClass lessons were designed to capture knowledge that can’t really be found anywhere else from the heads of these celebrity masters,” while “Outlier courses are designed to fully teach you a subject.”
The NY-based startup partnered with the University of Pittsburgh last year, so the credits earned with Outlier count as credits earned from Pitt that can be transferred to another university down the road to complete a degree. Rasmussen says this gives students more freedom to choose their dream school, dream major and dream job without the immense financial burden.
“Student debt is really infringing on the personal liberties of people,” Rasmussen said. “I think that there is a real tragedy to that. So the thing that excites me is giving people that opportunity to have access to exceptional education and not trade their future for it.”
Rasmussen says the company plans to use this most recent funding to add more courses and hire more people. Also, Outlier.org is now accepting applications for the Spring 2020 semester, which starts January 13th.
