A 29 year old Tade Oyerinde has attracted the attention of Shaquille O’Neal who joined investors like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Discord founder Jason Citron in backing a $29 million community college startup aiming to slash degree costs, make education accessible and help professors earn more.
Shaquille O’Neal is investing in Tade Oyerinde’s community college start-up, Campus as part of the efforts to make education accessible to all. Campus is an online community college startup that has raised more than $29 million from investors like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Discord founder Jason Citron.
Even with those big-name backers already in tow, O’Neal recently told Fortune that his decision to invest an undisclosed amount in the startup ultimately came down to his belief that Campus could “change people’s lives” — which reminded him of advice he’d previously heard from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
“I heard Jeff Bezos say, if you invest in things that’s going to change people’s lives, you’ll always get a great return on your investment,” O’Neal said. “But this particular investment is not about great return because I feel that everyone should have access to world-class education.”
Launched by 29 year old tech entrepreneur Tade Oyerinde in 2022, Campus is an accredited online community college that offers classes taught by professors who also teach at universities such as Princeton, Vanderbilt and Spelman College.
Oyerinde, himself a college dropout, said in a statement last year that he founded the startup to make “higher education more accessible, more affordable, and more relevant” to students across the country from diverse backgrounds and income levels.
According to Fortune, Each year, millions of students enroll at their local community college with the goal of starting their post-secondary education out right—by saving money, taking fewer intense courses, and exploring career options. After two years, most plan to either transfer to a bachelor’s degree program or jumpstart their new career.
On paper, this all sounds like a great deal. But in practice, this is far from reality for many students. Fewer than 40% of those who enroll in community college graduate. And an even smaller percentage of students go on to complete a bachelor’s degree.
With Campus, Tade Oyerinde is trying to change this cycle. He wants to end stigmas associated with community college and make it affordable and flexible for students of all life circumstances through what he’s calling the debt-free “community college for the future.”
Campus is an accredited community college that allows students to take online synchronous classes taught by professors at top universities across the country, including Vanderbilt, Princeton, and NYU.
Oyerinde’s drive and charisma has attracted the attention of household names like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Discord’s Jason Citron, and even Bloomberg Beta. In total, investors have committed more than $29 million.
Campus’s latest investor, Shaquille O’Neal, is hoping he can be “The Portal”—by delivering the message to students that a world-class community college education is feasible through Campus.
Growing up, Oyerinde was homeschooled, which he says opened his eyes to online learning at a very young age. Although his initial aspirations were to become a pilot and study aerospace engineering, his interests turned toward entrepreneurship. In 2016, he founded Campuswire—which he described as “Discord for education,” and today it is being used in classrooms around the country, like at Purdue and the University of Illinois. But through this work, Oyerinde became aware of how little adjunct professors make at many institutes, including top ones.
A report by the American Federation of Teachers released in 2022 found that nearly a quarter of adjunct professor respondents reported earning less than $25,000 annually, with only 20% feeling they were able to comfortably cover basic monthly expenses.
Some professors, Oyerinde learned, were pulling double duty at top-name universities and community colleges to make ends meet. This is also in part what inspired him to establish Campus.
In 2022, the company acquired California community college MTI College, using it to jumpstart Campus’s nationwide online reach. Today, there are about 726 students currently enrolled in Campus. Students in the nationally-offered online business administration program are provided with a free laptop and internet access and are assigned a success coach (with only a 1:50 ratio). Other associate degree programs currently offered include paralegal studies and AWS cloud administration.
And currently, business program adjunct professors are paid $8,000 for each class they teach, which Oyerinde says is around double the national average.
The Campus graduation rate so far is 61%—close to double the national community college average. But, that still leaves a number of students who do not complete the program.
“This is the number one thing that keeps me at night,” he says. “When students leave, why are they not completing?”
Ultimately, he hopes Campus can facilitate a place where students realize a post-secondary education will open more doors in their life, and that community college is not something to look down upon.
Oyerinde serves as the chancellor of Campus, with MTI College’s president also remaining on the team. The company’s board of trustees consists of the leaders of some of former leaders of the largest community colleges in the U.S., including Miami Dade College, LaGuardia Community College, and Dallas College.
Campus charges students $7,200 per academic year—below the Pell Grant maximum—which allows most students to attend with no out-of-pocket costs.
Born May 22, 1993 in Atlanta, to Dapo and Bola Oyerinde. Tade he was homeschooled before attending public high school and studying aerospace engineering at the University of Leeds in the U.K. Tade has a twin brother Tosh and an older sister. His parents came from Nigeria during university and settled in USA.
As a Kid, Tade was obsessed with aerospace and has a special love rockets. Not surprising, therefore, after finished high school at 16 and he went to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach to become a pilot.
During first semester, he decided to switch his major to aerospace engineering. After the first year, he transferred to Leeds University in the UK.
He applied to this program called OBAP ACE Academy, which is a partnership between Delta and the Organization for Black Airline Pilots. He however did not make it but his twin brother, Tosh was admitted even though he had no interest in the program.
He went to the program’s orientation wearing the uniform and his twin brother’s name tag. Tosh came, too. My dad walked us both up to the head of the program, introduced us, and said: “Surely there’s someone who’s supposed to be here, who isn’t. Is there any way you can accept my other son?” And, fortunately, there was a kid from Singapore who never showed up. So– right place, right time.
When he was studying aerospace engineering at Leeds, he was forced to use this thing called Piazza. It was interesting– I thought that Piazza served a real need, in a way that other apps at the time didn’t necessarily. The problem was it had poor UX and was really just too unambitious. There were other similar tools at the time, but no one had really nailed class communications yet.
Class communication, overall, is a really interesting problem space. Most of the communication that needs to happen in a college course is Q&A and the subject of the Q&A is essentially static. Physics 1 has been the same for decades, for example, and so you can actually predict a lot of the communication that’ll happen in a course and do some really interesting things to optimize it, which is the entire point of the company.
But Campuswire wasn’t the first company you founded. it is my second company– the first was a roulette-style chat tool. Chatroulette was blowing up at the time. And I thought, this is really interesting… what if you could limit to university students?
At the time, we [Tade, his flatmate at the time, Patrick, and his twin brother Tosh] thought it could be a cool way to meet people on your campus or other campuses across the country. Maybe you get lucky and get randomly paired with that person you have a crush on from one of your classes who you see in the library all the time.
We built it over the Easter holiday and then launched it as soon as everyone got back to campus. We did a bunch of guerilla marketing — we’d go into the largest lecture halls five minutes before class began and show a quick video about UniRoulette. At the end, the class would be giving us a standing ovation while the teacher chased us out into the hallway.
In November of 2016, right after we closed our first round of funding, we moved to NYC. I knew that I’d spend the next ten to fifteen years of my life building the company so I had this one chance to decide where I’d want to be long-term.