No College, No Fees: Silicon Valley Billionaires Launch New Path Into Tech Jobs | Tech News
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Andreessen Horowitz is putting $35 million into the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a free, one-year college alternative opening applications Tuesday in San Francisco.
Andreessen Horowitz’s office in San Francisco. (Image Courtesy: Ryotaro Yamada/Nikkei Asia)
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million in a new two-year college alternative that promises an “AI-native education” for business-minded high school graduates seeking a direct route into the technology industry. Applications for the programme, called the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, open on Tuesday in San Francisco, where a founding class of roughly 50 students will start a free, one-year course in the autumn of 2027.
School CEO Gagan Biyani, who co-founded the ed-tech platform Udemy before joining the for-profit Academy, told the Sourcery newsletter that the programme targets “young builders who want to get jobs or start companies in the technology space.” Biyani said the school’s education will be “highly experiential” and project-based, and that admissions will require applicants to submit portfolios, sit for interviews and undergo IQ testing.
He said 75% to 80% of students’ time will go toward working on projects or building out their own ideas, and that attendees will get the chance to work with founding partners including Anthropic, Google, Meta Platforms, Nvidia and OpenAI. Andreessen Horowitz has put $35 million into the concept, with an additional $7 million raised from other backers.
“The big difference between going to the academy and going to college is we are not gonna prioritise your grades,” Biyani said. “We’re gonna prioritise proof of work.”
The full two-year offering, contingent on regulatory approval, is due to begin in 2028 with tuition Biyani said would be “equal or more to elite private universities.” More than a dozen elite private universities, including Duke University, Barnard College, Georgetown University and New York University, now carry an annual cost of more than $100,000 once tuition, room, board, fees, books and living expenses are combined.
The Academy sits inside a wider push in Silicon Valley to bypass traditional higher education in favour of AI-native, hands-on apprenticeship models. Billionaire Peter Thiel founded the Thiel Fellowship in 2011, which pays $250,000 over two years to participants who skip or drop out of school to build companies. The Palantir Meritocracy Fellowship, a four-month paid alternative to college, evaluates candidates purely on proof of work and real-world execution, and functions as a direct hiring pipeline into full-time roles at Palantir. Accelerators such as Y Combinator, alongside early-stage startup incubators, increasingly serve as practical post-high school or post-dropout environments for would-be founders. Google has launched career certificates designed to be accepted by top employers as equivalent to four-year degrees, while Meta and Apple have built alternative hiring pipelines to train workers for specialised roles.
Biyani argued that the traditional college model is unsuited to the AI era and that students are better served learning on the job. Students must live in San Francisco to attend the Academy, placing them inside the city’s startup environment and giving the founding venture capital firm early visibility into promising companies to emerge from the programme.
Andreessen Horowitz founder and general partner Marc Andreessen had an estimated net worth of $1.9 billion, Forbes reported. He co-founded the web browser firm Netscape, later bought by AOL, and also co-founded Loudcloud, which sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. His largest financial success came as a seed investor in Facebook. His firm’s founding partner Ben Horowitz is not a Forbes billionaire but has backed companies including Skype, Lyft, Medium and Okta, and appears annually on Forbes’ Midas List of top venture capital investors.
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Ask News18The Horowitz Andreessen Academy is a two-year college alternative offering an AI-native education for high school graduates seeking a direct path into the technology sector, backed by a $35 million investment from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz along with $7 million from other backers.
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Anoshito Banerjee is a digital journalist at CNN-News18, specialising in Indian foreign policy, global diplomacy, South and West Asian geopolitics, and strategic affairs. His reporting spans hard news…Read More
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September 23, 2026, 19:42 IST
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