code_tom

We're a private institution and don't get any money from the state. So we need some form of tuition to keep the university independent and sustainable long-term.

But we offer a pay-later tuition model where everybody (no matter where you are from) can study for free now while agreeing to repay a low percentage of the first ten years of your later income. That makes it totally fair and risk-free for students, which is probably why 2/3 of our students chose it to finance their studies.

It never felt very hard for me, to be honest. I was lucky enough to get into coding when I was 13 and started earning money with it when I was 14, so founding a startup what simply the next step at some point. There is a very active and supportive startup ecosystem/community in Germany and world-wide which really helped a lot. And there are business angels and venture capital investors that funded my startups and shared the risk with us founders, so I never had to fear any tough financial consequences. I always knew that I'm still young enough to pursue another career if necessary.

That's exactly our line of thinking. We need to focus on human strengths like team work, creativity, communicative & collaborative skills, since more and more analytical skills will get automated in the future. And access to knowledge has changed so much thanks to the internet. Don't get me wrong, hard skills are needed as well, but only in combination with the others.

Thanks so much!

I think most of our students are working on the side (although not full-time) and many of them have prior professional experience. 22 years is there average age of our current students.

Just drop me an email at [email protected] if you like and let's have a chat about your individual situation :).

It differs from state to state. I was actually positively surprised by the regulatory environment for higher education here in Berlin, it's much more open than I originally feared.

The bigger issue is that the vast majority of university education is owned and funded by the state and therefore often not very student-oriented, meaning that innovation in teaching isn't a priority for them. They have a constant influx of students anyway. The big universities are to us what big corporates are to startups – we don't expect Siemens to innovate like startups do, so why should we expect state universities to innovate? German society needs to have a much more open mindset towards private universities. It's the only chance we have if we want to see more innovation in education without having to wait another 20 years.

But since you asked for my top three pain points with the regulations:

• There should be more room for experimentation, like a special protective status / pilot phase for innovative universities

• Universities in young, innovative disciplines need to be able to appoint professors without always requiring them to have a PhD

• Private universities must be included in state funding programs like the German Hochschulpakt – as of now the state receives money from the federal government for each of our students but simply keeps it to themselves.