The New Development: VC Money Is Now Directly Targeting Community Colleges

A company called Campus — backed by some of the most powerful names in tech — is actively inserting itself into the community college space through deceptive marketing.

According to The New Republic, Campus has received venture capital funding from Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Joe Lonsdale. These are the same people who fund enterprises designed to reshape institutions to their advantage.

The Pitch vs. The Reality

Campus markets itself on one core promise: access to professors from elite universities.

The New Republic investigated the instructor roster listed on Campus's own website. What they found: most instructors are or were part-time adjuncts, not full faculty. Multiple instructors listed as affiliated with prestigious universities no longer teach there. At least two listed "professors" were actually graduate teaching assistants.

Calling a graduate teaching assistant a professor is false advertising aimed directly at the students least equipped to spot it — low-income, first-generation students who are the exact demographic Campus claims to be helping.

Students Say They Were Misled

The New Republic spoke with former Campus students directly. They liked their instructors as people but felt deliberately deceived about who those instructors actually were.

One student said he had been counting on a recommendation letter from what he believed was a professor at a top university. That's not a minor complaint. That's a student making real decisions — about where to apply, how to position themselves, what this credential is worth — based on Campus's inflated claims.

Why This Is Different From Standard For-Profit College Grift

For-profit colleges like DeVry and ITT Tech ran the same basic playbook for decades: promise prestige, deliver mediocrity, leave students with debt and credits that don't transfer. ITT Tech collapsed in 2016. DeVry paid $100 million to settle FTC fraud charges in 2016.

Campus is running a variation of that model — but with Silicon Valley branding, VC runway, and founders who have the political connections to avoid the regulatory scrutiny that eventually killed the last generation of scammers.

Community colleges are already strained. They run on a mix of taxpayer money, tuition, and donations. Campus uses venture capital — which means it answers to investors expecting returns, not to students expecting an education.

What the Mainstream Coverage Is Missing

The Atlantic's David Brooks wrote about teachers who change lives through humanist education, focusing on Roosevelt Montás, who grew up in the Dominican Republic, landed at Columbia, and credits the Core Curriculum with reshaping his intellectual life. That's one conversation — about dedicated teachers in classrooms.

But that's separate from what's happening at Campus (the company), which is about investors monetizing the appearance of those teachers to sell a product. The same Silicon Valley culture that Bloomberg reports is now shaping academic institutions through books, funding, and influence is also directly deploying capital to replace those institutions with cheaper, investor-friendly substitutes.

The Kirst-Scott Research Is Now Relevant Again — In a Different Way

Back in 2017, Stanford professors W. Richard Scott and Michael W. Kirst published Higher Education and Silicon Valley through Johns Hopkins University Press. Their conclusion: California's tiered higher education system — UC research schools on top, CSU in the middle, community colleges at the bottom — creates unequal resource allocation that leaves the bottom tier chronically underfunded.

That chronic underfunding is now the open door that Campus is walking through. When community colleges are starved of resources, a well-funded VC-backed alternative that promises elite instructors looks attractive.

What This Means for Regular People

If you're a working adult trying to reskill — exactly the population Kirst identified as most underserved — Campus looks like a shortcut to quality. It's not. You're paying tuition for a product that inflates its own credentials, answers to venture capitalists, and has no accountability to the public systems that community colleges are legally bound by.

Your local community college, underfunded as it is, has transfer agreements, accreditation standards, and instructors whose employment isn't contingent on investor returns.

Campus has Peter Thiel's money and a slick website.