About Us

What is Uprise University?

An omni-channel education platform that will...

  • Provide modular, adaptive, self-paced course curriculum with dynamic content based on the individual students using it and their individual learning style and experience level using machine learning and artificial intelligence
  • Structure courses within departments to allow you to earn a major or minor in a particular field of study (e.g., Coding), or take electives in classes that interest you (e.g., Chinese History)
  • Give you the option to take courses pass / fail, for a grade, or to audit them
  • Offer a wide range of course curriculum across coding, business, accounting, science, math, etc. with a strong focus on real world application rather than just theoretical concepts
  • Create a standardized credentialing systems similar to a GPA or SAT score so that employers know how capable you really are
  • Help you find your next job

Our mission: Provide free global education to everyone and anyone!

We believe that high quality education should be easily available to anyone and everyone. Although we are not a non profit, we do not plan to make profits in the next decade or two in order to achieve our large and ambitious goal. Longer term, we do plan to make a profit from ancillary services (e.g., employer paid recruiter fee when students get a job through our site, 1x1 mentor services, credentialing, etc.). Since we don't ever want to charge for our course content, however, we are highly dependent on alumni donations in order to create new course content. If you take our course and find it to be valuable, please donate (and tell your friends about it!). Other courses can cost thousands of dollars per course so don't be stingy! :)

Our founder's story

Our founder wanted to refresh his coding skills to learn how to build a mobile app and online site. As a working professional though in finance, he didn’t have time to go back to school full time. After taking several online courses, he found that there were not a lot of great options. He talked to professional software engineers and other business minded colleagues who were looking to learn to code and both groups actually had the same problem. Although some classes existed out there that could teach you the very, very basics (e.g., what a “for loop” is), there were not a lot of options that could really teach you how to build something useful.

Even the expensive online classes that cost thousands of dollars had graduation rates of less than 30% and competency levels were very low even for those who graduated. Currently, the only real way to learn how to build something useful that isn’t in a sandbox (e.g., a python program run from command line), is to go through large amounts of documentation, find similar features from open source projects on github, and spends a lot of time on stackoverflow and google searches. After going through this process, it seemed like there had to be a better way!

Additionally, our founder spent his Saturdays for the past five years volunteering through NYC public schools and Minds Matter as a mentor for students in the area. Seeing the large gaps in available classes for these students (e.g., not having access to Advanced Placement classes) made him realize the much larger opportunity. The U.S. spends over one trillion dollars a year on education but there are numerous gaps and problems that could be addressed by technology solutions such as adaptive learning or even just better MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes). The covid pandemic has also shown us that online solutions today are incredibly ineffective.

Since education is one of the greatest economic equalizers and one of the greatest differentiators across people and across civilizations, the inadequacies of the current system should be one of humanities greatest priorities. Uprise University was born to solve these problems and to truly democratize education globally.

We believe: Start small, think big

We are building coding 100 and 200 level classes first so that students can learn how to build and deploy real world applictions, get a job as a software engineer or technical product manager, or even just learn how to better communicate with software engineers

We are then going to build out courses in personal finance. Our founder went to Wharton Business School and is still constantly surprised how many people (including many of his classmates) are not financial literate when it comes to personal finance (even if they can advise CFOs in multi-billion dollar deals!). After that we plan to develop courses that you would typically take in a business school so that you can unleash that innner entrepreneur. After that...the sky is the limit...SAT prep, African history, learn Russian, cocktail classes, how to build a house, ...

If you are interested in anything in particular, let us know!

Email us at info@upriseuniversity.com to learn more or to donate.

We're in pilot mode / beta testing!

We are currently in pilot mode and providing all of our courses for free. We are looking to raise money to create new classes primarily through donations. If you take one of our classes and find it valuable, please donate to pay it forward so that we can recoup some of our costs for the initial course development and so that we can create new courses!

Contact us

Email us at info@upriseuniversity.com to learn more or to donate.