Founder Of ‘An Entire MBA In 1 Course’: In 30 Years Most Degree Programs Will Be Online

POETS&QUANTS’ INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS HAROUN, FOUNDER OF HAROUN EDUCATION VENTURES

Poets&Quants: You say that in time most MBA programs will be online and there won’t be nearly as many of them. I’d love to hear you elaborate on that.

Chris Haroun: Absolutely. Traditional universities can cost a hundred thousand dollars for undergraduate education. An MBA degree can cost the same as well, of course. And you’re taken out of the workforce for two years.

One thing I’ve found from talking to a lot of my friends that went to my business school and went to Harvard and other schools, is that they don’t teach you the most important lessons in life. They don’t teach you in business school how to sell. They don’t teach you how to present. They don’t teach you how to network, which is the most important skillset. They also don’t teach you how to manage your own money. They teach you how to manage other people’s money.

That was the crux of a book I wrote a couple of years ago. And a lot of big companies no longer require a university degree to work there. Companies like Google, Wells Fargo, IBM, etc. Enrollments are certainly down a lot between now and before Covid even happened.

I think a lot of people realize that traditional university and business school is very theoretical as well. They don’t prepare you for the real world. What I’ve seen with my 400- or 500-hour online MBA program, a lot of people that have taken accredited programs from top Ivy League schools take mine as well and find they learn more from me in the first month or so. It just doesn’t make sense anymore. The system is broken.

I think what’s going to happen is in several decades, most major universities are going to go bankrupt. At first they’ll deplete their alumni endowment and then there’ll be a Hail Mary pass to alumni to support them. I think people will realize that, “Hey, I’m not going to go to university or an MBA program unless it’s a great name, like a Stanford, Harvard, whatever it is.” I think the other schools are going to see a material decline to extent that, if they don’t shift to online or truncate the program or lower the cost materially, I don’t think they’ll make it.

I think they’re almost seeing the start of that now. Smaller programs kind of see the writing on the wall. It’s not just moving some programs online, but eliminating some programs, too.

Yes. Totally. I think that the whole system is elitist as well. A lot of people get into great schools because of who their parents are. Of course there are people that work exceptionally hard to get in, but it’s not fair. It is not fair that your chances of success in life are predicated or based on who your parents are. I think society is catching up with that.

During Covid, it was fascinating: I was teaching my MBA program online and I realized that if the internet was invented first, would we still have traditional universities or big cities? It doesn’t make sense to uproot your life, spend an hour or two a day commuting, which is bad for the environment, bad for your social life, can’t spend as much time with your kids and stuff. So the whole system is just ripe for disruption.

Tell me about your program. When last we talked, it was already booming. I think that’s why we talked. But it’s just continued to grow and grow, right?

Yeah, it is been great, but I think I’ve been lucky because of this whole secular shift online. I have a website, harounmba.com. I’ve got a couple of different MBA programs. The big one for me is the on-demand version, which is called Silver, which is 400 or 500 hours and covers all major business topics as well as technology. I’m always adding new electives to it. I’m teaching Python as part of it now, as well as programming, how to use Excel, etc. It’s $499. You get a 30-day, 100% money-back guarantee. Then you just take it online like Netflix.

Then there are Gold and Platinum, which are similar, but I teach the lectures or I play the videos, and then I do hundreds and hundreds of hours of Zoom calls with groups of students. I do one-on-ones as well and help people make amazing LinkedIn profiles, get jobs, etc.

It’s been fun. I’ve had students get jobs at the top companies in the world. One of my students last year, halfway through the Platinum program, he doesn’t have a traditional MBA, but he got a job at Goldman Sachs as an associate, starting with Harvard Business School students. I was pretty proud of him.

Well, let me take you back just a little bit here. Let’s go over what students learn in the Silver. You mentioned Python, but that’s one of the newer elements of it. I sign up, pay my $499, what happens next?

What’s in the program are six different verticals, or pillars, I should say. One is finance and accounting, and this is based on my experience working at the biggest hedge funds, venture capital, Goldman Sachs, etc. Then there’s entrepreneurship, where I teach you how to start a company. I have a Venture Capital Bootcamp.

Part three of six is sales, marketing, communications — social media, how to present, etc. Then there’s economics, management, strategy. Then there’s personal growth. I teach how to accomplish much more.

Then there’s technology. So I threw in an Excel course as part of it as well, everything about Excel.

That basically covers what I talk about in the program. Then, every January or so, I do a live version as well. What I actually do is, I’ll play a lecture and then I’ll take questions using Wirecast. I was doing entrepreneurship yesterday at the Venture Capital Bootcamp. Then I’ll stop to take questions over YouTube chat, or I’ll do it over Zoom as well.

It’s fun, man. I’ve had a lot of fun. Keeping it at $499 with a 30-day 100% money back guarantee has been possible because of the internet. Also because I’m not accredited — if I did accreditation, there’d be a board that would tell me what I can and can’t teach, theoretical stuff, and the price would go up materially. So, I don’t want to exclude any students around the world.

And the profits on what I do go towards building schools in Africa with my students. So, if you go to my LinkedIn profile, this past summer I was in Rwanda and I built a school with one of my students. The money from what I make, a lot of the money goes towards scholarships.

I wanted to ask you about the international makeup of your student clientele. Is it mostly U.S. students? How does it break down?

I have students in every country. I would say the U.S. is now probably about 30%. It continues to go down as the international makeup scales. It’s great. I find that students learn just as much, if not more, from each other than from me. They bring the depth and breadth of international diversity, different experiences. So, it’s a lot of fun.

There is a sort of networking going on. I mean, the students talk with each other as much as they listen to you.

Yeah, exactly. And I do an annual graduation as well. I’ve got videos and photos and all that stuff. But this past August, we did it here in Burlingame, which was fun.

You can finish it your own speed? What’s the flexibility?

Yeah, you can do it as fast as you want. You’ve got lifetime access. You can do it in maybe one or two months. It’s a lot, though. The way I set it up is, there’s 100 classes that are three or four hours each, and after each class there’s a very short quiz. So, there’s 100 quizzes. And they’re really easy. In order to pass, all you have to do is get over 50% on half of the quizzes. I set it up this way, and it’s just a menu prompt, where I proposed to my wife 8 million years ago. But I feel like I’m a waiter. When you go to a restaurant, you look at the entire menu, but you only choose one or two items. I want to expose students to all types of careers in business and only have them focus on what they’re most passionate about.

So they don’t have to pass an analytics course when they really want to go into marketing or something like that?

No. There’s electives I had every year as well, which are optional. I’ve added lots so far. Very comprehensive, advanced options: investing, Python, programming. I used to be a programmer, with Accenture, before business school years ago. So it’s comprehensive.

How many students have you had at this point?

I have over 1.5 million students globally, in all of my courses on platforms like Udemy.

It’s been fun. It was accidental, too. I was working in venture capital and I was doing a lot of charity work. In East Palo Alto, where the high school graduation rate’s only 40%, I created this course, and I taught it for free of course. I had a lot of fun doing it. I was on the board of a place called the LEMO Foundation in East Palo Alto, and we teach students. What ended up happening was, I created a program for them, called An Entire MBA In One Day.

And then what I did was, this was in 2016, then the next day, on a Sunday in January 2016, I put it up on Udemy. I didn’t do it for the money, I just wanted to help people, and it humbly took off.

I really believe that if you chase money, you lose your dreams and your money. But if you chase your dreams and you don’t care what people think of you, then good things can happen.

Including possibly money.

Yeah, it usually follows. Like for Elon Musk, I’m reading his book right now. It was never about money. It was about passion.

And look at him now.

Yeah. It’s incredible.

DON’T MISS THE DISRUPTORS: ‘AN ENTIRE MBA IN 1 COURSE’ — AND MORE

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