Your future starts with affordable college

We believe quality education should be affordable and accessible for all who want it. That’s why we’re offering five $1,000 scholarships to help curious and determined students start college for even less. Scholarship funds will be applied directly toward tuition, divided evenly over each term of their Degrees+ program. 

How to Apply: Applying for the Trailblazer scholarship is built into the Degrees+ application. No extra forms needed. Simply answer a short essay question about how you embody curiosity and determination in your life, and you’ll be entered. 

Current Degrees+ students and previous applicants can apply for the scholarship here. Scholarship recipients will be notified via email by March 31, 2023.

Terms and conditions apply.

For Degrees+, all US students age 13 or older with at least a high school diploma, GED, or equivalent are eligible to apply, except for residents of: Alabama, Arkansas, D.C., Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, US Commonwealths (Puerto Rico, Upper Mariana Islands), and US Territories (Guam, American Samoa, US Virgin Islands). We also proudly welcome international students (with TOEFL or equivalent)

For our courses and certificates, you must be 13 or older and willing to commit yourself academically to enroll.

Students in any of our programs should be ready for the academic rigor of college-level coursework. Be sure to pick the right program for your ability, time commitment, and long-term goals. Our enrollment counselors are here to help.

Yes, you'll be able to complete courses anywhere in the universe with wifi and a laptop or desktop computer. (Tablets and cell phones do not meet our requirements.)

Tutoring sessions and office hours will be scheduled to maximize compatibility with students’ schedules and availability. Exams and writing assignments (when applicable) are each open within a set window of time (usually several days for assignments, and 1 whole week for exams); however, all other course materials are available to you from the time the course opens through the end of the final exam window.

We work with trusted partners to ensure you get real, accredited credit for the courses and degree programs you take with us. Plus, we offer support in transferring credits to your next institution if you’d like. Outlier-earned college credits have successfully transferred to hundreds of institutions, including Harvard, NYU, and many more.

For courses taken as part of a Degrees+ program, you’ll receive 4 credits per course from Golden Gate University, among the top 10% highest quality colleges in the US and accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (Source: College Factual).

If you take individual courses through Outlier, you’ll receive 3 credits per course from the University of Pittsburgh, a top 50 US institution accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

Yes, we proudly welcome international students from most countries, subject to certain limited restrictions under US trade law. Unfortunately, they’re not eligible for financial aid.

If you have a request for reasonable disability accommodations, contact support@outlier.org. Please include specifics regarding the accommodation you are seeking. Additionally, if you have a disability accommodations letter, you may send that to us as well.

Outlier’s mission is to increase access to education, and we’re committed to ensuring that learners with accessibility needs have equal opportunity to succeed in our courses.

It means that you’ll earn an accredited associate degree PLUS a career certificate from a top company—2 credentials for ⅓ the cost of the average US college tuition. (Source: NCES)

While Outlier’s sole founding vision is to drive massive social impact by tackling education accessibility and student debt, we are indeed a for-profit, venture-backed company. This is by design: while founding Outlier, after a ton of research and discussions with foundations, it became clear to our team that developing a market-based solution (rather than relying on charity) to increase educational access is actually a faster and more durable solution for an urgent and tenacious social problem.

For organizations focused on improving education, self-sufficiency matters, and here’s one big reason why: non-profit donations have a tendency to dry up during economic downturns, which is precisely when society needs to increase access to education to invest in a more prosperous future.

That said, it’s important that we acknowledge that in the world of higher-ed, the term “for-profit” carries with it additional baggage: many “For-profit Colleges” of yesteryear took advantage of their students with little regard for their actual education and success. This was a dark chapter in the history of higher-ed, and very much contributed to the problem we’re working so hard to solve.

Outlier’s goal is student-centric and aimed at access, not profit, and solving such a massive societal problem will certainly generate plenty of value. You can see this ethos in action in initiatives like Outlier’s purposefully low pricing, and unprecedented-in-higher-education refund policy: our individual courses are free if a student does all the work and still doesn’t pass—that’s our failure, and students shouldn’t pay for that. We’re putting our money where our mouth is.

TLDR: Yes, we’re for-profit, because we believe it is the faster and most sustainable way to make the biggest social impact.

When you are curious about an organization’s intentions, whether for-profit or non-profit, the easiest way to see their intentions is by their actions. We invite you to judge us by our actions.

Early on in the process of designing Outlier, we found that many students use their laptops late at night, and don’t feel like staring into a lightbulb. Too much white in the background of videos and active learning would be fatiguing and unpleasant. We also think it’s pretty neat that we decided to do this before Apple shifted everything to dark mode.

Unlike most things that sound too good to be true, this is for real. Students can save anywhere from 50% to 66% on their college education with Outlier. Students enrolled in a Degrees+ program pay just $149 per transferable college credit. That’s less than ⅓ the average US college tuition. Credits can be transferred to the school of their choice and save students $24,296 on their way to a bachelor’s degree vs. the national average 4-year tuition. (Source: IES/NCES Digest 2021 Table 330.10) Or students can opt to take one course at a time for $199 per college credit.

Our team has been working tirelessly to build a product that will make world-class education more equitable and more accessible, and change the way people define excellent education.