Campus.edu offers new IT degree (and certification prep)

Just because you’re teaching online doesn’t mean you can’t go around the room with an IT icebreaker.

Theo Khayat, an instructor at Campus, a two-year online college, began his first Spreadsheets & Databases class by asking his 60-plus students how they used—you guessed it—spreadsheets and databases. One student deployed digital ledgers for their real estate business, Khayat said; another used them for their anime club.

“Organizing information is at the heart of what information technology is trying to do,” Khayat, who also teaches at Northwestern University, told us.

Those basics are part of a new Campus program: the Associate of Science in IT program, which covers topics like cloud architecture, networking, cybersecurity, and applied AI. Its creators say it offers an advantage compared to other degrees: cost.

(In March, Bloomberg reported that Campus raised $46 million from an array of investors:Sam Altman, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Figma chief Dylan Field, Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, Discord co-founder Jason Citron, Notion Labs co-founder Akshay Kothari, Bloomberg Beta, and basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal. To date, Campus has raised $101 million.)

How IT all started. Tuition at Campus is capped at $7,320 per academic year—an amount nearly matching the $ 7,395 maximum Pell Grant award, which provides financial aid for students in need. Campus, founded in 2016, also offers associate degrees in business administration and paralegal studies.

According to data analysis site Community College Review, the 2025 average public community college tuition is approximately $5,099 per year for in-state students and $8,776 for out-of-state students. (For private community colleges, average yearly tuition is approximately $15,581 per year.)

College Board estimates that for the 2024–2025 academic year, average tuition for full-time undergrads in four-year programs reached $11,610 for public in-state schools; $30,780 for public out-of-state schools; and $43,350 for private nonprofit schools.

“There’s a lot of people who aren’t inspired by what they do. Maybe you’re 22, you’re working at the mall, you’re folding t-shirts, you’re folding burritos, and it’s like, ‘Wait, is there more for me out there?’ My goal is that people who think that, or who don’t want to get themselves in that situation, have a place where they can learn useful things from the best people in the world without going into debt,” Tade Oyerinde, chancellor and founder of Campus, told us.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, overall employment in computer and IT occupations is projected to grow “much faster than the average for all occupations from 2023 to 2033.” About 356,700 openings are projected each year, on average, due to employment growth and the need to replace workers who leave the occupations permanently.

The AS of IT, which launched July 10, offers 14 courses, including instruction on server management, Linux and command-line foundations, and GitHub workflows.

Campus’s educational model uses live online instruction taught by a distributed network of professors like Khayat; other professors in the program also teach at schools including Columbia and UC Davis.

The Campus IT program also includes preparation for industry certifications like CompTIA A+ Core 1, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, and LPI Linux Essentials—a major benefit, according to Oyerinde.

“I think students get really excited knowing that, ‘Hey, employers recognize not just a degree, but these specific certifications that mean I have specific skills that are useful on day one,’” he said.

A CompTIA study of 462 US community college students found that 81% of respondents said industry-recognized certs required or recommended in academic programs “provide a stepping stone to career advancement over time.” (Only 24% of respondents, however, report that colleges require industry-recognized certifications.)

“Make no mistake: After a two-year degree and some of these certs, you don’t necessarily have to have a four-year degree to get an entry-level tech job,” Kirk Smallwood, VP of key accounts and industry engagement, at CompTIA told us.

Hire learning. Oyerinde sees graduating Campus students becoming entrepreneurs, continuing on to a four-year program, or starting right in on a job.

And it’s not out of the question for institutions to hire their IT undergrads. IT Brew reported this year how university CISOs have turned to students to operate their on-campus security operations centers.

“In my tenure with the security team that dates back to 2012, we have hired more than 10 of our student workers as full-time employees,” Matthew Williams, deputy CISO and executive director of information security at the University of Cincinnati, shared with IT Brew in March 2025.

Tyler Laidler, who was working at a machine shop before Covid-19, pivoted to IT just a few years ago. He graduated in late 2023 with an associate science in IT from Sacramento-based MTI College—a school that Campus acquired in 2022. The new Campus curriculum mirrors MTI’s IT program, Laidler said.

Laidler, who was no stranger to taking apart computers, found the cloud design classes, including the Amazon specialty instruction, to be the most “practically applicable.”

Following a work-study IT program as a student, Laidler is now IT lead for the Sacramento facility at Campus. He helps to make sure file and server resources are properly administered and allocated, and that all staff is onboarded.

“The curriculum that I went through was largely focused on AWS, but the same principles apply for the Google Cloud environment,” he told us.

Campus itself builds a lot of software so instructors can crank out their Week 1 discussions.

“We could literally hire students today who graduate from this program,” Oyerinde said.