When Al Tarzi founded Nexford University in 2019, he was an entrepreneur in an unfamiliar sector with a vision of making international higher education more affordable, more accessible and more aligned with the workplace.
Educated across France and the Middle East, Al Tarzi was 16 years-old at high school in Egypt when he travelled to UCLA for a web development course, gearing him up to launch his first tech company at the age of 18.
Al Tarzi went on to study at the American University in Cairo where he continued taking six-week courses at other institutions, equipping him with career skills and influencing his views on the value of a traditional education.
Al Tarzi previously described Nexford University as a “next generation” institution that was a “fusion between a tech startup and an online university”. Today, it offers US-accredited online degrees to over 5,000 students in more than 100 countries.
Affordability and innovation
According to HolonIQ, there will be an additional two billion worldwide postsecondary students by 2050, with the most growth driven by burgeoning youth populations in Africa, Southeast Asia and Central Asia.
It is in these emerging markets that Al Tarzi expects to see the most innovation, where historically there has been an imbalance between the supply and demand of higher education, and where high school graduates will “leapfrog” and choose the most modern higher educational options including digital first universities.
“It’s about how you create a model that can serve a wide customer base without the public funding that you have in the UK or US which is so heavily reliant on governments, so people are going to have to build that system from scratch in a way that is affordable.
“I think we’re going to see a lot more innovation coming in those markets,” said Al Tarzi, highlighting that 70% of undergraduate students in Brazil are taking online degrees.
Set against a different context, affordability is becoming increasingly important in western markets, with Nexford seeing the fastest enrolment growth in US students increasingly concerned about their return on investment who are forecast to become the largest cohort of students in two years.
“Unless I’m going to Harvard and buying this membership into a super expensive club for the rest of my life, why would I pay $30 – $40,000 for a mid-tier brand?” asked Al Tarzi. “This just doesn’t make sense to people anymore.”
Comparatively, tuition at Nexford is paid monthly and calculated in line with students’ local economies, with the average cost of its online MBA totalling $7,020.
Career skills
Alongside affordability, career outcomes are central to Nexford’s offerings, where the curriculum is written using a backward design model based on what employers want and the career outcomes of former students.
“There’s a large difference between our approach and the approach of many traditional schools where faculty are the ones who are determining what should be taught,” said Al Tarzi, who said that that “unless you’re a Stanford or a Harvard, let’s face it, you’re not going to attract the world’s best faculty”.
“So instead of trying to hire the world’s best faculty and use them to determine what should be taught, it’s much more scalable, more practical and much lower risk if you rely on millions of data points from employers to figure out what should be taught,” he said.
The industry will continuously filter out the weak players and the innovative ones will continue
Fadl Al Tarzi, Nexford
The university has embraced the teaching of AI, encouraging students to critique it as a tool and use it to enrich their learning, as well as using AI to analyse large volumes of job data, automate grading and create course content at a fraction of the cost.
When it comes to measuring educational gains, Nexford uses a “NorthStar metric” of whether learners achieve a three to five times return on their educational investment within three to five years of graduating.
“Beyond the social impact and accessibility angles, how can you charge higher than $200,000 for a degree when you know this person is not going to be able to make that money when they graduate and it’s going to take them 20 years to pay it back?” asked Al Tarzi.
Despite recognising potential drawbacks of online education in terms of social interaction and hands on instruction necessary for some disciplines, for Al Tarzi, courses can be designed to closely mimmic online workspaces and prepare students for hybrid careers.
AI and the pace of change
Despite the widespread uptake of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCS) across global education since 2008, Al Tarzi argues that they are a “complimentary offering” and that the pace of technological change has not been as rapid as people expected over the past two decades.
According to Al Tarzi, now is the time that AI is “changing the game”, when universities should “change what they’re teaching and how they’re teaching as a result of AI”.
“Everyone has been keen to adopt the AR, VR and gamification of the past decade, but frankly, students don’t go to college to play a game or to do virtual reality, and there’s very little to prove that actually helps with learning outcomes,” he said.
Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, Al Tarzi is predicting a rise in anxiety about using AI for cheating which will force universities to take a point of view about how to mitigate the panic and establish guidelines around the use of AI.
“Unfortunately, I think a lot of [institutions] are going to gravitate towards the typical approach of control and policies and rules… and these are all going to experience utter failure.
“So, I think the second wave will be when universities come to terms with the fact that everyone will use AI and that’s going to introduce a new wave of innovation.
“And with each new wave, there will be a filtration process where those who don’t move along will get killed and the industry will continuously filter out the weak players and the innovative ones will continue just like we’ve seen in the past.”
