The Ominous Big Tech Takeover of Our Community College System
The ghouls of privatization have long had their eyes on the community college system. From Devry to ITT Tech, there have been countless versions of the for-profit junior college, and most of them have the same problems. The process to transfer credits from those schools to four-year universities is often a confounding mess for students. Most instructors at for-profit colleges work part-time and are underpaid, forcing them to teach classes at multiple schools to make ends meet, which makes it difficult to give students the time and focus they deserve. More often than not, these schools lure in students who would be better served by their local community college.
As if the community college system wasn’t strained enough by these privatization efforts, the tech bros have recently swooped in and are striving to cause further disruption. Community colleges operate with a combination of taxpayer funding, donations, and tuition revenue. But Campus, a predominantly online school that markets itself as a community college, uses a different financial model. The school has been injected with venture capital funding from the likes of Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Joe Lonsdale.
Thiel, Altman, and Lonsdale are the types of investor who fund enterprises that could serve a role in remaking the world more to their liking. Like virtually every other of these would-be overlords’ ventures, Campus is a play for even more power and control. And it’s a scammy one at that.
The Campus pitch is that it gives underserved students access to professors from elite schools. But after looking into the instructors listed on the school’s site, it’s clear that calling them “professors who teach at the world’s top universities” is deliberately misleading. Most of the Campus teachers either work, or worked, as part-time instructors at the schools advertised under “Also teaches at.” Multiple no longer teach at the prestigious universities Campus leverages in its advertising. At least two of the “professors” were actually graduate teaching assistants. Showcasing the well-known institutions where these instructors also teach, or have taught, is a brazen move to profit from those schools’ reputations. Rather than helping underserved students, this marketing is designed to dupe them.
Having been made aware of the more nuanced reality that’s intentionally glossed over in the school’s marketing, former Campus students I spoke with felt misled. Overall, these students say they had good experiences with their instructors. But they felt it was dishonest to call them all professors—and to claim they all still teach at elite universities—when many, in fact, no longer do. This deceptive marketing draws students to Campus, and the ones I spoke with wish the school was more transparent about the people that make up its ersatz “faculty.” One student said that he had been counting on a recommendation letter written by a professor from a top school. He now worries that the recommendation won’t carry the same weight if it comes from an adjunct instructor or graduate teaching assistant.
I was a graduate teaching assistant for three years, and an adjunct English instructor for eight. I taught at several schools and found little job stability, but I loved teaching, especially at community colleges. As an adjunct, I often felt like I was doing a better job than some senior faculty members, who, for one reason or another, had grown complacent and out of touch. So my aim here is not to say that classes taught by adjunct instructors are inherently inferior to those taught by tenured professors. But the gulf between an adjunct instructor and a full-time professor is large to anyone familiar with this world, and Campus seems to be banking on the likelihood that most undergraduate students aren’t aware of these underlying structures of higher education.
Considering the deceptive marketing, it wasn’t much of a surprise to learn that students’ best interests in other areas, including their safety, weren’t always front of mind for Campus leaders. A glib tech entrepreneur, Tade Oyerinde, is the CEO/chancellor of Campus, and he operates with the hubris of a typical tech bro.
In the spirit of Shark Tank, Oyerinde hosts an annual competition called Campus Grind where students pitch their business ideas to a panel of judges. The top three win cash prizes of up to $20,000. Along with NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale was a judge for the inaugural Campus Grind.
Students knew for a few weeks in advance that Lonsdale would be a judge, but it was only days before the competition when they learned that the event would be held at Lonsdale’s home. Students, most of whom flew to Austin for the contest, weren’t told beforehand that they’d have to sign an NDA in order to enter Lonsdale’s house. They also weren’t told about Lonsdale’s highly contested relationship with a student while he was a mentor at Stanford. To have a chance to win the cash prize, those Campus students, all of whom paid their tuition with need-based Pell Grants, had to sign the NDA on the fly and enter Lonsdale’s home.
When I asked Oyerinde about the past allegations against Lonsdale, he said, “That was not on my radar at all.” But wasn’t it his job to know about things like this, especially involving someone students would be around at a school event? “These are all students over 18,” Oyerinde said. “It was the opportunity of a lifetime for them. Think about it. You’re a student. You’re a Pell student. Every student we took there was Pell. Now you get to go to a billionaire’s house, which is, like, the coolest place they’d ever been. And they’re there with their family. They each got to bring a family member with them. Multiple students said it was the best day of their lives.”
One student at that first Grind competition was a Mexican immigrant. In 2003, along with Peter Thiel and three others, Lonsdale founded Palantir, the now infamous tech company whose tools for mass surveillance are used by ICE goons to locate and kidnap people like that student and her family. Lonsdale also donated millions of dollars to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Watching those Grind episodes, it’s bleak to see college kids nervously pitch their business ideas to someone who’s dedicated so much of his time, energy, and resources to instituting fascism in the United States—and in that person’s home, no less.
When asked if he felt any obligation to tell students about Lonsdale’s extreme politics before the contest, Oyerinde said that he “doesn’t spend time getting into [his] investors’ edgiest, most divisive views.” I also asked Oyerinde how he could justify funding his school with investments from known fascists. “Forget whether or not you agree with Peter or Joe’s vision for what the world should be,” he replied. “There are only a handful of investors in Silicon Valley who are actually trying to build something in America—and that have some mission behind their investments. Peter and Joe are some of the guys who have that vision.” Even if that vision is shaped by an affinity for race science and admiration of apartheid-era South Africa, it didn’t seem to matter much to Oyerinde. After all, in the world of for-profit education, money will always win.
Before acquiring MTI College and starting Campus, Oyerinde founded a learning management system, or LMS, company called Campuswire that he still owns and operates. Campus students use this LMS for their classes, giving Oyerinde privileged access to valuable student interaction data. When colleges use Canvas, Blackboard, or any other third-party LMS, the schools get to put restrictions on how much data the LMS company can access. But since Oyerinde owns the school and the LMS, he can decide how to use the data himself—when he’s already demonstrated a concerning level of carelessness when it comes to protecting students. In 2025, Campus acquired Sizzle AI, a company founded by Meta’s former head of AI, Jerome Presenti, who’s since become the chief technology officer of Campus. Sizzle’s mission is to create AI learning companions. Campus’s unique access to student data, such as how they interact with course materials, is no doubt very useful to such an endeavor.
This is exactly what people like Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, and Campus’s other V.C. investors want: a privatized education system that entrenches an AI-first agenda instead of rigorously questioning the use and ethics of this technology, as proper educators should do. Teachers at Campus are pushed to integrate AI into their classes, despite overwhelming evidence that LLM use severely inhibits critical thinking. For tech plutocrats, AI is simply easier to control than human educators.
Notably, Campus isn’t Joe Lonsdale’s first foray into disrupting higher education. Along with CBS CEO Bari Weiss and two others, Lonsdale started the University of Austin in 2021, offering “forbidden courses” more aligned with right-wing politics than classes at traditional universities. Students at the University of Austin can enjoy courses taught by tech accelerationists and learn about the “epidemic” of anti-white discrimination in higher education admissions. Take a quick look at the University of Austin’s marketing collateral—and the sea of white faces therein—and it’s not hard to get a sense of what that school is about.
Considering Lonsdale’s and Thiel’s illiberal beliefs, their reasons for investing in Campus, with its woke-coded marketing and claim to serve underserved students, are opaque at first glance. But this for-profit school is another step toward the goal of privatizing higher education in the United States, which Trump and his oligarchs are eager to accomplish. From the perspective of someone whose mental faculties are wholly consumed with thoughts of accruing more money and more power, public schools are unruly things—too hard to control and too little devoted to the accumulative desires of the plutocratic class. Many Campus students pay for their tuition with federally funded grants that are getting siphoned away from actual community colleges and public universities. Those timeworn institutions are foundational to our democracy, so any chance to weaken them is a prime investment opportunity for the tech fascists who want to shape the future to their ends.