The People’s University, a free online university, was founded in 2009 and was accredited in 2014. As VOA correspondent Maxim Adams reports, the goal of this non-profit organization in the United States is to provide access to the education of higher for about 140,000 students from 200 countries. Kateryna Glubochenko is from Mykolaiv in Ukraine. Russia started war on her country, just three months before she graduated.

“Everyone started leaving the city in panic. All businesses were closed. Everything remained in place,” she says. But Kateryna did not stop her studies. She continued to work and managed to graduate, sometimes studying in bomb shelters. “I had no other path, except UoPeople.”. University of the People, or UoPeople, says it is the first US-accredited nonprofit online university. But university is not completely free. Students must pay between $140 and $400 for each class they take. Students pay about $5,000 to get a bachelor’s degree, and less for some master’s programs.

In addition, the University offers a scholarship system for people who cannot pay. If students qualify and about 50 percent of them fall into this category, graduation costs nothing. According to bestColleges.com, in 2022, the average cost of tuition and fees at a public four-year university in the United States was about nine thousand six hundred dollars per year. UoPeople was founded in San Francisco in 2009 by Israeli-American businessman and entrepreneur Shai Reshef, who says the university welcomes students from around the world.

“In the US we have homeless people, we have undocumented students, we have mothers who don’t work, but we also have many students who have a difficult life.” The Afghan refugee Khadija Amini is a student of this university who lives in Albania while waiting for an American visa. Her parents worked for the Afghan government, but after the Taliban came to power, they left. UoPeople gave Khadija not only the chance to get an education that the Taliban would have denied her, but much more.

“Other Afghan girls want to get an education. I have started teaching them online from home as a volunteer. I am also guiding them to find a way to get an education”. Today, about 130,000 students from 200 countries study at UoPeople. The staff – about 26,000 people – consists entirely of volunteers, and the university offers degrees in business administration, information technology, health and others.

“I believe that education is a basic right and every person in the world should have this opportunity. And that’s exactly what we do. We develop a model of higher education, showing that everyone can access and afford higher education.” UoPeople works with a number of reputable higher education institutions, including Edinburgh and McGill universities. The university also receives support and assistance from non-profit organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and technology giants such as Google and Intel.

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