StarvardAbout Starvard
A real university, free for everyone.
Starvard is a free university on the internet. No tuition, no applications, no accounts, no deadlines. Just real courses, a library of classics, and people who want to learn, open to everyone, everywhere.
Our mission
Knowledge belongs to everyone. That one sentence is the whole mission. A great education changes a life: it raises what a person can earn, deepens what they can understand, and widens what they believe is possible for themselves. For most of history, that education sat behind gates: money, geography, admissions offices, luck. The internet removed every one of those excuses. What was missing was a university that actually behaved like it.
So we are building it. Starvard holds itself to a simple standard: courses worth your time, books worth your life, and a price of zero dollars, forever. Rigorous and kind at the same time. Ambitious about quality, relaxed about everything else.
Why we are doing this
Starvard started with a question our founder could not put down: what happens if a university costs nothing and turns nobody away? Not a video library with a university logo on it, but the real thing: a curriculum, a library, a community, professors' lectures from Yale and Stanford sitting next to courses we wrote ourselves, and the great books, all of them, free to read and hear.
The honest answer is that learning compounds. A person who finishes one course thinks differently the next morning. A person who reads one classic carries it for sixty years. Now multiply that by everyone on earth with a phone. That multiplication is the entire business plan, and there is no charge for it, because the students are the point.
We build in the open, with a small human crew and a team of AI assistants, and we publish what we make as fast as we can make it well. Some of our students are preparing for careers. Some are grandparents reading Dostoevsky at midnight. Both belong here, equally, and the door does not close.
How we work
People and AI build Starvard together, and we say so plainly. Our written courses are drafted with AI help and checked by people. Our video courses curate lectures from professors at universities like Yale and Stanford, always credited. Our library shelves public domain editions from Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks, typeset for comfortable reading, with human narration from LibriVox where it exists. When a page is machine translated, it says so on the page, until a native speaker reviews it. If you find an error, tell us and we will fix it. That is the deal.
Our promise
Free means free. No ads, no selling your data, no account required to learn, no paywall waiting at lesson seven. We keep a short list of values and we try to live up to it in public: the dignity of every person, the truth told straight, and kindness as the house rule.
Hi, I am Dave. I started Starvard because I kept meeting smart, hungry people who had been priced out of, or waved away from, the education they wanted. That seemed fixable, so we are fixing it, one course and one book at a time. If you are reading this, you are exactly who it is for. Pick a course, open a book, and stay as long as you like. Class is always in session.
Dave Dlaney, Founder
Starvard is part of E2, a small network of kind, clear websites, at e2.life.