by Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy
More than two decades ago, I started tutoring my cousins. In 2008, I turned that work into a nonprofit, which is still free today for anyone who wants to learn. Early on, several venture capitalists and angel investors offered to write checks if I’d make it a for-profit company. When the conversations turned to monetization and exit strategies, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do.
People still ask me why we’re a nonprofit. The question usually comes with a raised eyebrow. “Couldn’t you have built a business?” they ask. I could have. But everything I’ve seen in for-profit education since then has confirmed my choice, from the MOOC boom and bust to the pandemic to the onset of AI.
Here are five things I’ve come to believe about nonprofit work and why I’m more committed than ever to doing it.
The world needs an education safety net.
Let me start with a story about a girl in Afghanistan named Sola. In 2007, she was in the fifth grade when men threatened to throw acid in her face if she continued to go to school. So for years she stayed home, dreaming of more from inside the walls of her family compound. Then her brother brought home a copy of TIME magazine that mentioned Khan Academy. Sola started with elementary school math. She worked her way up to physics. She found a way to take the SAT in Pakistan and eventually attended college in the United States. I’ve said for years that I want Khan Academy to be a safety net for the world. If a child can’t go to school or if they don’t have a school, they still have somewhere to turn.
Education shouldn’t answer to investors.
When a company answers to investors, its priorities eventually follow the money—not out of malice, just by design. We’ve watched it happen. Edmodo, once used by millions of teachers, was sold, and its free platform was later shut down. Byju’s, once valued at $22 billion, is in insolvency. 2U went through bankruptcy. Chegg has cut nearly half its workforce. At some point, each one of them was hailed as the future of education. Khan Academy has no owner, no equity, and no exit plan. When we decide what to build, the only question we have to answer is whether students learn. We are in this for the long term.
“Early on, several venture capitalists and angel investors offered to write checks if I’d make it a for-profit company.”
“Early on, several venture capitalists and angel investors offered to write checks if I’d make it a for-profit company.”
If someone else could do this, I’d happily get out of the way.
It’s true. If someone else could do this work better than we can, we’d gladly move on to the next hard problem. But in education, I believe the problem is structural, and it’s not going away anytime soon. The person who decides what tool to use, the person who pays for the tool, and the person who uses the tool are three different people. Administrators choose the tool. Taxpayers fund it. Students and teachers live with the result. That gap between who decides, who pays, and who benefits is best bridged by a nonprofit. We don’t have to pick whose interests come first. Our only incentive is student learning.
Nonprofit or not, a tool has to prove it works.
Anyone who claims to help kids learn should be willing to have that claim checked by someone else. That applies to us as much as it does to anyone else. Researchers have run randomized controlled trials of Khan Academy, from Tennessee to El Salvador. None of them were funded by us. Most found gains, some of which were large. One trial in Brazil, however, found no overall effect: students had to share devices and rarely used them on their own, but those who practiced consistently did improve. The lesson is that the tool alone isn’t enough; students need to use it as intended.
“When the conversations turned to monetization and exit strategies, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
“When the conversations turned to monetization and exit strategies, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
Donors should expect a return.
Investors ask one question: what do I get back for my dollar? I think donors should ask the same thing. In the philanthropic sector, a benefit-to-cost ratio above 10-to-1 is considered very good, and ratios of 20- or 30-to-1 are genuinely rare. In a 2020 analysis using a conservative, published methodology from the Robin Hood Foundation that ties standardized test-score improvements to lifetime earnings gains, I calculated a benefit-to-cost ratio for Khan Academy’s U.S. classroom work of roughly 480-to-1 overall. It’s about 240-to-1 in historically under-resourced schools. That analysis counts only classroom use so, if anything, it understates where we are now.
Put those five things together and you get a particular kind of nonprofit. We use technology as ambitiously as any company in Silicon Valley, but we also use it for the public good. We think about scale the way the biggest companies in the world think about scale, except we measure it by how many millions of learners we can reach and how much we help them learn—not how many quarters of growth we can report.
“Khan Academy has no owner, no equity, and no exit plan.”
“Khan Academy has no owner, no equity, and no exit plan.”
So when someone asks, with that raised eyebrow, why I didn’t go for-profit, the answer comes easily. I chose students over shareholders, and I’ve never once regretted it. I am dedicating my life to this work. I do not intend to stop until it is done.
Become a supporter by donating to Khan Academy. Khan Academy has more than 220 million registered users. Every dollar equals 100 minutes of learning for students around the world.
Sola has written about her experience in Afghanistan in her book Defiant Dreams: The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for Education.
