Adam Braus is an entrepreneur and engineer turned professor and leader in higher education. Braus has been conducting original research in higher education for more than a decade. He discovered that we are living in a kind of higher educational ice age—there are almost zero new colleges started in the United States or other advanced countries. How can this be? Do we simply have enough colleges? Are colleges just impossibly difficult to start?

To get to the bottom of these questions, Braus started to interview the struggling founders of new nonprofit colleges, and also their lawyers, accreditors, and professors. From these interviews, he learned that in America today, the system is rigged against even a qualified person trying to start a nonprofit college. In this book we will meet five innovative educators and their teams who tried to start nonprofit colleges, but who were shut out or shut down. You will learn the fascinating, untold history of innovation in higher educational in the United States. Braus argues that the solution to the high costs and falling quality in higher education lies in enabling qualified people to start new and innovative nonprofit colleges.