Like many good tech narratives, Make School’s origin story begins with its founders dropping out of college. Ashu Desai and Jeremy Rossmann went to high school together in Palo Alto. When he was 16, Desai built an iOS game called Helicopter, similar to other games that at the time were only available on Facebook or Android. His adaptation came at a fortuitous moment, right at the launch of Apple’s App Store, and after a tongue-in-cheek rollout — “For only 99 cents your life will be complete,” Desai wrote in an early advertisement for his game — he ended up selling some 50,000 copies and making $35,000. Desai was the only student in his high school who’d built his own app, and some small tech startups began to woo him.

Desai instead enrolled at UCLA in 2010 to study computer science, while Rossmann went to MIT for the same. But while in school, both found that their courses — weighted towards the theory of computer science, and away from app development — didn’t feel relevant to their desire to build products and found startups.

Desai, who said he’s never felt as engaged as while creating his first game, found himself bored and avoiding class. Now a sharply-dressed 22-year-old, wearing crisp blue pants and rounded black frame glasses on the day I met him, he remembered, “I didn’t feel like I was building cool things.”

In the summer after Desai’s freshman and Rossmann’s sophomore years, the two went back to their high school and invited 30 students to build gaming apps in their shared Palo Alto apartment, as part of a startup program they called MakeGamesWithUs. Students created song-guessing games (“Name That Jam”) and apps that would allow friends to trade dares back and forth. When their program attracted the attention of business accelerator Y Combinator in 2012, Desai and Rossmann felt things were progressing well enough that they could both withdraw from their respective colleges to focus on their new company, soon rebranded as Make School.

(In a 2014 TEDx talk for students, “5 lessons for high school students who want to change the world,” Rossmann proudly introduced himself as an MIT dropout — before going on to warn the audience that despite his own standing, or the legends of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, dropping out of college does not equal guaranteed startup success.)

After two years of summer academies, which saw graduates go on to internships at companies like Pandora and Snapchat, Desai said they felt their initial hopes were vindicated. “High school students could build pro-quality apps that get them internships at Facebook and Google, while their friends [at college] aren’t even getting interviews,” he said.

In 2014, the two decided to expand Make School again, launching a pilot two-year college alternative for students who felt traditional school wasn’t providing the right education for the startup marketplace. Desai said they were also motivated by a resounding complaint they heard from friends working in Silicon Valley—that many bright young hires weren’t entering the workplace with the right skill set. Tech giants might still look to computer science schools like MIT as a natural farm team for software talent, but, Desai said, impressive college degrees often served more as “a filter for intelligence, rather than [an indication] that they’d learned the right things.” When new Silicon Valley employees did know enough coding to be useful, Desai added, they were most likely to have picked it up outside the classroom.

As Rossmann put it in his TEDx talk, “At the end of college there is a huge difference in how hirable, how knowledgeable, and how successful students will be between those have stopped at what class asked of them — those who just completed the problem sets, did the in-class assignments — and those who went beyond, or around, and built things and released things.”

Desai said that instead, he and Rossmann set out to create the college experience they wished they’d had. They built the world’s first “Product University,” an educational environment geared exclusively towards the development, building, and marketing of new software, which could nimbly adapt its curricula in response to what tech companies say they need. Despite its anti-college origins, Make School’s curriculum has been picked up as a supplement to traditional curricula at technology-minded universities like UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT.

In its initial 2014–2015 session, the school drew students who had foregone traditional schools to attend, including one who passed up a full-ride scholarship to MIT; some of the school’s most prominent students (some just a year or two out of high school) were recruited by startups and large tech companies, where they made six-figure salaries in their first year.

Part of Make School’s lure, in addition to the promise of networking with Silicon Valley luminaries, is its deferred tuition plan that is contingent on job placement. Students don’t pay tuition up-front, but rather reimburse Make School based on what they end up earning, should they land a job in their field. When Make School is able to secure students an internship in between its eight-month training blocks, students agree to give 100 percent of what they’re paid — tech industry interns in San Francisco earn an average of $6,000 per month before living stipends, Venture Beat recently reported — to Make School. After they graduate, they commit to giving the school a quarter of their salaries for their first two years in the field. It could seem like a gamble: if they don’t get jobs, they owe nothing, but if they do, they could end up paying $60–80,000 for a program that does not confer any recognized degree.