Dear GCAS College Researchers and Friends:

Not Just a Debt-Free Difference

Next month, in August, GCAS will celebrate its 13th anniversary — thirteen years of building something the world was told couldn’t be built. Since 2021, when GCAS began awarding accredited degrees, we’ve held to a simple promise: education should not come with a lifetime of debt attached. But GCAS has never been only about being debt-free. From the beginning our ambition has been larger: to create a real, high-quality alternative to the neoliberal debt university — an institution that can genuinely compete with the elite universities designed to reproduce the privileged classes even as they hollow out and abandon the very humanities that make us human. What makes the result remarkable is the scale it comes from.

GCAS is a small, highly selective college — just over 300 students — yet in only a few years our debt-free model has delivered relief that institutions many times our size can never match. Compared to what students would have paid for equivalent Bachelor’s, Master’s, and doctoral degrees across the US, UK, and Canada, GCAS has already saved its students and alumni an estimated €10 million (about $11.7 million) in tuition alone. And because tuition is almost never paid in cash but borrowed at interest from greedy banks, the real, lifetime saving is closer to €15 million (roughly $17.6 million) once loan repayment is factored in — which, across our community of 380 students and alumni, works out to roughly €39,500 (about $46,000) saved for every single person. And that’s before our in-house scholarships, which stretch the savings further still: on top of our already debt-free tuition, GCAS awards its own bursaries and scholarships to lower the cost even more for students who need it, meaning every student-researcher pays less than our published rates.

GCAS breaking bread at our 2018 Summer Institute at PAF, France

What makes this journey truly remarkable is that we achieved it without ever compromising on quality — in fact, we kept raising it, bringing world-renowned professors to teach at GCAS and creating meaningful, paid academic work for them, proving that a college can honor both its students and its scholars without succumbing to the greed from university administrators and banks that drives tuition ever higher elsewhere. And we do it while owing no one: just as we don’t ask you, the student-researcher, to go into debt, GCAS itself carries no debt to banks and answers to no outside master — no foundation, no external funding source, and no government support is part of GCAS, which means there is no pressure from anyone to change our model to raise tuition.

We are financially solid and have been growing by roughly 50% per year over the past few years, entirely on our own terms. But the deeper impact isn’t only financial. By refusing to mortgage our student-researchers’ futures (your future and your freedom), GCAS frees a generation of thinkers, artists, and scholars to follow their vocations and dreams — into teaching, research, activism, socially conscious businesses and organizations, and community life — rather than surrendering their most creative years to servicing debt by being forced into jobs that crush our souls and make the rich even richer at your expense. That money stays with our students and their families and flows back into the communities they build, rather than into the bank accounts owned by the very actors who are destroying our society.

GCAS’s Honorary Vice President, Professor Dr. Azfar Hussain, in Havana, Cuba’s seminar “On Revolutions” in 2017

And this matters now more than ever: in a post-liberal, neoliberal age when democratic institutions — the very institutions built to protect local communities — are under sustained attack, GCAS is doing its part to build a counter-narrative (a counter-resistance) that is not abstract but real and felt, embodied in every piece of research, every sentence you write (not AI, but YOU), every seminar, and every student-researcher liberated from debt.

And this is only the beginning: if GCAS continues to grow by our current rate, by 2035 our community will number more than two thousand, and the debt we will have spared them — in real lifetime cost — is projected to exceed €80 million (around $94 million), crossing the €100 million (roughly $117 million) mark around 2038. Now imagine that value not extracted by shareholders but held in common: through our co-ownership model (you become an owner of GCAS), the worth of GCAS is distributed over time across the very alumni and faculty who build it, so that everything we create together compounds back into the hands of our community (and by extension your communities) rather than away from it. Keeping education debt-free isn’t a marketing line for us; it’s the foundation of everything GCAS was built to do — a small college proving that access, excellence, and social good need not be traded against one another.

GCAS Reception on the first day of our Florence 2026 seminars

What Our Students Are Telling Us

We recently asked our researchers to reflect candidly on their year at GCAS, and their responses affirm exactly why this community exists. Students rated the intellectual quality of their courses at 8.9 out of 10, the administrative support at 9.1, and the May 2026 Florence Seminars at an outstanding 9.5. Most telling of all, when asked how likely they’d be to recommend GCAS to a friend or colleague, our students answered with an average of 9.6 out of 10 — a near-unanimous vote of confidence.

But the numbers only tell part of the story. What comes through in students’ own words is a shared sense of having found something rare. They describe GCAS as advanced, rigorous, and prestigious, and repeatedly praise the intellectual and academic freedom at its core:

The Florence Seminars clearly left a mark — students singled out the speakers, the graduation ceremony, and the seminars themselves as “absolutely brilliant,” and spoke of the “electric feel” of gathering, however remotely, as one global community. Time and again, they named the same things they want us to keep doing: inviting world-class, boundary-pushing thinkers, protecting freedom of inquiry and open debate, and staying “a very supportive community.”

We’re listening just as closely to what would make GCAS even better — to aspire to a greater union and cause. Students asked for more one-on-one time with faculty, longer live discussions, and more chances to connect socially with peers and professors across the globe — and a few noted moments when a supervisor’s reply came slower than they’d hoped. We take these to heart: they are the growing edges of a young institution, and we’re committed to strengthening every one of them in the year ahead.

GCAS in Paris after Bruce Fink’s seminar

People & Community

Welcoming new faculty. We’re delighted to welcome three exceptional scholars to the GCAS faculty. Dr. Pearl Brock and Dr. Rishab Nathan — both GCAS graduates — return to teach where they once studied, a living embodiment of our co-ownership model. They are joined by Dr. Ekaterina (“Katia”) Belousova, who completed her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Rice University.

Dr. Pearl Brock and Pancho (Dr. Francisco Gonzalez Castro) at GCAS’s Commencement, Florence, May 2026

Dr. Rishab Nathan

Amy Deiko

A new team member. We’re thrilled that Amy Deiko, from Peru, has joined GCAS as our SEO Manager — and is herself a student in our MA Philosophy program. Another lovely example of a researcher helping to grow the very institution she studies in.

A milestone worth celebrating. Congratulations to our new faculty member Dr. April Wu, one of the first researchers in our MA Philosophy program, who has successfully defended her PhD dissertation in Music and Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. April earned her BA at the University of Oxford before coming to GCAS — Oxford BA, GCAS MA, and now a doctoral defense at Royal Holloway is a wonderful testament to the trajectory of our researchers.

A Note for Our MA Researchers

For those of you aiming to complete your MA degree within a single calendar year — especially if you began your studies in the middle of the academic year — I would strongly encourage you to use the summer months to write your MA thesis, or at least a substantial part of it. Getting a good draft underway now means you can finish your coursework and defend on schedule, allowing you to complete your degree in one year as planned. The summer is a valuable stretch of uninterrupted time; putting it to work on your thesis is one of the best ways to keep your momentum and stay on track to graduate.

Yours sincerely,

The GCAS Team