No tuition, no grades, no power grid: why are people flocking to a ‘college’ in the middle of the desert? | California

A dozen writing students perched around a collection of weather-beaten couches, laptops balancing on their knees, ready to discuss their work. Next up to read was Ira Birch, a poet sporting black boots and a shag haircut.

“I told myself I was gonna share today,” Birch said nervously, looking around the circle. “But there are a lot more people here.”

The leader of the workshop, Amy Brown Carver, stepped in to help, reading a few of Birch’s poems aloud for them. “It’s been a long time since this land has seen people,” a few lines read. “We bring goods from far away, bags of beans, boxes of pasta. Without, we are helpless.”

After the reading, there was clapping – someone muttered the word “amazing” – and words of encouragement. As they chatted and critiqued, the writers sipped tea from porcelain cups.

It was a scene reminiscent of any creative writing brainstorm happening on any given college campus across the country. But zoom out from the immediate circle of couches, and the gathering’s true setting was a barren, windswept plot in the middle of the California desert, roughly 200 miles from Los Angeles, 40 miles from the nearest grocery store and a mile from the tiny settlement of Bombay Beach. The writers sat in a small room constructed from plywood boards and metal frames: a temporary structure built a few months prior, and now positioned right on top of the sand.

Outside, open desert stretched as far as the eye could see, punctuated on one side only by the steadily shrinking, pesticide-laden Salton Sea.

The desolate community’s name: Mars College.

“It’s unclear who gave it that nickname,” says co-founder Gene Kogan, a programmer and artist. “But, you know, it kind of looks like Mars out here.”

At Mars, unlike a real college, there are no grades, degrees or mandatory attendance. There are no tuition fees or trained professors or even public utilities, like electricity or indoor plumbing. Most power to the camp comes from a towering wall of solar panels.

But there are daily classes taught by anyone who has something to teach, ranging from the writers’ workshop, to the mathematical theory of shapes, to the proper way to install solar panels, to the creation of AI-inspired art. All classes are held within a cluster of plywood-and-metal structures, which are built right before the beginning of the “semester” in January, and then torn down again every year in April. For three months, the college’s several dozen “students” live in trailers and sheds and tents that flank the main desert campus, and pay a few hundred dollars for communal services like wifi, meals and access to portable toilets.

Mars is clearly not collegiate in a traditional sense, its founders argue; it’s more like a low-cost experimental community. But as the price of college tuition continues to soar, and the college educated now see more long-term unemployment than in decades past, people of all ages are looking for new, adventurous ways to keep learning, they say. And Mars feels like a college for the end of the world: a dystopian, isolated place where students learn both how to live off the grid and how to use modern AI tools.

A tuition-free desert “school” with no plumbing inevitably raises eyebrows – is this really the antidote to the higher education crisis? But Kogan maintains that Mars shouldn’t be viewed as a normal educational institution at all.

“I’m not attached to the word [college], I’m not trying to convince anyone we’re a university of sorts,” Kogan said. “In a lot of ways it’s an alternative to college. In the future, I don’t see how the university system as it is now can sustain itself.”

‘You can’t take anything for granted’

Mars College may have lofty goals, but the day-to-day living conditions for students aren’t for the faint of heart.

When the wind whips through the desert, spawning sandstorms that can last hours, a thick film of dust settles over the open campsite. Tanks of drinking water have to be driven in, and trash has to be driven out. And during the spring months, temperatures in the California desert start reliably climbing into the triple digits.

“Here, you can’t take anything for granted,” Kogan said.

The seed for Mars College was planted years ago at an event with a much bigger profile, tens of thousands more attendees, and far more parties: Burning Man.

It was at the Nevada desert festival that a former Silicon Valley software engineer and entrepreneur (who requested to simply go by his first name, Freeman, after admitting to being “a bit press-phobic”) starting building huge, temporary structures out of pallet racks, the heavy-duty metal scaffolding often used in warehouses. In Bengaluru, India, Freeman had also constructed a multi-story building for use by coders and creatives.

At Burning Man, festivalgoers could actually live inside Freeman’s futuristic lodgings. But the structures had a natural shelf life. After a week, when the party ended, Freeman found himself with a bunch of leftover plywood and no use for it.

So in 2019, he bought a cheap 20-acre plot of desert for about $20,000 near Bombay Beach, the quirky artist enclave on the Salton Sea, and home to only a few hundred people. The vacant land eventually became the new “campus” for Mars College.

And if Freeman brought the building materials, Kogan, his co-founder, brought the people.

In an open call on Twitter in 2019, Kogan touted the new “free and highly unconventional experiment in living and learning in the desert”, with focuses like art, coding, gardening and building.

“More or less, the first cohort was all of my friends,” Kogan said earlier this month, while sitting inside the current nucleus of Mars College: a spacious two-story auditorium adorned with small screens showcasing AI-created art videos. In one video, a giant, hallucinogenic pancake flipped on a griddle over and over again. Outside the DIY auditorium, a vicious windstorm was pelting sand against the building’s plywood walls, and students walked around wearing ski goggles to block the swirling dust.

“We were just like, ‘OK, anyone who wants to come for any amount of time just come, we’ll figure it out,’” Kogan said. “We were all sort of fresh here.”

Despite his current unorthodox occupation, Kogan has a background in traditional higher education.

Armed with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Columbia University, Kogan later received a Fulbright scholarship to study “art technology spaces” in India, where he met Freeman. For the next few years, Kogan taught workshops on machine learning and generative art, everywhere from classrooms at New York University to nonprofits and conferences in Berlin.

Along the way, Kogan was trying to envision a community where students could both live and attend workshops, but was also realizing the limitations of a normal college – especially when it comes with a hefty price tag.

During the pandemic when all classes moved online, he noted, universities like Columbia were still charging undergraduates roughly $80,000 a year in tuition and housing fees.

“In the age of the internet, you can get educational content for free,” Kogan said. “But the thing that you can’t get for free, or the thing that college still does [in a great way], is provide a place for young people to go through this youth learning phase together.”

A broad cohort

Today, those who make the trek out to Mars College come from many different backgrounds: some have advanced degrees, while some didn’t finish high school.

One current Mars student is a former English major who is now fascinated by off-grid living and solar power. Another is a 45-year-old microbiologist, with a specialty in photosynthetic bacteria and a PhD from Berkeley, who now compiles an “academic journal” for the camp (printed on hot-pink paper and mostly written by AI). One woman comes from the neighboring squatter community of Slab City, where she runs a dog rescue and helps vaccinate strays. And one Vietnamese man, when he’s not here in the California desert, lives in Bali and works as a Balinese Hindu priest.

There are about 60 students in total: the largest group that the experimental college has seen thus far. The youngest is 25, the oldest 60. There have been attendees from Brazil, India, China, different parts of Europe and every corner of the US. To join Mars, prospective students have to formally apply, although Kogan admits that the admission process is “very self-selective” because of the inherent toughness required to live in the desert for three months with virtually no immediate resources.

“We sort of emphasize that this isn’t a vacation,” he said.

The Balinese priest, who requested using only his first name, Hai Dai, first showed up at Mars College because he knew Freeman from decades ago; the two worked together in the 1990s for Sun Microsystems, the company that created the programming language Java.

“[At the time] I said: ‘The internet is not humanity in any shape or form,’ not where I saw it,” Hai Dai said. “So then I went back to learn ancient technology, which is the spiritual technology.”

Meanwhile, other Mars students had no previous connection to the college’s founders – nor any background in tech – before moving out to the desert.

Carver, who helms the writing workshop, ended up at Mars after hearing about it from an ex-boyfriend a few years ago. Carver was living in Los Angeles, working as a screenwriter, when her then-boyfriend announced his plan to attend Mars.

“I was like, ‘You don’t know where you’re gonna stay. You don’t know what this is,’” Carver remembers telling him. The concept of the college seemed a little cult-ish, she said.

But that winter, when Carver went out to visit him, she saw the appeal. She enrolled herself the following year, and every year after that. Now, she’s working on a standup comedy set about her life in the desert.

“Because I’m new to stand-up and I’m doing the open mics and stuff,” she said, “there’s something of an advantage coming in and talking about something [unique] like this each time.”

Grappling with the future

Still, Mars is grappling with some of the same broader, philosophical questions facing college students everywhere: namely, how AI will, or should, shape the future.

Because of the founders’ experience in tech, artificial intelligence influences many aspects of the school, including its dedicated “AI Camp.” There are classes on “vibe coding” and “creative AI”, and dedicated AI agents control the lights in the main auditorium and even help organize things in the communal kitchen. In their creative work, Mars students deliberate over the best way to incorporate artificial intelligence, if at all.

The potential environmental toll of AI doesn’t trouble Kogan often – even somewhere like the California desert and the Salton Sea, which have long been defined by their unique environmental woes. Massive AI data centers proposed for rural areas near Mars College have recently sparked concern over the amount of electricity and water it would take to power them.

“I encounter it sometimes, although I don’t think about it too much, because I’m not much of an expert on this topic,” Kogan said. “It doesn’t have that much to do with AI, it’s more just how energy systems work and so on.”

More often, both Kogan and Freeman think about the possibilities of AI. “So much is happening in this field,” Freeman wrote in an email. “It’s nice being around other people using it extensively to see what it’s capable of, and having projects to get experience using it directly.”

The former microbiologist who now prints an “academic journal” also mused about his editorial choices in one recent edition of the homemade bulletin. Amid more generic, AI-enhanced articles, he penned a self-reflective, human-written editor’s note.

“Am I making slop? I hope not,” he wrote. “I certainly am sniffing the slop. It doesn’t stink too bad to me, but it also doesn’t smell quite floral. There’s some brain-broken territory that we are exploring here with bot-penned prose, and I hope you will forgive me for mixing the two together.”

For now, at least, the future of Mars College and its educational offerings are once again unknown. In a few weeks, all of the carefully constructed classrooms and buildings will be torn down, as they are every April, and the students will pack up their trailers and RVs and head back to their normal lives. The landscape will return to being just a vast expanse of open desert.

And next year, they’ll build it all back up again.