Affordability is not a talking point for me. It is the thread that runs through every role I have held in higher education for the past sixteen years. This month, that thread led somewhere new: Pacific West Academy has been approved as a partner school with Edly, giving our Certified Executive Security Specialist (CESS) students access to income-based repayment (IBR) loans.
I want to be precise about what this is, and what it isn’t. In my last piece, I laid out the design for Telos University — an institution built on income-contingent credentialing from the ground up, no majors, no front-loaded cost, students paying a fraction of income only after they’re earning. IBR is not that. IBR is what’s available today, inside a financing system that still asks students to borrow the full cost up front and hope the repayment terms are humane. It’s a real improvement over the alternative. It is not the fix I’ve been describing all along. Both things are true, and the difference matters.
The Gap IBR Was Built to Close
Traditional private student loans were built for a different student than the one showing up at institutions like ours. They assume a cosigner with strong credit. They assume a fixed monthly payment that starts regardless of whether the borrower has landed a job yet. They assume, in short, a level of financial cushion that a lot of career-changers, first-generation students, and working adults simply do not have.
Income-based repayment loans, offered by platforms like Edly, were designed to close that gap. The mechanics are simple:
- No cosigner required. Approval is based on the borrower and the program, not on a parent’s or spouse’s credit history.
- No credit history needed to apply. For students without an established credit file — which describes a meaningful share of career-changers and younger students — this removes a barrier that traditional lenders treat as disqualifying.
- Payments scale with income after completion, rather than starting as a fixed obligation the moment the loan is disbursed.
- Deferment and pause options exist for students who lose a job or whose income drops below a qualifying threshold.
This model has grown for a reason. Federal aid alone has not kept pace with the true cost of career training, and the traditional private loan market has never been generous to the students most likely to need it. IBR loans do not solve the underlying affordability crisis in American higher education. But they change who gets a seat at the table, and that has been the fight of my career.
A Young Market, Built Around a Real Shortage
Income-based repayment is not new — for federal loans. Federal IBR traces back to the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 and became available to borrowers in July 2009. It caps payments at a share of discretionary income and forgives remaining balances after 20 to 25 years.
Private lenders never offered anything close to it. Banks underwrite risk with credit scores and cosigners, not a borrower’s future income potential, and there was no private-market equivalent to federal IBR until remarkably recently. Edly launched in 2019 as the first — for a period, the only — private-sector platform offering income-based repayment loans. Within about three years, Edly had funded more than 4,000 students through more than 1,500 partner schools. Today that footprint has grown to over 1,700 institutions nationally.
Who actually uses these loans matters. Edly underwrites without a traditional credit score, using outcomes data instead: historical completion and earnings data from the Department of Education and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, alongside its own loan performance data. That approach only works in fields with well-documented, predictable post-completion earnings — which is why Edly’s borrower base has concentrated heavily in nursing, STEM, business, accounting, and education.
Nursing, in particular, is where Edly built real depth. In January 2022, Edly acquired Avenify, a financing platform built specifically for nursing students. The timing was not incidental — the country was facing a shortfall of more than 1.1 million nurses, and nursing programs were losing qualified students to the same financing gap I’ve spent my career working against. The acquisition let Edly combine Avenify’s nursing-specific underwriting with its broader IBR platform, and it cemented Edly’s position as the go-to income-based lender for nursing programs nationally.
That history is exactly why the PWA partnership matters to me. Edly did not start as a generalist lender that happened to add more schools over time. It built its model around fields where a real funding gap was costing the country workers it badly needed — nursing first, and other workforce-critical fields since. Executive security training belongs in that same category: real demand, a labor pool disproportionately made up of veterans, and qualified candidates being priced out by financing built for a different kind of student.
What Life 3.0 Actually Argues — and Why That Matters Here
Readers of my Telos University piece know Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 as the conceptual backbone of that whole project — the idea that we are moving from a world where institutions merely update their “software” (curriculum, policy) to one where the entire architecture can be redesigned from first principles. I want to be precise about what the book actually argues on the higher-ed financing question, because it would be easy to overclaim it.
Tegmark doesn’t propose IBR loans, or any specific financing mechanism. What his labor-market chapter does argue — quoting economist Andrew McAfee — is that “the Econ 101 playbook is clear, but is not being followed.” The target of that critique is the front-loaded degree model itself: one large, up-front credentialing event, financed all at once, meant to hold its value over a forty-year career, in a labor market where AI is actively rewriting which skills hold value on a timeline far shorter than most loan terms.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. IBR does not fix front-loading. A student still borrows the full cost of the program up front; IBR only changes the shape of the repayment curve afterward. It is a better way to survive a front-loaded system, not a replacement for one. The more radical implication of Tegmark’s argument — and the one I built Telos University around — is that the credentialing model itself needs to stop being front-loaded: modular, stackable, paid for as you go, priced against the outcome rather than the seat time.
That is the real difference between what PWA just did with Edly and what I designed with Telos. Edly is IBR bolted onto an existing, front-loaded credential. Telos was designed around income-contingent participation from day one — no large up-front bill to soften the blow of later. One is a patch on the model higher ed already has. The other is the rethinking Tegmark’s chapter gestures toward, and the one I still think the field needs.
The Edly partnership is the tool available to us right now. It is not the only tool I want. Short-term Workforce Pell Grants — the federal expansion that took effect in July 2026 — are exactly the kind of financing PWA students should be able to access: aid tied to a short, career-aligned program rather than a four-year degree. But Workforce Pell eligibility requires Title IV participation, and for a private, non-degree-granting institution like PWA, that pathway runs through an accreditation and approval process that takes time. We are pursuing Title IV eligibility. Until that infrastructure catches up, I am not going to leave our students waiting on a policy timeline to get the education they’ve already committed to.
That’s what the Edly partnership is: not a substitute for Workforce Pell, and not a substitute for the kind of structural rethinking Telos University was designed to model. It’s a bridge — no cosigner, no credit history requirement, and payments that respect the reality of what it costs to start over in a new career, while the field slowly builds toward the model I actually believe in.
Access to education should not depend on who happens to have a parent willing to cosign a loan. It never has for me, and it will not for the students at PWA while I have anything to do with it. And I’m not done arguing for the version of higher ed where students never have to ask that question in the first place.
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