All in for Education: Keep Khan Academy Free

Hi everyone, Sal Khan here. Just to remind everyone that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. That means I don't own Khan Academy; no one owns Khan Academy. We are a public charity, and we can only do the work we do through donations from folks like yourself. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about making a donation.

As a reminder, Khan Academy is about the budget of a large high school, but we reach—we try to reach all of humanity. Last year, we had 13 billion learning minutes on the platform. Half of that are students and families all over the world, coming off oftentimes telling us that this is the learning resource, the tutor, the help that their family could not otherwise afford.

The other half is hundreds of thousands of teachers using Khan Academy in the classroom to personalize learning, to make it more engaging for them, and to have better information about where their kids are, so that they can do more focused interventions with students. There's some calculations around social return in the for-profit sector; if you get even a 20 or 30 percent return on investment, that's considered a very, very good return.

In the not-for-profit sector, if you get even a 2x or 3x benefit-to-cost ratio for a not-for-profit, that's considered very good. Even conservative estimates of Khan Academy are 500 to 1 to 1,000 to 1 benefit because we're at a special time in history where something like education, which has always been scarce and frankly always been expensive—at least aspects of it, very important aspects of it—can now be delivered to tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people in ways that we could not have imagined even 20 or 30 years ago.

As I tell everyone, as much as Khan Academy has done over the last 10 or 12 years and as much as we've done this past year—especially during the pandemic—we're just getting started. We really want to cover all of the core academic subjects from pre-K through the core of college. We want to meet students where they are, and we want to think about how do we connect that learning to real opportunity—whether it's getting into college, getting a job, or getting credit in some way.

We want to do it one day for billions of people around the world. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about making a contribution of any size to Khan Academy; it will go a long, long way.