A French billionaire spent €70 million to build a coding school with no teachers and no tuition.
In 2013, Xavier Niel, the founder of the French telecommunications company Free, invested seventy million euros to open a computer programming school in Paris with no professors, no textbooks, no tuition, and no entrance requirements tied to prior academic credentials.1 The school, named 42 after the answer to the ultimate question of life in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, accepted students between the ages of eighteen and thirty based solely on a four-week immersive trial called La Piscine.
Approximately 70,000 people applied in the first year. Of those, 20,000 completed the online qualification test, 4,000 were invited to the trial, and 890 were selected for the inaugural class.2 The acceptance rate was roughly 1.3 percent, lower than Harvard's.
The pedagogical model relies entirely on peer-to-peer learning and project-based challenges. Students work through increasingly difficult programming problems with no lectures and no assigned instructors. The building is open around the clock, and at three in the morning, between 300 and 400 students can be found working.3 No diplomas are awarded. Niel's reasoning was direct: in his industry, hiring managers ask candidates to code, not to present a certificate.
Forty percent of 42's students do not hold a baccalauréat, the standard French secondary school credential.4 The school reports a one hundred percent employment rate among graduates, with placements at companies including Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. The Agile methodology principles of iterative learning and self-organization are embedded in the school's daily operations.
By 2024, the 42 Network had expanded to campuses in more than fifty campuses worldwide, each operating as a nonprofit funded by local institutions and companies.5 The WURI global university rankings placed 42 third for innovation in 2025.