Now U. · nowu.org · Est. 2025
The university
you're already
attending.
The question is not whether you are being educated — you are, every day, whether you intend it or not. The question is whether you are paying attention.
The argument
The university
as brand name.
The American university was not always a marketing machine. It was once a place where a person went to be genuinely changed — by ideas, by books, by the friction of other minds. That version still exists, in pockets, for people who know how to find it.
But for most people — the ones who enroll because it seems like the right thing to do, the ones who choose a school the way they choose a brand of sneaker, the ones who graduate with debt and a diploma and still no clear sense of what they want — the university has become something else entirely. An expensive rite of passage. The thirteenth grade.
Now U. is not anti-college. It is pro-learning. College is extraordinary for the person who arrives knowing what they want — who is ready to read and think and argue and grow in the company of other serious minds. But it is an expensive mistake for the person who doesn't yet know what they want. Better to get any job, write your way through it, think your way through it, until the question of what you want begins to answer itself.
"Your life is the curriculum.
Writing is the method.
You are both the student and the teacher."
The method
Write Away.
The practice.
"Every person alive is already learning — from experience, from failure, from the relentless input of a world that never stops talking. Write Away is a practice for paying attention to what that learning is actually teaching you."
We will talk about what you find.
The EDjournal. The writing accumulates over time into a living record — your prompts, your responses, your courses completed, your actions taken. More honest and more specific than any transcript. And more useful in any room you walk into.
What you'll write about
Eight territories.
All of them yours.
Write Away is not a subject. It is a practice you bring to every corner of your life. These eight territories are not a curriculum — they are a map. You decide where to begin, and where to go deeper. The eighth is entirely open. That one is yours.
Also at Now U.
Three more ways
to move forward.
A blog and Substack by Billy Treger — sharp, personal, honest takes on education, learning, resilience, and what it means to move forward deliberately. It's kind of his own modern Walden, dispatched from the basement of his DC home. Naturally, no pond.
First up
"What Three Kids in College Taught Me"
The real cost of higher education — measured in more than dollars. You'll want to read this one.
Coming soon
"The Thirteenth Grade"
On why so many students enroll in college without knowing why — and what that costs everyone.
On the way
"Learning to Learn"
What it actually means to teach yourself — at any age, from any starting point. A good read for anyone who thinks it's too late.
The first step is writing
one honest sentence.
"No application. No tuition. No prerequisites except the willingness to begin. Your first mentor conversation is free."
Write Away →