The Brand Thesis

“I would love it if my kids could go to Yale — but hear me out: Yale from 200 years ago. Biblically grounded, Christian environment, and the pursuit of excellence and ideas with rigor.”

That’s the brand. Excellence, Biblical foundation, rigor, and electives that no one else offers — for serious Christian homeschool families who want more than what the modern private, public, or even typical homeschool path provides.

The Elective Machine

We’re not trying to replace English or math. Those paths are well-served. What’s missing for serious high-school homeschoolers are the electives — Finance, Architecture, Biblical Anthropology, Economics, History of Business, History of Ideas — taught with academic rigor and from a Biblical foundation.

AJES Academy grew out of our own story. In 2020 we started homeschooling our kids, and my wife Katie began teaching at the co-op they attended — Cornerstone Academy. Soon after, I was asked to write and teach a Biblical Finance course, drawing on two decades in banking and consulting and a conviction that Scripture and financial stewardship belong together.

That course became Riches Redeemed: 19 chapters, AI-graded homework, video lectures, official transcripts — the only Biblically-integrated personal finance curriculum of its depth. Teaching it every week surfaced what else was missing from the serious Christian homeschool market, and AJES Academy is the catalog we’re building to fill those gaps one course at a time.

Multi-Modal Depth

Our courses are not lecture libraries. A student working through an AJES Academy course reads the textbook, watches short video lessons, listens to audio companions, completes graded homework and exams, and builds a portfolio. Parents get readable reports and the option of an official transcript.

This is what “a complete learning experience” means to us: read, watch, listen, do, get graded, and come away with something that stands up as high-school coursework.

What Depth Actually Looks Like

Depth is a word every course catalog claims. We’d rather show than tell. Here are three openings — one paragraph each, drawn from the actual first chapter of three different courses — so you can see what we mean by “timeless truths and deep knowledge.”

Riches Redeemed — Finance

The Payments chapter doesn’t open with Venmo. It opens in Uruk, 3000 BC, with a teenage farmer dumping dates into a temple storeroom and walking out with a small clay envelope — the world’s first prepaid debit card. That detail is not incidental. The world’s first banks were temples— because they were the safest vaults in the ancient world, run by priests, guarded by kings. Five thousand years later, payments pipes still run on the same two engines the farmer depended on: a trusted medium of exchange and a reliable store of value. Students trace that story from the Lydian coin (600 BC) to the Medici’s bills of exchange that made distance disappear, to London goldsmith notes, to the Diners Club card, to PayPal, to Bitcoin — and alongside each innovation, the moral pressure it created. The Medici built an empire on paper promises and collapsed in 1494 because they over-lent to reckless kings. Buy-Now-Pay-Later services charged users $2.6 billion in late fees in 2024, and 40% of young users ended up deeper in debt than when they started. Every era’s newest speed brings the same temptation: spend tomorrow’s money today. Romans 13:8 — “Owe no one anything, except to love each other” — is not nostalgia. It is diagnostic. Students finish the chapter understanding both the 5,000-year engineering story of payments and the timeless heart question every new payment method forces on its user.

History of Ideas — Forthcoming

This forthcoming course argues something many schools won’t touch: the Christian doctrine of the Fall gives a more realistic account of human nature than any of its competitors. Rousseau published The Social Contractin 1762 and argued humans are naturally good, corrupted only by social institutions. Twenty-seven years later, the French Revolution tested that theory at civilizational scale and produced the Reign of Terror — thousands executed by guillotine, neighbor denouncing neighbor. Marx wrote that humans could be perfected by changing economic systems. The twentieth century tested that theory and produced one hundred million dead in the gulags, famines, and camps of communism. “Ideas have consequences” is not a slogan on our course. It is a course-length argument traced from the page of a philosopher’s book to the history it produced. Students leave able to trace any modern cultural conflict — expressive individualism, moral relativism, the reshaping of identity — back through three centuries of philosophical genealogy, and evaluate it against Scripture with both conviction and grace.

Architecture History & Appreciation — Forthcoming

Chapter 1 opens with a question most architecture courses would never ask. The Pantheon has stood for 1,900 years. Its 142-foot unreinforced concrete dome is still the largest ever built. In 2017, researchers at the University of Utah demonstrated that Roman concrete exposed to seawater actually self-heals— the volcanic ash and seawater trigger crystal growth that fills cracks and makes the concrete stronger over time. Modern Portland cement cannot do this. Our concrete deteriorates in 50–100 years; Roman concrete has stood for 2,000 and counting. The Great Pyramid’s base is level to within 2.1 centimeters across 13 acres. The Parthenon’s columns are deliberately curved so the human eye perceives them as perfectly straight. Students learn the Greek orders and Roman engineering, but the course’s spine is a question it keeps asking across eight chapters: we call these civilizations primitive; their buildings call us temporary. What do we believe is eternal, and does our architecture reflect it?

What We Are Not

We are not a celebrity-academy competitor. Other platforms pay seven figures to recruit famous faculty and produce Hollywood-level video — a model that requires $499/year pricing to cover production and optimizes for the faculty’s fame rather than the student’s formation.

Our difference starts with pedagogy, not price. We focus on timeless truths, primary sources, and the kind of depth a serious high-school student can build a worldview on. The cost story is real, but it follows from the content story: modern tooling and the selective use of AI let us keep per-course production costs low, which means we can invest in pedagogical depth and audience focus rather than production spectacle. Courses are priced $79–$99 each, or $149–$199 per year for a family plan.

The Founder

AJES Academy is founded by Troy Williams— U.S. Bank SVP, former McKinsey consultant, Kellogg MBA, and homeschool father. Riches Redeemed, the Finance course, was built from two decades of personal-finance expertise and a conviction that Scripture and financial stewardship belong together in every chapter — not in a separate appendix.

Additional courses are being co-authored with trusted colleagues in their respective fields. More electives will launch through 2026–2028.