1. of the more than 100,000 students who first signed up for CS101, just 30,000 completed the first lesson, and even fewer, 10,000, hacked their way through the final exam. A 90 per cent drop-out rate doesn’t look great on paper, but then, Udacity’s only admission requirement is an email address…. two-thirds of our students are from outside the United States,” Stavens, now the CEO of Udacity, said. “It’s about a third US, a third from ten other countries you might expect—western Europe, Brazil, east Asia, Canada—and then about a third from 185 other countries. We have 500 students in Latvia. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it actually means more students take our classes in Latvia than take them on Stanford’s campus.