The new “final frontier” for billionaires like Bill Ackman, Laurene Powell Jobs and Peter Thiel is not outer space but helping education embrace private sector solutions and artificial intelligence.
This comes as schools — like every other industry — are grappling with what parts of AI to embrace and what parts to eschew.
Last week, Ackman doubled down on his support for the Alpha School, a K-12 program in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and California that uses AI to condense core academics into two hours daily. It emphasizes personalized learning and life skills while notably excluding DEI content. Ahead of the school expanding to NYC, Ackman called Alpha a “breakthrough innovation.”
Powell Jobs, has invested more than $300 million in XQ Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to rethinking how technology like AI can transform schools (primarily at the high school level).
Thiel hasn’t launched any schools, but the Thiel Fellowship is transforming education by allowing young entrepreneurs to skip traditional college and pursue innovative projects.
Josh Browder, a Thiel Fellowship alum, told me he left Stanford months before completing his degree because requirements like dance classes for diversity credits undermined his ability to launch and run his tech startup.
“The world is moving so quickly the education system doesn’t help people the way it should — by the time you learn what they teach you, the world has changed,” he said.
Ackman, Powell Jobs and Thiel are just the latest in a long line of rich people to try and put their marks on education, whether by funding university buildings with their names on the or reimagining elementary schools.
Elon Musk launched Ad Astra, which prioritizes STEM education, in Los Angeles a decade ago and just opened a location in Texas. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan founded the tuition free-school The Primary School in the Bay Area in 2016, and Zuck was also a big backer of the for-profit AltSchool, which focused on individualized, child-led learning. Adam Neumann opened the Monstessori-ish WeGrow in Chelsea in 2018.
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Big money hasn’t always meant big success in the education sector. WeGrow closed in 2020 after just two years. The Primary School will be closing next year, and AltSchool sold its “microschools” in 2019 and rebranded as a software company.
But there’s a lot of optimism around what Ackman, Powell Jobs and Thiel are doing and how they’re bringing an understanding of the skills needed in the private sector — like adapting to technology — to education.
“For too long, great education has been blocked by high tuition and rigid schedules… AI is breaking down those walls, opening high-quality, personalized pathways for anyone driven to learn,” Carl Madi, the CEO of Stepful, a top education tech company, told me.
Browder noted how AI could make school less boring and more engaging.
“AI can make education so efficient that instead of having a teacher ramble to a classroom for hours to learn something, you can learn something in 20 minutes because it is tailored to the student,” he said. “I [don’t think] it’s doom and gloom with AI.”
Yale School of Management’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told me this is the right kind of mindset for schools. Instead of hand wringing over how AI is harming education and making it easier for kids to cheat, we should be thinking about how it can benefit schools.
“I believe in the free market and having different founders and owners figure out solutions,” he told me. “I think it’s great education is a magnet that is drawing in such interesting people.”
So yes, Elon Musk can and should still go to Mars. But if we are capable of starting a new colony in space, we should certainly be capable of making learning more efficient and tech-savvy here on earth as kids go back to school.
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