The Main College, a tuition-free personal college with 543 college students co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg’s spouse Priscilla Chan, will shutter its doorways after roughly a decade in operation.
The college, which has two places within the San Francisco space, mentioned in a word on its web site that it’ll shut after the 2025-2026 educational yr. To maintain its legacy, the billionaire couple’s philanthropic group, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, will make a $50 million funding within the communities the nonprofit serves — East Palo Alto, Belle Haven and the East Bay — over the following few years.
“This was a very difficult decision, and we are committed to ensuring a thoughtful and supportive transition for students and families over the next year,” in accordance with the word, which was posted late Thursday.
Carson Prepare dinner, a Main College spokesperson, had no remark past the assertion.
Chan, 40, a pediatrician, co-founded the varsity in 2016 with an “integrated health and education model” to work with households and youngsters from beginning via highschool, in accordance with the entity’s tax varieties. The nonprofit’s first center college cohort began in 2023.
In keeping with the newest tax kind, greater than 95% of the Main College’s East Palo Alto college students are under-represented minorities. The submitting exhibits it had greater than $30 million in property on the finish of June 2023.
Musk, Ellison
The Main College isn’t the one such initiative began by billionaires just lately. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison have all additionally opened faculties during the last a number of years.
Musk’s nonprofit, the Musk Basis, has donated $237 million towards his schooling enterprise — a technology-focused major and secondary college in Austin, with eventual plans for a college. That college, Advert Astra, is partnering with the identical firm that helped Ellison arrange his Hala Kahiki Montessori college in Lanai, Hawaii, the island 98% owned by the Oracle Corp.co- founder. Bezos, the Amazon.com Inc. co-founder, created a community of Montessori-inspired preschools for kids in poor communities.
The Main College’s closure comes as Zuckerberg, 40, founding father of Meta Platforms Inc., makes sweeping modifications to his enterprise empire to raised align with the Trump administration. He’s appointed longtime Trump allies to his board, together with Final Combating Championship CEO Dana White and Dina Powell McCormick, who served as Trump’s deputy nationwide safety adviser throughout his first time period.
Zuckerberg additionally tapped a Republican strategist to function chief of worldwide affairs, eradicated Meta’s US fact-checking program, dismantled the corporate’s hate-speech insurance policies and axed key variety, fairness and inclusion applications at Meta in addition to at CZI.
The Main College has prioritized variety efforts, conducting an audit in June 2020 within the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and establishing a DEI job pressure that fall.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
