The Number one College, a tuition-free non-public college with 543 scholars co-founded through Mark Zuckerberg’s spouse Priscilla Chan, will shutter its doorways after kind of a decade in operation.
The college, which has two places within the San Francisco house, stated in a note on its web page that it’s going to shut after the 2025-2026 instructional 12 months. 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 used to be an excessively tricky resolution, and we’re dedicated to making sure a considerate and supportive transition for college kids and households over the following 12 months,” consistent with the word, which used to be posted past due Thursday.
Carson Prepare dinner, a Number one College spokesperson, had no remark past the observation.
Chan, 40, a pediatrician, co-founded the varsity in 2016 with an “built-in well being and training fashion” to paintings with households and youngsters from start thru highschool, consistent with the entity’s tax bureaucracy. The nonprofit’s first center college cohort began in 2023.
Consistent with the newest tax shape, greater than 95% of the Number one College’s East Palo Alto scholars are under-represented minorities. The submitting displays it had greater than $30 million in property on the finish of June 2023.
Musk, Ellison
The Number one College isn’t the one such initiative began through billionaires just lately. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison have all additionally opened colleges over the past a number of years.
Musk’s nonprofit, the Musk Basis, has donated $237 million towards his training undertaking — a technology-focused number one and secondary college in Austin, with eventual plans for a school. That college, Advert Astra, is partnering with the similar corporate that helped Ellison arrange his Hala Kahiki Montessori college in Lanai, Hawaii, the island 98% owned through the Oracle Corp.co- founder. Bezos, the Amazon.com Inc. co-founder, created a community of Montessori-inspired preschools for youngsters in deficient communities.
The Number one College’s closure comes as Zuckerberg, 40, founding father of Meta Platforms Inc., makes sweeping adjustments to his trade empire to raised align with the Trump management. 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 right through his first time period.
Zuckerberg additionally tapped a Republican strategist to function leader of worldwide affairs, eradicated Meta’s US fact-checking program, dismantled the corporate’s hate-speech insurance policies and axed key diversity, equity and inclusion systems at Meta in addition to at CZI.
The Number one College has prioritized variety efforts, accomplishing an audit in June 2020 within the wake of the Black Lives Topic protests and organising a DEI job drive that fall.
This tale used to be at the beginning featured on Fortune.com
