The Main Faculty, a tuition-free personal faculty with 543 college students co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg’s spouse Priscilla Chan, will shutter its doorways after roughly a decade in operation.
The varsity, which has two areas within the San Francisco space, stated in a notice on its web site that it’ll shut after the 2025-2026 tutorial 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 subsequent few years.
“This was a really tough determination, and we’re dedicated to making sure a considerate and supportive transition for college kids and households over the subsequent 12 months,” based on the notice, which was posted late Thursday.
Carson Cook dinner, a Main Faculty spokesperson, had no remark past the assertion.
Chan, 40, a pediatrician, co-founded the varsity in 2016 with an “built-in well being and schooling mannequin” to work with households and youngsters from beginning by way of highschool, based on the entity’s tax kinds. The nonprofit’s first center faculty cohort began in 2023.
Based on the newest tax type, greater than 95% of the Main Faculty’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 Faculty isn’t the one such initiative began by billionaires 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 faculty 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 faculty 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 Faculty’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 world affairs, eradicated Meta’s US fact-checking program, dismantled the corporate’s hate-speech insurance policies and axed key range, fairness and inclusion applications at Meta in addition to at CZI.
The Main Faculty has prioritized range efforts, conducting an audit in June 2020 within the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and establishing a DEI activity pressure that fall.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
