The $75,000-a-Year AI School: Education for the Few

Alpha School, founded 12 years ago in Austin, Texas, offers a model in which children spend two hours a day with an AI tutor that adjusts assignments to each student's pace and level in real time. Annual tuition reaches $75,000. In 2025 the school opened campuses in San Francisco and New York; roughly 24 more locations — in Palo Alto, Malibu, and other cities — are planned by fall 2026. Teachers here don't run traditional classes; they're called 'guides' and earn six-figure salaries. Billionaire Bill Ackman has publicly endorsed the model.

The rise of schools like this comes against a backdrop of crisis in traditional education: research shows students are using AI en masse for homework, yet test scores are falling — in one Chinese study of 26,000 students, the decline was 24%. AI personalization at $75,000 a year creates a new fault line: families with money get education tailored to their child; everyone else stays in a system that has yet to figure out how to integrate AI productively.