Wealthy US Families Ditch Regular Schools, Pay $75,000 a Year to Send Kids to AI Private Schools
- A segment of wealthy American families are pulling their kids out of traditional schools and enrolling them in "AI private schools" like Alpha School, which replace regular classroom teaching with AI tutoring.
- Alpha School's model is 2 hours of AI tutoring a day plus project-based workshops, with tuition running up to $75,000 a year. It added 8 campuses in 2025 and plans nearly 24 more by fall 2026.
- Two studies — one covering over 26,000 students in China, one from UC Berkeley — found that AI-assisted homework scores higher, but exam scores drop by up to 24%, with 81% of heavy users offloading their thinking entirely to AI.
- Traditional schools currently have no answer for teaching kids to "use AI well" instead of "letting AI do the thinking" — and that's exactly the gap Alpha School is targeting.
- Only a handful of families can afford $75,000 tuition. Set next to the 75 instant millionaires created by a single OpenAI internal stock sale, the widening wealth gap of the AI era comes into sharper focus.
Wealthy Parents Are Opting Out of Regular Schools
America's wealthy are preparing their kids for the AI era, and some families are abandoning traditional schools for "AI private schools" like Alpha School. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on this trend.
Why it matters: Alpha School, founded 12 years ago, added 8 campuses in 2025 alone, with nearly 24 more planned for fall 2026 in places like San Francisco, New York, Palo Alto, and Malibu. That pace of expansion shows "AI private schools" have moved from fringe experiment to a business scaling up fast.
What a Day at an AI Private School Looks Like
Take Alpha School as an example — founded 12 years ago in Austin, Texas. Its biggest difference from a regular school is how the day is structured. Regular schools run on a fixed schedule, with the whole class moving at the same pace. Alpha splits the day into two starkly different halves.
~2 hours
The key is that AI constantly monitors student status and adjusts difficulty on the fly — students move to the next concept only once they've mastered the current one, so pace is individualized. This approach has a name: competency-based curriculum, where progress is set not by grade level or class hours, but by what you've actually learned. Teachers step down from the podium and become "guides" — according to spokesperson Anna Davlantes, each on-campus guide earns a six-figure salary. The price tag for the whole package: up to $75,000 a year.
How Fast It's Grown in Two Years
This isn't some small-scale side project. Starting from a single location in Austin, Alpha School's expansion over the past two years speaks for itself in the numbers.
Who's Footing the Bill, and Why
Who exactly is paying $75,000? According to the spokesperson, Alpha's New York families are mostly in finance or run their own companies, while Bay Area families mostly come from tech. Billionaire Bill Ackman is reportedly also a vocal fan of the school.
We realized education, as it currently stands, is probably broken, and entrepreneurs will step up to try to fix it.
Why Traditional Schools Can't Keep Up with AI
Why are these parents willing to bypass traditional schools? Two recent studies expose a soft spot in traditional education when it comes up against AI: homework done with AI looks fast and polished, but falls apart the moment there's an exam.
Data comes from a Chinese study covering over 26,000 students. Homework scores went up, but real, no-help exams went down — that's what's called the "hidden cost of AI-assisted learning."
A separate study from UC Berkeley reached a similar conclusion: AI pushed scores up, but students didn't actually learn the material.
Traditional schools have almost no answer for teaching students how to use AI to learn better without letting it take over their thinking entirely. That gap is exactly what schools like Alpha are targeting — they want to deliberately weave AI into the learning process, instead of just handing it over and letting students figure it out on their own.
$75,000 a Year — Only a Few Families Can Afford It
But a $75,000-a-year price tag inevitably means only a handful of families can afford it. Set against the wealth map of the AI era, the gap becomes even clearer.
But AI Itself May Be the Greatest Equalizer
That said, outside the formal education system, AI may well be the most democratizing learning tool to come along in years. Anyone with an internet connection can have a private tutor: patient, adaptive to individual needs, available 24 hours a day, free or nearly so.
The catch is that using it well requires exactly the skills schools were supposed to teach in the first place. What actually widens the gap is who gets taught how to use it.
These parents' argument is that AI will reshape the economy, and old teaching methods can't keep up. The Wall Street Journal, via The Decoder