Alpha School’s Ritzy New York City Campus Costs $65,000 a Year—But It’s Not Really a School

To fall of 2025, the top management at Alpha School gathered a group of wealthy New York City parents on a series of lots in Lower Manhattan to put them on the company’s new campus. The event, hosted in part by Alpha cofounder MacKenzie Price and its billionaire CEO, Joe Liemandt, was designed to showcase how Alpha was “redefining school” through AI-powered learning models. The goal: to convince families to leave the city’s traditional education system and join what Alpha called “New York’s most innovative private school.”

The show seems to have worked. This year, more than a dozen families have been sending their children to the sixth and seventh floors of the skyscraper at 180 Maiden Lane. According to Alpha New York’s latest website, the “school day” runs from 8:15 am to 4:00 pm, and the reported “tuition” is $65,000 per year. (Family founders received a discount.) As Price he told the Free Press in the month of May, “Alpha is medicine as a school that caters to certain people,” and “is an expensive, expensive private school.”

Except the Maiden Lane campus isn’t really a school. Late last summer, months before many of the information sessions took place, the New York State Department of Education refused to approve Alpha’s request to join as an independent school, according to an undisclosed decision obtained by WIRED. “On-demand instruction is online, with an AI platform called 2 Hour Learning™ that provides advanced learning without the supervision or professional instructor providing the instruction,” the counseling office wrote. “In most cases, (NYSED) doesn’t recognize online schools as they should.”

About a week later, in a post on X, Alpha invited parents to attend an information session about the Maiden Lane facility, which the post called the “Alpha Anywhere Center.” Alpha Anywhere is a series of products from the homeschooling industry, advertised to start at around $10,000 per year. Although the company’s ad did not specify, parents who enrolled their children at the Maiden Lane campus had to fill out registration forms as homeschoolers.

PHOTOS: ELENA LACEY/GETTY IMAGES

After WIRED first contacted Alpha staff about the matter in April, the company resubmitted its request to register as a school. The project is pending, according to NYSED. Under state law, even if Alpha gets permission from the agency to join as a school, it will have to show New York City public school officials that it offers curriculum that is “substantially similar” to the curriculum of the city’s public schools. And this should do so at a time when a school principal in New York City describes AI as “Invasive technology” and parents and teachers have called for further restrictions on how students can use AI in their education.

As WIRED has done it has already been saidAlpha uses “leaders” to manage the class. These elders do not teach students themselves; must encourage students to complete the course of the individual study program. (“We call them guides, coaches, teachers,” Price he said. “We use these terms interchangeably.”) The company combines this training method with a successful payment method. Students at some schools can earn hundreds of dollars over time for scoring well on exams or completing enough courses in one day. On campus in Brownsville, Texas, sources was previously reported by WIREDchildren who failed to meet their academic goals reported being banned from certain rooms and said they could not participate in activities such as going on field trips, getting toys, or eating lunches outside of school. The company says its model enables students to learn twice as much in just two hours of instruction as their peers in traditional schools do in a day. This frees up students’ afternoons for workshops that focus on life skills such as grit, entrepreneurship, and leadership.

WIRED spoke to several sources for this story who have been involved in the construction, installation, and operation of new Alpha schools across the country. New York school insiders told WIRED they’re concerned about the company’s stance on expectant parents saying their children won’t be able to attend school. “A lot of these parents are just drinking the Kool-Aid,” one person said. “Their child comes home with a new Nintendo Switch, an AI robot, an iPad, so their child is happy, so they’re happy to see it.”

When WIRED reached out to parents who enrolled their children in Alpha, one group responded with a unanimous statement that they know the New York City school is not a school but a “homeschooling environment.” They added that they are “grateful for the good things Alpha Anywhere Center has done for our children and wholeheartedly recommend it to families who want to have a quality, caring, and supportive education for their children at home.” The joint statement had 13 signatories and 22 who “wanted to share this letter while keeping their child’s education private.” Other families WIRED reached out to for comment did not respond.