The building in Fremont, California, doesn’t look like any school you’ve been to. There are 390 beds in a dorm that can hold 600 people, computers that are always on, and no teachers standing in front of the class. The school has 250,000 square feet of open space. When you walk through it, it feels both exciting and a little unsettling. It’s more of a lab than a campus, and someone spent $100 million making sure it would work.
It’s called 42. From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the name comes. In that book, 42 is the key to life, the universe, and everything else. It’s hard to tell if that’s just smart branding or a real belief. It’s clear that French billionaire, high school dropout, and one of Europe’s most important tech figures, Xavier Niel, built this place because he thought traditional schools were turning out the wrong kind of people. Not dumb people. Just people who have been taught to do what they are told instead of figure things out.
Niel started 42 in Paris in 2013 because he was fed up with French schools and because the companies he worked with couldn’t find engineers who could think. By any measure, the model he chose was radical: there would be no teachers, no tuition, and no diploma at the end. Students between the ages of 18 and 30 take an entrance exam based on logic; they don’t need to know how to code beforehand. If they pass, they go through a month-long trial period that the school calls piscine, which means “pool.” There are more than 100 hours in a week. The point is to see who can change. The people who get hired stay for three to five years and work on programming problems in small groups. They teach each other and look for answers online. The school gives you the time, space, and machines.
This way of doing things sounds crazy until you hear who supports it. Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, said it was like a school from the future. At the time he said it, Jack Dorsey was CEO of Twitter and Square. He said that his companies were looking for engineers who had trained at places like 42, no matter what their resume said. In a job market where a diploma from a well-known school used to be the only way in, that kind of institutional credibility is important.
Across the street, but not really, a different kind of tech-backed school is also making its own moves. Max Ventilla, who worked at Google for years before deciding to start over with elementary school, raised $100 million from investors like Mark Zuckerberg and Andreessen Horowitz to start AltSchool. This pitch is very different from 42’s: it’s about highly personalized, technology-driven learning for young kids, and the tuition is $21,000 per year. There are eight schools, 500 kids, and a plan to sell licenses for the model to other schools that want to use it. Ventilla might not see AltSchool as a chain of schools, but rather as an approach to education that other schools can use in the future.
An analysis by CB Insights from that time shows that spending on education startups rose by 55% in just one year, reaching almost $1.9 billion. It’s not a blip. That’s a real change in where big money is going, and it shows that tech investors are becoming more and more sure that the school system—K–12, college, vocational, all of it—is one of the last big institutions that technology hasn’t completely changed yet.
The harder question is whether any of this works for the students. It sounds good to get free lessons and learn with other people, but think about what you lose when there aren’t any experienced teachers around. And paying $21,000 a year for a customized elementary school curriculum makes it clear that access is limited. Silicon Valley is known for making solutions that work great for people who are already in a position to use them. One thing to keep an eye on is whether these schools are really different or if it’s just how they look.
