Alpha School’s Ritzy New York City Campus Costs $65,000 a Year—but Isn’t Actually a School

In the fall of 2025, top executives from Alpha School gathered a group of wealthy New York City parents at a series of information sessions in Lower Manhattan to pitch them on the company’s new campus. The events, some of which were hosted by Alpha cofounder MacKenzie Price and its billionaire principal, Joe Liemandt, were designed to show how Alpha was “redefining school” through AI-powered learning models. The goal: persuade families to ditch the city’s traditional education system and join what Alpha initially called “the most forward-thinking private school in New York.”

The pitch seems to have worked. This school 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 the current Alpha New York web page, the “school day” runs from 8:15 am to 4:00 pm, and the stated “tuition” is $65,000 a year. (Founding families received a discount.) As Price told the Free Press in May, “Alpha is a product as a school that is catering to a certain demographic,” and “it is a premium, expensive private school.”

Except the Maiden Lane campus isn’t really a school. Late last summer, months before many of the info sessions, the New York State Education Department declined to approve Alpha’s request to incorporate as an independent school, according to a previously unreported copy of the decision obtained by WIRED. “Instruction as proposed is primarily online, with an AI-based platform called 2 Hour Learning™ that delivers instruction in core academic subjects with little to no supervision or competent teacher delivering such instruction,” the department’s office of counsel wrote. “Generally, [the NYSED] does not recognize online schools as proposed.”

About a week later, in a post on X, Alpha invited parents to attend an info session for the Maiden Lane location, which the post called the “Alpha Anywhere Center.” Alpha Anywhere is the company’s line of products for homeschooling, which is advertised as starting at around $10,000 per year. Though the company’s marketing materials didn’t explicitly mention it, parents who enrolled their kids at the Maiden Lane campus would be required to file formal documentation signing up as homeschoolers.

After WIRED began reaching out to Alpha employees for this story in April, the company resubmitted its application for incorporation as a school. That application is pending, according to the NYSED. Under state law, even if Alpha receives permission from the agency to incorporate as a school, it will still have to demonstrate to New York Cit