Hedge fund titan Ken Griffin is donating a combined $3 billion to create a Carnegie Mellon University campus in Miami and fund the university’s main campus in Pittsburgh.
It is the largest single donation from an individual in higher education history, according to Carnegie Mellon University.
NBC News correspondent Stephanie Gosk spoke with Griffin and Carnegie Mellon president Farnam Jahanian in an exclusive interview on “TODAY” that aired Wednesday about the donation aimed at preparing students for the most rapidly transforming economy in history.
“Their most important education will not be a knowledge base that they acquire at university,” Griffin said. “They will learn how to learn, because their entire life will be in a fast-changing environment where intellectual flexibility and agility will be key to success.”
Griffin, 57, whose net worth Forbes estimates at $57 billion, is donating $2 billion to fund the creation of the new Carnegie Mellon campus in Miami.
“I’ve been a resident of Miami for almost five years now,” Griffin said. “To bring one of the greatest universities in the world to Miami will be game-changing for this city.”
The founder and CEO of the hedge fund Citadel is a 1989 Harvard graduate. He explained why he chose Carnegie Mellon for his record-setting donation.
“Carnegie Mellon University leads the nation: number one in computer science, number one in artificial intelligence, number one in cybersecurity,” he said.
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The Miami campus is expected to support more than 3,500 undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. students. Construction on the 35-acre campus is set to begin in 2027, with the goal of enrolling in 2028.
Amelia De Leon, a Miami native who attends the Carnegie Mellon School of Art in Pittsburgh, believes the new campus will have a profound impact.
“With no limitations, the possibilities are endless, especially for artists,” she told “TODAY.” “If you provide them with the resources, they’re going to make something big.”
Jahanian says the new campus will upend the traditional university model at a time when the U.S. is expected to see a 13% decline in college enrollment between 2025 and 2041, according to research from Deloitte. Only 22% of Americans believe college is worth the cost, according to a 2024 survey by the Pew Research Center.
“What we realized is that we needed to bring some new thinking to how the future of higher ed is going to look like,” Jahanian said. “So instead of organizing the campus around schools, colleges, departments, and majors, it’s organized around the notion of grand challenges.”
As for the $1 billion going to Carnegie Mellon’s Pittsburgh campus, half of that is dedicated to the school of computer science. Maxwell Jones, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon focused on artificial intelligence research, spoke about Griffin’s donation.
“One thing that’s very clear to me is there needs to be a lot of research done on how people learn best and what teaching even looks like in the future,” he said. “And so I’m really excited for CMU to kind of be on the front edge of doing this research.”
Griffin views his donation as a way to help what he sees as a faltering education system in the U.S.
“Those of us in the business community need to support both our institutions of higher education and to be actively engaged in how do we better our schools,” Griffin said.
“Every once in a while, you have to step up and meet the urgency of the moment,” Jahanian added. “And I couldn’t agree more with Ken that this is one of those moments.”
