Billionaire Ken Griffin moved to Miami — now his $3-billion donation is aimed at getting a major college to go there, too

Griffin has made a landmark donation to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University of $3 billion. It is the largest individual gift to a college or university ever — and it will see the school expand with a new second campus that’s a thousand miles away.

And the reason for the gift isn’t just to get his name on a building, though that will happen too. He said that Americans have “lost sight” of the importance of higher education.

Transformative gift

Of Griffin’s $3-billion gift, $2 billion will go toward the creation of a brand new campus, Carnegie Mellon University Miami, which will “pioneer a model for higher education built for the next era of American innovation,” a release from the school says.

Griffin moved the headquarters of Citadel from Chicago to Miami in 2022. According to Reuters reporting, this was because of Florida’s tax advantages and concerns about crime in Chicago.

According to a report from CNBC, since the move, Griffin has “become a vocal Miami booster, touting Florida’s business-friendly policies, low taxes, and quality of life.”

The other $1 billion of the gift will be allocated to the Pittsburgh campus, split evenly between “flexible support for the university’s highest priorities,” and $500 million for the school’s School of Computer Science, to be renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science.

The Miami campus will have a mission “to drive revolutionary breakthroughs that address society’s defining challenges,” the release says. The school will have a focus on “grand challenge areas” facing society: “human health and biological discovery; national security and strategic capabilities; energy and climate resilience; and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation.”

In the release, the school’s president, Farnam Jahanian, referenced AI and the current “moment of profound technological change.”

“Artificial intelligence represents one of the defining intellectual developments of our time, and it demands that we rethink how we educate students, conduct research and partner with others,” Jahanian said.

Confidence in college education is waning

According to Gallup, “U.S. public confidence in higher education remains much lower than it was a decade ago.”

The June survey found that “37% of Americans say they have ‘some’ confidence in higher education, while 25% have ‘very little’ or ‘none.’ By comparison, in 2015, 10% said they had “very little” or “none.”

For respondents who said they lacked confidence in higher education, Gallup found that the reasoning focused generally “on three broad themes — perceived political agendas on college campuses (31%), the high cost of a college education (30%), and colleges not preparing students well for the workforce (25%).”

According to a report from MarketWatch, Griffin remarked at an event at Carnegie Mellon celebrating the gift that a reason for his donation was to counter this lack of confidence.