Yale Gets $100 Million From Eli Broad to Boost Public Education

(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire Eli Broad is giving a Los Angeles-based organization he founded to improve public education a new home -- in Connecticut.

The Broad Center will relocate to New Haven to become part of the Yale School of Management, and Broad is giving a $100 million gift to support the entity, according to a statement Thursday.

The gift is the largest in the School of Management's history, according to the university, and is designed to allow Yale to build on the previously independent Broad Center's mission to advance excellence and equity in education. The center will offer training for school executives, as well as research and policy initiatives. It aims to be a hub for data on public education leadership.

“This is is not lifting one thing and depositing it under the SOM roof,” Kerwin Charles, the dean of the business school, said in a phone interview. “This will be Broad 2.0. This is going to be a Yale thing.”

Some existing programs will be adapted to take advantage of Yale's resources. The Broad Residency in Urban Education will become a tuition-free master's degree program for educators, while the Broad Academy will become a leadership program for top school executives.

Broad, the founder of KB Home, has a net worth of $7.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His philanthropy with his wife Edythe includes the Broad Institute, focusing on genomics, as well as the Broad contemporary art museum in downtown L.A.

To contact the reporter on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, Peter Eichenbaum

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