Apex America Initiative

America will lead the AI century — if we build the generation that builds it.

 

America's next generation of exceptional AI talent is in high school today — unidentified, undeveloped, and unmatched in potential. Apex America is a five-year, nationwide commitment to find them, back them early, and build a recognized national cohort of 500 Apex America Scholars by 2030.

100K
High school
students
10K
Teachers
trained
5 YRS
Strategic
horizon
50
States,
every school
01 — Why America. Why now

American primacy has never been an accident.

It has been produced, each generation, by deliberate programs and competitions built to identify and develop exceptional Americans early — the service academies, the national labs, the Rhodes and Marshall competitions, the Olympic Trials, Regeneron STS, Putnam, Fulbright. Each is a national instrument of excellence.

For AI — the technology that will define American power, prosperity, and security for the next fifty years — no such instrument exists. America has 15.5 million high school students. Just 2.9 million take any AP STEM course. Roughly 1 million study computer science in any form. And of the students whose PSAT scores already mark them as likely to succeed in AP Computer Science, fewer than one in ten ever sit the exam.

America is not short of talent. America is short of the mechanism to find it. Apex America is built to be that mechanism.

The American AI funnel today
15.5M

American high school students in grades 9–12. The country's entire pool of pre-college talent.

NCES, 2025

2.9M

Enrolled in any AP STEM course — math, science, or computer science combined. Fewer than one in five.

U.S. Dept. of Education, CRDC

~1M

Study computer science in any form. 49% of U.S. high schools don't even offer a foundational course.

Code.org / CSTA, 2024

< 9%

Of students whose PSAT scores already mark them as likely to succeed in AP Computer Science actually sit the exam.

College Board

0

National competitions, rankings, or recognized credentials that identify exceptional pre-college AI talent in the United States.

15.5 million students. No national mechanism to identify the teenagers who will inherit the AI century.

2 — The Vision

The Rhodes Scholarship of American AI.

 

Apex America is built to become a credential the AI field recognizes on sight — a national network of young Americans identified for exceptional ability in AI, selected through rigorous competition, and supported as a cohort for life.

The precedent is a century of practice. Rhodes Scholars are known. Marshall Scholars are known. Presidential Scholars are known. Apex Scholars will be known — by the labs, the companies, and the institutions that will define the American AI century.

100,000

American high school students introduced to AI — the base of the pyramid from which Apex America Scholars are selected

10,000

American teachers equipped to identify and champion promising students inside their own classrooms

100

Apex America Scholars named each year — a lifelong cohort, recognizable by name inside the American AI field

"Launchpad widens the base. Educators expand the reach. The Championship produces the class. Together they deliver something America does not currently have — a cohort of exceptional young AI talent, identified by name, every year."

04 — Roadmap

Five cohorts.
Five hundred Apex America Scholars.

The Rhodes names ~100 Scholars a year. Marshall names 40. Gates Cambridge names ~80. Apex America names 100 — drawn from a national field of tens of thousands of applicants, admitted at a rate comparable to the most selective credentials in the country.

The broader pipeline — 100,000 students introduced, 10,000 teachers enabled — is how the Scholars are found. The 500 Apex Scholars are the asset the field will come to know by name.

Year Scholars Students Teachers Milestone
Year 1
2026
100
10,000
1,000
Inaugural Championship. First Apex Scholars named.
Year 2
2027
100
15,000
1,500
Scholar-to-lab placements begin at frontier AI firms.
Year 3
2028
100
20,000
2,000
First Scholars enter top-tier college AI programs as a recognized cohort.
Year 4
2029
100
25,000
2,500
Apex Scholar status becomes a known signal in admissions and hiring.
Year 5
2030
100
30,000
3,000
Network of 500 Apex Scholars established — a recognized credential in American AI.
05 — The Operator

The work Correlation One was built to do.

 

For a decade, Correlation One has built the platform, the campus network, and the operating discipline a program of this scope requires — in deep partnership with Citadel, the U.S. State Department, Amazon, and the Department of Defense.

600+
Universities engaged worldwide
3,000+
Campus student groups in active partnership
120+
Competitions built and run for Citadel since 2016
500K+
Professionals trained across 50 countries
A decade with Citadel
The Data Open Championship 2017 winners holding the $100,000 grand prize check at the NYSE.
The Data Open Championship
New York Stock Exchange · November 2017

Since 2017, Correlation One has built and operated Citadel's flagship campus talent programs — The Data Open and Terminal — across more than 600 universities and 3,000 student groups. One hundred twenty competitions. Over two million Terminal matches played.

The partnership began in November 2017, with the first Data Open Championship at the New York Stock Exchange. Ken Griffin presented the $100,000 grand prize. We've built and run the competition together every year since.

Apex America applies that infrastructure — the platform, the competition operations, the campus network, the assessment methodology — to the high school level, at national scale.

01

Campus infrastructure

Active relationships across 600+ universities and 3,000+ student groups. The assessment platform behind Citadel's Data Open — built and operated by Correlation One.

02

Enterprise credibility

A decade of delivery for Amazon, Citadel, Johnson & Johnson, and other Fortune 500 leaders. The same methodology applied, for the first time, at the high school level.

03

Proven at high school level

Piloted High School Terminal with Citadel in 2022 — head-to-head AI coding competitions for teenagers. Apex America extends that proof-of-concept into a permanent national program.

We work with the best universities in the U.S.

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06 — What comes next

One founding partner.
One century of compounding. One conversation.

 
The Rhodes Scholarship is 123 years old. The first cohort took up their studies at Oxford in 1903. Cecil Rhodes did not live to meet them. But every Rhodes Scholar since — more than 8,000 of them, across four generations — has carried his name into the most consequential rooms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
 
Apex America has been engineered in every detail — the curriculum, the Championship, the platform, the campus network, the assessment methodology, the alumni architecture. What hasn't been built is the partnership that names the institution. That's not something to decide from a page. It's something to decide over dinner.