Silvia
Mahan

The CEO Who Made Companies Do the Homework

At Cristo Rey San José Jesuit High School, the deal is unusual: Cisco hires your student. NVIDIA, too. Kaiser Permanente, Morrison Foerster, Bristol Myers Squibb. One day a week, every week of the school year. The money those companies pay goes directly toward tuition - up to half of it. The kid shows up, learns to send a professional email, sits in meetings where billion-dollar decisions happen, and goes back to calculus on Tuesday. Silvia Mahan built this machine. She did not invent the model - the Cristo Rey Network has been running it since 1996 - but she brought it to the most competitive corporate zip code in human history, and she made it work.

The results are not modest. Ninety-eight percent of Cristo Rey San José graduates enroll in college. Ninety-seven percent of students meet or exceed expectations at their corporate placements. The school's annual retention rate is also 98%. These are not averages padded by selective enrollment - this is a school built specifically for students from families that Silicon Valley has left behind.

Mahan arrived at this work through a career that refuses easy categorization. She studied economics at Harvard. She went to Georgetown Law. She became a corporate attorney at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom - a firm where first-year associates make more than most school principals ever will. Then she left. She founded an e-commerce company. She produced social impact films. She joined Innovate Public Schools as a manager of digital advocacy, eventually rising to Regional Vice President for San José. In April 2021, the Cristo Rey San José board tapped her as President and CEO.

The thread connecting all of it is not obvious from the outside. But listen to how she describes the work: "working with people who are driven by mission." That phrase - not ambition, not impact, but mission - tells you something about how she operates. She is not running a startup. She is running an institution with a 500-year-old founding order and a 60-student cohort that needs a job before the school year ends.

From Skadden to East San Jose - Nothing Wasted

There is a version of Silvia Mahan's biography that reads as a series of detours. Corporate law. E-commerce. Filmmaking. Public school advocacy. CEO of a Jesuit high school. From the outside, it looks scattered. From the inside, it is an education in every system that shapes opportunity in America.

The Skadden years - brief, by attorney standards - gave her a window into how the highest-stakes institutions work. She saw "one of the best young associates" in herself, as a former colleague put it: someone who "worked hard, wrote well, understood complex ideas quickly, and proposed creative solutions to difficult legal issues." She also saw what was missing from that world: the students who would never reach that conference room.

The e-commerce and filmmaking chapter was not a vacation. It was a laboratory. She built things. She shipped products. She told stories that required evidence, not just argument. When she arrived at Innovate Public Schools - a nonprofit fighting for accountability in public education - she brought all of it.

Her testimony before the San José Unified School District in March 2020 - delivered at the onset of a pandemic that threatened to collapse public education - showed how she operates under pressure. She did not ask for perfect solutions. She warned that "not educating our kids is exacerbating existing inequities." She called for immediate action, transparent communication, and services for undocumented families. She offered partnership, not just critique.

That combination - diagnosis, urgency, and an outstretched hand - is essentially how she runs Cristo Rey San José today.

How a Jesuit High School Enrolled Silicon Valley as a Co-Founder

The Corporate Work Study Program is the strange heart of everything Cristo Rey does. It is, at its core, a staffing model that funds a school. Partner companies pay for student work - administrative roles, finance, legal, planning, coding. The students show up, do real work, and learn what professional environments actually feel like before most of their peers have filled out a college application. The revenue - which can cover up to half of each student's $25,000 annual tuition - keeps the school financially alive.

Mahan's job is to make 100+ companies believe this is worth their time. NVIDIA has to think a Cristo Rey student belongs in their offices. Cisco has to want to participate again next year. Morrison Foerster - a white-shoe law firm - has to find real value in the arrangement. That Mahan, with her Skadden and Harvard background, can speak that language credibly is not a coincidence. She built this network from the inside out.

The city grant - $862,000 over five years, approved by the San Jose City Council in June 2023 - placed Cristo Rey students inside city government itself: finance, planning, code enforcement, the mayor's office, libraries. It generated controversy precisely because it worked too well. Council members noted only one school applied. Mahan's husband, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, recused himself from the vote. The dynamic is genuinely complicated: she runs a private religious school, he runs the city, and the school's students are doing work inside city hall.

What you notice, reading through the coverage, is that the critique was almost never about the program's results. It was about process. The students at their city desks were not the controversy - the politics were.

Miami, Havana, Cairo, San Jose

Silvia Scandar Mahan grew up in Miami as the daughter of Cuban and Egyptian immigrants. That is not a common combination. It also means she grew up in a household that understood displacement, adaptation, and the particular ambition that comes from families who rebuilt themselves in a new country.

She raises her own children - Nina Luz and Luke Alejandro - in South San José, not far from the school she runs. The names are markers: Spanish and English, reflecting a life lived at intersections. Her daughter attends a school in the same district whose board she once testified before about distance learning equity.

Her mother's advice - "the most important thing is that you care about the people working for you and let them know that you care" - came from running a hospital department, not a school. But it translates perfectly. At Cristo Rey San José, the staff of 90 faculty and administrators are executing something genuinely difficult: a dual mandate of Jesuit education and corporate placement that most institutions would split into two separate organizations. Keeping that coherent requires a leader who means what she says about caring.

She has also pushed, in her work with the Society of Jesus, for something rarely discussed openly: formation programs for lay leaders and women in Jesuit institutions. The Jesuits are extraordinarily good at training priests, she argues. The parallel programs for lay people - especially women - lag significantly behind. It is a structural critique delivered from inside the tent, which is the hardest kind to make and the most useful.

The FAFSA Fight - Where Policy Meets a Desk in East San Jose

In March 2024, Mahan co-authored a piece in The Hechinger Report with a title that got straight to the point: "We fear our students will be shut out of college due to FAFSA failures." The federal student aid application system had broken down. Processing delays meant students would graduate without knowing whether they could afford college. For Cristo Rey students - whose families have little margin for financial uncertainty - this was not an administrative inconvenience. It was a potential reversal of everything the school exists to achieve.

The piece was not written for policy insiders. It was written for the students sitting at graduation not knowing where their future lies. That is the register Mahan works in: specific, concrete, and oriented toward the person at the end of the pipeline.

The through-line from her COVID-era testimony to her FAFSA op-ed is consistent: she identifies the systemic failure, names who it hurts most specifically, and then does something about it. At Cristo Rey San José, "doing something about it" looks like calling Cisco. Calling NVIDIA. Building a program where the solution to inadequate public funding is to make 100 Silicon Valley companies co-investors in a kid's education.

It is a peculiar kind of idealism - one that has learned to speak fluent corporate. The Jesuits have been running schools since 1548. The Corporate Work Study Program has been running since 1996. Silvia Mahan has been running Cristo Rey San José since 2021. She has four years in, and the school has 700+ alumni who have walked out of East San José into colleges and careers they built one corporate Tuesday at a time.

The Long Way Around

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