In Seven Cities Around the World, A New Kind of College Takes Flight

This is the magic of Minerva . . .

I’m not that old, yet consider this: 

When I first arrived at the University of Wisconsin in 1988, the full-time bill for my tuition and fees was less than $4,000. 

Today? It’s more than $40,000 -- a tenfold increase for a public university (and that’s not even considering the cost of room and board).

Clearly, something has to give -- but how? After all, while it’s true that a four-year degree remains among the most proven ways to increase the quality of one’s life prospects, it's equally true that, for too many of us, college is not just too expensive; it’s too out of touch with what today’s graduates actually need to know, do and understand in order to successfully navigate a rapidly changing world.

Enter Minerva University -- a remarkable, little-known marvel that is poised to leave the rest of higher education behind.

It began just fourteen years ago, in response to two inosculated truths:  first, that we’re facing a dire, transdisciplinary shortage of leaders; and second, that education -- and specifically higher education -- must play a critical role in solving this problem.

“Colleges are fundamentally failing in their promise to educate,” says Minerva’s founder, Ben Nelson. “A liberal arts education is supposed to teach students to think freely, critically and logically. But our elite universities no longer do that at all.”

In response, Nelson sought to reinvent higher education from scratch. “I wanted to create a university that serves as a model for other institutions by being indisputably the best in the world. Unless you demonstrate that you are the absolute best, that you can provide an education that Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford cannot come close to, no one will listen. And we are doing exactly that.”

It’s true. In less than two decades, Minerva has become the most selective, most innovative and most globally diverse university you’ve never heard of. And if I had to render their special sauce down to the core ingredients, I’d say their success stems from the following five C’s: community; curriculum; campus; cost; and competencies.

THE COMMUNITY

Minerva’s students come from more than 100 countries from all over the world. Fewer than one quarter of those students are American, and no single group constitutes a majority. Consequently, the Minervan student culture is not anchored in any majority group, nor is it rigid and calcified. It’s malleable and emergent. 

Within each class, students are divided into cohorts ranging from 90 to 150 -- an intentional nod to the wisdom of Dunbar’s Number. In their admissions process (which is the most selective in the world), Minerva looks for students who are very good at one subject, and then puts them into a team environment alongside students with different strengths. Every student is assigned a career coach, and they’ve instituted a “talent agency” that actively helps students find appropriate summer internships -- and jobs after graduation. They also provide a higher ratio of mental health support than any university. As Nelson put it, “Our goal is to provide students with fishing rods, not fish.”

THE CURRICULUM

Minerva’s curriculum focuses on what Franklin, Jefferson and other founders once described as “useful knowledge.” As university president Mike Magee put it, “Our aim is not to teach knowledge and skills for their own sake, but to equip our students with intellectual tools they can use to adapt to a changing world and achieve their goals.”

As a result, while many other colleges still cling to the anachronistic habits of information transmission, Minerva provides a very broad liberal arts education -- with a twist.

All courses build on one another, and are highly structured at the start. In fact, every student takes the same four yearlong courses their first year: Formal Analyses; Empirical Analyses; Multimodal Communications; and Complex Systems.

The second year consists of a set of courses that build on these competencies, but allow students to apply them to specific majors. The third year provides another structured set of building blocks. And finally, in the fourth year, students take courses as electives, design their own seminars with faculty guidance, and finish a two-year capstone research project of their choosing.

There are just five colleges with a single major for each -- Arts & Humanities, Business, Computational Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. The pedagogy is as intentionally designed and implemented as any I’ve seen. Based on decades of research in the science of learning, it insists upon active, socially relevant, sequential experiences. All classes are 90 minutes, seminar style, and take place online via the University’s Active Learning Forum (ALF) platform. The classes themselves are “radically flipped” -- any homework or knowledge delivery occurs beforehand, so the actual class time can be reserved for applying that information in various ways (e.g., solving problems, role playing, debating, etc). And yet, as valuable as the classes themselves are, the primary vehicle of the curriculum is the campus itself -- all seven of them.

THE CAMPUS

This may be the coolest part of the Minerva model: Its students live in seven different cities, in seven different countries, across their four years of study. “There’s no campus cafeteria, or stadium, or gym,” Mageee explains. “Instead, you live as an adult in a city. We want our students to learn about the world by experiencing it.”

That experience starts in San Francisco -- a vibrant intellectual and entrepreneurial city, but also one that’s relatively small, and therefore more manageable for a group of young people who will typically be living abroad for the first time in their lives.

In year two, the students spend a semester each in Seoul and Hyderabad, two postcolonial societies, each with complicated histories, and each also in the midst of  massive growth. 

In year three, the location shifts to Berlin & Buenos Aires, two cities that provide a study in contrasts: one that’s still emerging from the shadow of war, and another that’s amidst a century of peace. And then finally, in year four, students toggle between the polyglot maze of modern London and the civil friction of East and West in Taipei.

“Our Undergraduate Program allows you to experience the world first-hand while developing the skills you need to change it,” Magee explains. “Each city offers a chance to reflect on the ways history has shaped our world -- and how as individuals, in collaboration with each other, we might shape the future for the sake of us all.”

THE COST

Despite its selectivity and city-hopping, Minerva’s tuition and fees are less than a third of what other universities charge. That’s because attending Minerva only requires living in a residence hall and buying a computer. 

By design, this is a university with no hidden costs. Better still, Nearly 60% of its students receive needs-based financial aid covering up to 95% of the program costs across their full four years, making Minerva the most socio-economically diverse highly selective university in the United States. 

THE COMPETENCIES

In the end, though, none of these innovations matter unless they lead towards Minerva doing what it set out to do: prepare young people to be effective leaders and stewards of the modern world.

In response, every aspect of Minerva’s curriculum was designed to provide students with four core competencies: Thinking Critically, Thinking Creatively, Communicating Effectively and Interacting Effectively. Underneath these four competencies are more than one hundred specific learning objectives, which represent a blend of habits of mind -- cognitive skills that with practice come to be triggered automatically -- and foundational concepts -- fundamental knowledge that is broadly applicable.

“The Minerva curriculum is designed to help our students understand leadership and working with others,” Nelson explained, “to become innovators, to develop into broad and adaptive thinkers, and to adopt a global perspective. Our learning objectives are informed by the literature on leadership and creativity, as well as by interviews and surveys of large employers in a variety of disciplines.”

Will Minerva’s innovations spread through the sclerotic veins of American higher education? We shall see. And yet, as Magee put it in a recent talk, the way forward for every college and university should be the same.  “In a contemporary world that is somehow both entirely interconnected and increasingly divided,” he said, “we’ve created an institution where creating global citizens isn’t just an afterthought -- it’s at the heart of everything we do. We guide them on a journey from exposure to engagement. We invite them to enter a liminal space of exchange. And we equip them to catalyze change in the direction of our own desire for a more peaceful world.

“If our colleges and universities don’t get to work achieving such things, who will?”