When Ben Nelson was a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, in the mid-1990s, he volunteered for the annual phone-athon to call admitted students. His job was to persuade them to enroll, and he was relentless in his sales pitch.
When his classmates gave up after several nights of calls, Mr. Nelson returned to finish them off himself. “I was very effective, if I must say so myself,” he told me when I met him recently. “Wharton’s yield during the time I recruited was up by 1,000 basis points,” or 10 percent.
By his senior year, admissions officials simply handed Mr. Nelson stacks of paper with none of the students’ personal information redacted. He saw addresses, Social Security numbers, high-school grade-point averages, SAT scores, class rank.
“As I scanned the list, I’d see valedictorians, salutatorians, applicants with perfect SAT scores,” he recalled. “Then I’d see 129th in the class, 89th in the class, 250th in the class. Every seven or eight names there would be someone not remotely qualified, not even close.”
When he called them, he noticed that the weaker applicants tended to fall into two categories: athletes and children of big donors. “I knew this happened to an extent,” he said, “but it was a real shocker.”
That discovery, just two months before graduation, cemented his growing distaste for elite American higher education. Unlike most students, Mr. Nelson was captivated by the inner workings of the university. He had spent much of his time at Penn on a curriculum committee of students who lobbied—unsuccessfully—to reshape how undergraduates were taught to think, an idea he first outlined in a research paper as a freshman. Now he found himself questioning the entire admissions process of his soon-to-be alma mater.
After college he went to work as a business consultant, and the experience only confirmed his belief that top colleges and universities fail to teach undergraduates how to think critically. “I realized I didn’t get a good education,” he said.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Nelson joined a start-up photo-sharing site called Snapfish, eventually becoming its president. When Snapfish was acquired by Hewlett-Packard, in 2005, for a reported $300-million, he knew he “couldn’t spend another decade selling widgets.”
So he dusted off that freshman-year plan to remake undergraduate education. It seemed even more doable, given advances in technology.
What Mr. Nelson created is the Minerva Project, a for-profit company now backed with more than $95-million from Silicon Valley venture-capital firms. Its goal is both audacious and unprecedented in the recent history of higher education: to build a name-brand, elite, liberal-arts-focused university that would cost about half of what Ivy League institutions charge.
Technology Is Key
I met Mr. Nelson at his office here as Minerva’s first class of students—just 28 of them—were about halfway through the pilot year of the four-year program. None of them pays tuition to be part of the initial class, but soon students in a larger class will pay about $10,000 per year for tuition and $18,000 for living expenses.
Unlike elite colleges that have put a lid on undergraduate enrollment even as demand for admissions has skyrocketed, Minerva’s plan is to accept everyone who qualifies. The question is whether those who are academically qualified to attend Harvard or Stanford will want to take a chance on a start-up college. Within the next decade, Minerva wants to enroll 2,500 students a year: some 10,000 students over all. (By comparison, Cornell, the largest Ivy League institution, enrolls about 14,000 undergraduates.)
The key to Minerva’s business model is its stripped-down version of the elite modern American university. There is no campus with buildings designed by famous architects, no palatial recreational facilities, no expensive athletics teams. No classrooms, for that matter. All classes are virtual.
The students take classes online even though they live together in the same city—this year in an apartment building in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood. Each year the students will move around the world, living in Buenos Aires, Berlin, perhaps Istanbul and Mumbai, among other cities.
The success of Minerva’s academic model will rest on its curriculum and its technology. Every freshman takes the same four cornerstone courses: formal analysis (mathematics), empirical analysis (science), complex systems (social science), and multimodal communications (writing and public speaking). They are similar to the ones Mr. Nelson outlined in his freshman paper.
“If you master those four systems of thinking,” he said, “then you can apply them to anything.” He corrected me when I called them “intro courses” and a “core curriculum.” They are more rigorous than typical introductory courses, he maintains, and the Minerva core doesn’t allow students to pick from a menu of choices, as is done at elite universities.
What excites Silicon Valley, and even some academics, is Minerva’s technology. The promise of an elite education at a cut-rate price is based on the company’s homegrown online-learning platform. The Minerva team looked at existing learning-management systems “for about day,” Jonathan Katzman, chief product officer, told me, before deciding to build its own.
Scaling the Seminar
On a Thursday morning in February, I sit down with Mr. Katzman in one of the few enclosed spaces in Minerva’s wide-open offices here to watch an 80-minute class. As the session of “Multimodal Communications” begins, images of students pop up across the top of the screen. Classes happen in real time. And unlike massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which can be of unlimited size, Minerva’s classes here are no bigger than 19 students “We have figured out how to scale the best teaching model, the seminar,” Mr. Katzman tells me.
Except that a college seminar typically has an air of intimacy to it. This one feels oddly distant, even though the students, most of them in their apartments, are only a mile away from Minerva’s offices.
That’s the part of the model, I tell Mr. Katzman and others at Minerva, that I still don’t get: Why have online courses when all of your students live in the same city? It’s a question I’m told that Eric Mazur, a professor of physics at Harvard University and a leading researcher on peer instruction, has also asked.
Mr. Katzman attributes my reaction to the fact that the two of us are chatting during the class, so I’m not an active participant. The students need to be ready to be called on by a professor at any moment, he notes. They can’t be checking Facebook on another screen.
Today the students are discussing how to recognize unfair practices in the global banana trade. The discussion is fast-paced. The professor calls on students, some at random and others who have clicked on an icon of a hand. In a typical seminar, a faculty member might call on a student who wants to take the conversation in a different direction. But on the Minerva platform, a chat window allows students to indicate how they want to contribute to the conversation, so the professor knows in advance. To gauge whether students understand a concept, flash polls and pop quizzes are given throughout the class, and students use emoticons to answer yes/no questions from the professor.
About midway through the class, the students break into groups, each playing the role of a different constituency in the banana supply chain. Their goal is to figure out how to fairly distribute profits. The splitting into groups happens with a push of a button. The professor views the activities of all of the groups on one screen and can click on any of them to eavesdrop on the discussions. On this day, students in each group record their thoughts using a shared document that any of them can edit in real time.
The groups disband as quickly as they were formed, and a representative from each one gives a report. One young woman is difficult to hear. Clearly she’s sitting in a coffee shop somewhere. The professor asks her to speak up. It’s a reminder that when students are dispersed like this, the quality of the classroom is only as good as the technology or where the students are logging in from.
Everything in the class is recorded, so students and professors can mark moments they want to review later on. Professors use the recordings to evaluate students. In ordinary undergraduate seminars, professors’ impressions of students are formed as they are teaching. At Minerva, Mr. Katzman says, professors’ impressions sometimes change after they watch the video, which allows them to focus on assessment. “It’s like a game tape,” he says, comparing the recordings to the videos that athletes use to improve their performance.
Teaching From Anywhere
Minerva’s dean of arts and sciences is Stephen M. Kosslyn, a former Harvard dean and an expert in learning science.
The biggest job right now for Mr. Kosslyn, who designed the pedagogy behind Mr. Nelson’s ideas about curriculum, is recruiting faculty members for next year. He says he has received more than 700 inquiries from professors interested in teaching at Minerva. The big attraction is that they can live anywhere. He is looking for a mix of recent Ph.D. recipients, dual-career couples who can’t find jobs in the same city, and faculty members who lost tenure bids despite being good teachers.
Pay for full-time faculty members, who will teach four sections per semester, ranges from $80,000 in the humanities to $120,000 in computer science. Professors can work less than full time if they want to continue their research. There is no tenure; professors work under three-year renewable contracts. They are eligible for bonuses based on quality of teaching and for an equity stake in the company.
Minerva’s first students are taking its cornerstone courses this year. Then they will choose one of five majors: arts and humanities, social sciences, computational sciences, natural sciences, or business. Most students in the pilot program are international, and Mr. Nelson expects demand from international students to continue to outpace that from American students.
The students know they are taking a chance on an experimental college, but most of those I met on my visit came from unconventional education backgrounds and said they had often been bored in high school.
Arvvin Maniam, who grew up in Malaysia with dreams of attending Harvard, told me that he was skeptical at first, but that after reading more about Minerva and talking with Mr. Nelson, he “jumped at the chance to be a pioneer.” The assignments are more challenging and time-consuming than he expected, and the learning platform had a few bugs at first. But “no other university can give me this experience,” he said.
Gabriella Grahek, who grew up near Los Angeles, applied to 15 colleges. She chose Minerva after visiting Wellesley College and observing a class. “They had fancier buildings, but the classes were the same as high school—just with good professors,” she said. “I didn’t see how it made sense for me.”
It makes sense, of course, to tens of thousands of other students every year who vie to get into elite colleges, with reputations built over decades and centuries. Minerva is attempting to do something that none of the other new entrants in higher education have tried: to reach the top rank right away.
“The value of elite colleges is predicated on the brand you leave the college with and the social capital you build while you are there,” says Trace A. Urdan, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities who focuses on education-related companies. “Being in the club is a big piece of going to an elite college, not the quality of the education. It’s the educational component that Minerva is banking on to attract students.”
It’s also banking on academically talented students who are willing to give up the traditional residential-college experience.
A few weeks into the first semester last fall, Minerva’s director of student experience and community engagement, Z. Michael Wang, organized a field trip for the students to visit nearby Stanford University. They roamed the campus on a beautiful fall day.
A few of Mr. Wang’s colleagues casually wondered aloud whether some of their new students would want to return to Minerva after exploring an elite campus where many of them could probably have gone. But after a few hours, they all boarded a bus back to San Francisco to get ready for their next online class.
Corrections (3/6/2015, 12:20 p.m.): This article originally contained a reference to the Minerva Project’s board of advisers, which included Lawrence Summers and Bob Kerrey. That board completed its work and no longer exists. The article has been updated to reflect this correction. In addition, the name of the project’s chief product officer has been corrected from John Katzman to Jonathan Katzman, and the name of a student has been corrected from Arvin Maniam to Arvvin Maniam.
Jeffrey J. Selingo is a contributing editor at The Chronicle and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Follow him on Twitter @jselingo.
