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50
a brash tech entrepreneur thinks he can reinvent
higher education by stripping it down to its essence,
eliminating lectures and tenure along with football
games, ivy-covered buildings, and research libraries.
What if he’s right?
The Future
of College?
By Graeme Wood
Photograph by Adam Voorhes
t h e at l a n t ic
September 2014
51
On a Friday
morning
in April,
I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel
to the future of higher education. I was on the ninth foor of a
building in downtown San Francisco, in a neighborhood whose
streets are heavily populated with winos and vagrants, and
whose buildings host hip new businesses, many of them tech
start-ups. In a small room, I was fanked by a publicist and a
tech manager from an educational venture called the Minerva
Project, whose founder and CEO, the 39-year-old entrepreneur
Ben Nelson, aims to replace (or, when he is feeling less aggressive, “reform”) the modern liberal-arts college.
Minerva is an accredited university with administrative
ofces and a dorm in San Francisco, and it plans to open locations in at least six other major world cities. But the key to
Minerva, what sets it apart most jarringly from traditional universities, is a proprietary online platform developed to apply
pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by
one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard
dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
Nelson and Kosslyn had invited me to sit in on a test run of
the platform, and at frst it reminded me of the opening credits
of The Brady Bunch: a grid of images of the professor and eight
“students” (the others were all Minerva employees) appeared
on the screen before me, and we introduced ourselves. For a
college seminar, it felt impersonal, and though we were all sitting on the same foor of Minerva’s ofces, my fellow students
seemed oddly distant, as if piped in from the International
Space Station. I half expected a packet of astronaut ice cream
to foat by someone’s face.
Within a few minutes, though, the experience got more
intense. The subject of the class—one in a series during which
the instructor, a French physicist named Eric Bonabeau, was
trying out his course material—was inductive reasoning. Bonabeau began by polling us on our understanding of the reading,
a Nature article about the sudden depletion of North Atlantic
cod in the early 1990s. He asked us which of four possible interpretations of the article was the most accurate. In an ordinary
undergraduate seminar, this might have been an occasion for
timid silence, until the class’s biggest loudmouth or most caffeinated student ventured a guess. But the Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous.
Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and
Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon
to defend them.
Bonabeau led the class like a benevolent dictator, subjecting
us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-fesh seminar would have taken precious minutes
of class time to arrange. He split us into groups to defend opposite propositions—that the cod had disappeared because of
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September 2014
t h e at l a n t ic
overfshing, or that other factors were to blame. No one needed
to shufe seats; Bonabeau just pushed a button, and the students in the other group vanished from my screen, leaving my
three fellow debaters and me to plan, using a shared bulletin
board on which we could record our ideas. Bonabeau bounced
between the two groups to ofer advice as we worked. After
a representative from each group gave a brief presentation,
Bonabeau ended by showing a short video about the evils of
overfshing. (“Propaganda,” he snorted, adding that we’d talk
about logical fallacies in the next session.) The computer screen
blinked of after 45 minutes of class.
The system had bugs—it crashed once, and some of the
video lagged—but overall it worked well, and felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form
of time when my attention could fag or I could doodle in a notebook undetected. Instead, my focus was directed relentlessly
by the platform, and because it looked like my professor and
fellow edu-nauts were staring at me, I was reluctant to ever let
my gaze stray from the screen. Even in moments when I wanted
to think about aspects of the material that weren’t currently under discussion—to me these seemed like moments of creative
space, but perhaps they were just daydreams—I felt my attention snapped back to the narrow issue at hand, because I had to
answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in
efect, to learn. If this was the education of the future, it seemed
vaguely fascistic. Good, but fascistic.
Minerva,
which operates for proft, started
teaching its inaugural class of 33
students this month. To seed this frst class with talent, Minerva gave every admitted student a full-tuition scholarship of
$10,000 a year for four years, plus free housing in San Francisco for the frst year. Next year’s class is expected to have 200
to 300 students, and Minerva hopes future classes will double
in size roughly every year for a few years after that.
Those future students will pay about $28,000 a year, including room and board, a $30,000 savings over the sticker price of
many of the schools—the Ivies, plus other hyperselective colleges like Pomona and Williams—with which Minerva hopes
to compete. (Most American students at these colleges do not
pay full price, of course; Minerva will ofer fnancial aid and
target middle-class students whose bills at the other schools
would still be tens of thousands of dollars more per year.) If
Minerva grows to 2,500 students a class, that would mean an
annual revenue of up to $280 million. A partnership with the
Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, California, allowed Minerva to fast-track its accreditation, and its advisory board has
included Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary
and Harvard president, and Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic
senator from Nebraska, who also served as the president of the
New School, in New York City.
Nelson’s long-term goal for Minerva is to radically remake
one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so
shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire
more administrators at higher salaries.
The paradox of undergraduate education in the United
States is that it is the envy of the world, but also tremendously
beleaguered. In that way it resembles the U.S. health-care
sector. Both carry price tags that shock the conscience of citizens of other developed countries. They’re both tied up inextricably with government, through student loans and federal
research funding or through Medicare. But if you can aford the
Mayo Clinic, the United States is the best place in the world to
get sick. And if you get a scholarship to Stanford, you should
take it, and turn down ofers from even the best universities
in Europe, Australia, or Japan. (Most likely, though, you won’t
get that scholarship. The average U.S. college graduate in 2014
carried $33,000 of debt.)
Financial dysfunction is only the most obvious way in which
higher education is troubled. In the past half millennium, the
technology of learning has hardly budged. The easiest way to
picture what a university looked like 500 years ago is to go to
any large university today, walk into a lecture hall, and imagine the professor speaking Latin and wearing a monk’s cowl.
The most common class format is still a professor standing in
front of a group of students and talking. And even though we’ve
subjected students to lectures for hundreds of years, we have
no evidence that they are a good way to teach. (One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta
cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
In recent years, other innovations in higher education
have preceded Minerva, most famously massive open online
courses, known by the unfortunate acronym MOOCs. Among
the most prominent MOOC purveyors are Khan Academy, the
brainchild of the entrepreneur Salman Khan, and Coursera,
headed by the Stanford computer scientists Andrew Ng and
Daphne Koller. Khan Academy began as a way to tutor children
in math, but it has grown to include a dazzling array of tutorials,
Photographs by Ike Edeani
Minerva’s headquarters
some very efective, many on techare in San Francisco,
nical subjects. Coursera offers
and the frst class of
students will live in a
college-level classes for free (you
dorm there this year,
but the university
can pay for premium services, like
plans to open locations
actual college credit). There can be
in at least six other
cities, including Berhundreds of thousands of students
lin and Buenos Aires.
in a single course, and millions are
enrolled altogether. At their most
basic, these courses consist of standard university lectures, caught on video.
But Minerva is not a MOOC provider. Its courses are not massive (they’re capped at 19 students), open (Minerva is overtly
elitist and selective), or online, at least not in the same way
Coursera’s are. Lectures are banned. All Minerva classes take
the form of seminars conducted on the platform I tested. The
frst students will by now have moved into Minerva’s dorm on
the ffth foor of a building in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood and begun attending class on Apple laptops they were required to supply themselves.
Each year, according to Minerva’s plan, they’ll attend university in a diferent place, so that after four years they’ll have
the kind of international experience that other universities
advertise but can rarely deliver. By 2016, Berlin and Buenos
Aires campuses will have opened. Likely future cities include
Mumbai, Hong Kong, New York, and London. Students will
live in dorms with two-person rooms and a communal kitchen.
They’ll also take part in feld trips organized by Minerva, such
as a tour of Alcatraz with a prison psychologist. Minerva will
maintain almost no facilities other than the dorm itself—no library, no dining hall, no gym—and students will use city parks
and recreation centers, as well as other local cultural resources,
t h e at l a n t ic
September 2014
53
for their extracurricular activities.
The professors can live anywhere, as long
as they have an Internet connection. Given
that many academics are coastal-elite types
who refuse to live in places like Evansville,
Indiana, geographic freedom is a vital part of
Minerva’s faculty recruitment.
The student body could become truly
global, in part because Minerva’s policy is to
admit students without regard to national origin, thus catering to the unmet demand of, say,
prosperous Chinese and Indians and Brazilians for American-style liberal-arts education.
The Minerva boast is that it will strip the
university experience down to the aspects
that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone.
Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up
the walls—gone, gone, gone. What’s left will
be leaner and cheaper. (Minerva has already
attracted $25 million in capital from investors
who think it can undercut the incumbents.)
And Minerva ofcials claim that their methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices, unlike the methods
used at other universities and assumed to be
sound just because the schools themselves
are old and expensive. Yet because classes
have only just begun, we have little clue as
to whether the process of stripping down the
university removes something essential to
what has made America’s best colleges the
greatest in the world.
Minerva will, after all, look very little
like a university—and not merely because it
won’t be accessorized in useless and expensive ways. The teaching methods may well be
optimized, but universities, as currently constituted, are only partly about classroom time.
Can a school that has no faculty ofces, research labs, community spaces for students, or professors paid to do scholarly
work still be called a university?
If Minerva fails, it will lay of its staf and sell its ofce furniture and never be heard from again. If it succeeds, it could
inspire a legion of entrepreneurs, and a whole category of legacy
institutions might have to liquidate. One imagines tumbleweeds
rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing
through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who
have plugged into new online platforms.
The
decor in the lobby of the Minerva ofce building
nods to the classical roots of education: enormous
Roman statues dominate. (Minerva is the Roman goddess of
wisdom.) But where Minerva’s employees work, on the ninth
foor, the atmosphere is pure business, in a California-casual
sort of way. Everyone, including the top ofcers of the university, works at open-plan stations. I associate scholars’ ofces
with chalk dust, strewn papers, and books stacked haphazardly
in contravention of fre codes. But here, I found tidiness.
One of the Minerva employees least scholarly in demeanor
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t h e at l a n t ic
is its founder, chief executive, and principal evangelist. Ben
Nelson attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School as an undergraduate in the late 1990s and then had no
further contact with academia before he began incubating Minerva, in 2010. His résumé’s main entry is his 10-year stint as an
executive at Snapfsh, an online photo service that allows users
to print pictures on postcards and in books.
Nelson is curly-haired and bespectacled, and when I met
him he wore a casual button-down shirt with no tie or jacket.
His ambition to reform academia was born of his own undergraduate experience. At Wharton, he was dissatisfed with what
he perceived as a random barrage of business instruction, with
no coordination to ensure that he learned bedrock skills like
critical thinking. “My entire critique of higher education started
with curricular reform at Penn,” he says. “General education is
nonexistent. It’s efectively a bufet, and when you have a noncurated academic experience, you efectively don’t get educated. You get a random collection of information. Liberal-arts
education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the
individual, and learning to be a productive member of society.
And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
Students begin their Minerva wouldn’t be of any use to the majority of Minerva’s students,
education by taking the same four who will likely come from overseas.
“Cornerstone Courses,” which introSubsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even
duce core concepts and ways of students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since
thinking that cut across the sciences federal money is pegged to costs. These efects pervade higher
and humanities. These are not 101 education, he says, but they have nothing to do with teaching
classes, meant to impart freshman- students. He believes Minerva would end up hungering after
level knowledge of subjects. (“The freshman year [as taught at federal money, too, if it ever allowed itself to be tempted. Intraditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting stead, like Ulysses, it will tie itself to the mast and work with
that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at private-sector funding only. “If you put a drug”—federal
home.”) Instead, Minerva’s frst-year classes are designed to funds—“into a system, the system changes itself to ft the drug.
inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational If [Minerva] took money from the government, in 20 years we’d
concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. be majority American, with substantially higher tuition. And as
In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep much as you try to create barriers, if you don’t structure it to be
understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a mission-oriented, that’s the way it will evolve.”
humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques
of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum
talking about Minerva’s future, Nelson
then builds from that foundation.
says he thinks in terms of the life spans of
Nelson compares this level of direction favorably with what universities—hundreds of years as opposed to the decades
he found at Penn (curricular disorder), and with what one fnds of typical corporate time horizons. Minerva’s very founding
at Brown (very few requirements) or Columbia (a “great books” is a rare event. “We are now building an institution that has
core curriculum). As Minerva students advance, they choose not been attempted in over 100 years, since the founding of
one of fve majors: arts and humanities, social sciences, com- Rice”—the last four-year liberal-arts-based research instiputational sciences, natural sciences, or business.
tution founded in this country. It opened in 1912 and now
Snapfsh sold for $300 million to Hewlett-Packard in 2005, charges $53,966 a year.
and Nelson made enough to fund two
So far, Minerva has hired its deans,
years of planning for his dream project.
who will teach all the courses for this
He is prone to bombastic pronounceinaugural class. It will hire rank-and-fle
ments about Minerva, making broad
faculty later in the year. One of Minerva’s
Some claim
claims about the state of higher educamain strategies is to lure a few prominent
education is
tion that are at times insightful and at
scholars from existing institutions. Other
an art and a
times speculative at best. He speaks at
“new” universities, especially fantastiscience. Nelson
many conferences, unsettling academic
cally wealthy ones like King Abdullah
has disputed
administrators less radical than he is by
University of Science and Technology, in
this: “It’s a
blithely dismissing long-standing pracSaudi Arabia, have attempted a similar
tices. “Your cash cow is the lecture, and
strategy—at times with an almost cargoscience and a
the lecture is over,” he told a gathering
cult-like confdence that flling their labs
science.”
of deans. “The lecture model … will be
and ofces with big-shot professors will
obliterated.”
turn the institutions themselves into imIn academic circles, where overt
portant players.
competition between institutions is a serious breach of etiAmong the bigger shots hired by Minerva is Eric Bonabeau,
quette, Nelson is a bracing presence. (Imagine the president of the dean of computational sciences, who taught the seminar I
Columbia telling the assembled presidents of other Ivy League participated in. Bonabeau, a physicist who has worked in acaschools, as Nelson sometimes tells his competitors, “Our goal demia and in business, studies the mathematics of swarming
is not to put you out of business; it is to lead you. It is to show behavior (of bees, fish, robots), and his research helped inyou that there is a better way to do what you are doing, and for spire Michael Crichton’s terrible thriller Prey. Diane Halpern,
you to follow us.”)
a prominent psychologist, signed on this year as the dean of
The other taboo Nelson ignores is acknowledgment of social sciences.
proft motive. “For-proft in higher education equates to evil,”
Minerva’s frst major hire, Stephen M. Kosslyn, is a man I
Nelson told me, noting that most for-proft colleges are indeed met in the fall of 1999, when I went to have my head examined.
the sort of disreputable degree mills that wal …
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