Education

How Minerva is reimagining higher education now and partnering to scale for impact in the future.

(Photo by iStock/marrio31)

Imagine building a university from the ground up, and doing it specifically with 21st-century students in mind. It would mean no baggage, no legacy systems, and no outdated curricula. It would also mean attracting a completely new faculty and student body, and raising the funding needed to operate.

This was our challenge. Born in 2012 to address the problems inherent in the centuries-old system of higher education, Minerva’s ambition is to establish a model for the next generation university: intentionally designed to equip future leaders and innovators to solve complex challenges, to make decisions of consequence, and to work collaboratively to improve the world. We’ll not only outline how we began an innovative university from scratch, but how we are will scale our impact through strategic partnerships across educational levels, sectors, and geographies.

Innovating Higher Education for the Greater Good

This series, presented in collaboration with Ashoka U, will share insights from leaders in higher education, presenting stories, strategies, and lessons in rewiring higher education’s purpose, relevance, and business models.

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Minerva’s model addresses four core systemic concerns:

1. How to admit students based entirely on merit, not wealth, relationships, or athletic ability
2. How to provide an exceptional, outcomes-driven education
3. How to engage students at the lowest possible cost
4. How to produce purpose-driven global citizens, ready to contribute to society

An Unconventional Admissions Process

Because Minerva sought to admit students with the highest potential—regardless of family background, wealth, or geographic location—we needed a new approach to admissions. In addition to high school grades, Minerva considers applicant accomplishments outside of class, their performance on a series of cognitive challenges, and their conduct during a video interview. Standardized test scores and standard application essays have all been shown to produce bias toward wealthy applicants. Focusing on high school transcripts, extracurricular accomplishments, and cognitive tests allows Minerva to better predict future success.

While Minerva values diversity, there are no quotas or protocols to balance gender, religion, or ethnicity. But focusing on merit alone has attracted a student body that’s almost equally male and female, with a globally diverse student body: roughly a quarter of our students come from North America, a quarter from Asia, a quarter from Europe, and the remaining quarter coming from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. This organic diversity helps to validate our belief hypothesis that talent is equally distributed around the world.

Our commitment to student access extends to the overall cost to attend, which is kept as low as possible by eliminating superfluous campus infrastructure and amenities (Minerva owns no real estate and only leases student housing). Minerva grants financial aid to every admitted student that demonstrates need: much of it supplied through a robust work-study program, in which students gain professional experience, with the remainder provided by low-interest loans and grants.

An Intentional Curriculum

Every aspect of the Minerva curriculum is intentionally designed, rather than students picking-and-choosing from a vast array of courses chosen by the subject matter and expertise of research faculty. Our goal is not only to shape a mindset but to impart a universal skill set: in addition to a distinctive way of looking at the world, our students acquire the range of tools necessary to make meaningful, positive change within it.

The educational model is structured by three interconnected features: 1. cross-contextual curricular scaffolding, in which concepts are repeated with increasing complexity, across diverse contexts; 2. fully active learning, where students are engaged in every class session; and 3. systematic, formative feedback and assessment, all facilitated through an advanced virtual learning environment, called Forum™. For example, after students learn the concept of “heuristics” during their first year, they will continuously apply the concept in different subjects and new contexts, demonstrating their command in the classroom through live discussions, polling, and breakouts (while their instructors continuously assess their engagement and understanding using Forum, which registers all interactions).

During the first year, all students take the same four foundational courses—Complex Systems, Empirical Analyses, Formal Analyses, and Multimodal Communications—which are explicitly structured to impart universal cognitive tools and frameworks that can be applied across different domains. In the second year, Minerva students select a major field of study—arts and humanities, business, computational sciences, natural sciences, or social sciences—where they continue to explore their interests before committing to a more focused concentration (for example, data science and statistics, within the computational sciences major). As Minerva students progress, their studies become increasingly individualized and self-directed, including co-design of their fourth-year coursework and an independent project that incorporates both intensive research and creative problem solving. These capstone projects, chosen from within their fields of study, must present novel concepts, just as a graduate thesis would.

This cross-contextual curricular scaffolding continually reinforces pre-established learning outcomes in each class, throughout courses, across domains, and over time. The learning outcomes comprise a set of approximately eighty Habits of Mind (cognitive skills that come to be triggered automatically) and Foundational Concepts (fundamental knowledge that is broadly applicable). These act as the building blocks of four core competencies: critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The Habits and Concepts (HCs) are introduced early, reinforced often, and consistently assessed. Through deliberate, spaced practice and prompted application, students learn to use them for more effective decision-making, devise inventive solutions to complex challenges, manage ambiguity and navigate uncertainty, and, ultimately, to transfer them to novel situations.

The 80 HCs were identified by Minerva as part of an iterative process to find the paramount skills for the next generation of leaders, innovators, and engaged global citizens. Importantly, though derived from the universal skills employers consistently seek, the HCs used in Minerva’s academic programs need not be identical for other academic institutions.

Flexible and Engaged Pedagogy

When hearing the words “online classes,” many people envision pre-recorded lectures, pre-programmed activities, and other content-driven educational approaches. But simply taking traditional classroom instruction and putting it online has been shown, time and again, to be ineffective, leading to low course completion rates, and result in minimal understanding, retention, or recall of the information being taught.

The Minerva platform was purpose-built to facilitate the learning outcomes of our curriculum. It utilizes live, multi-stream video, integrated course development and management tools, and rich data collection and analysis features. Most importantly, the pedagogy emphasizes fully active learning, in which students are kept engaged during every class session, through guided Socratic discussion, collaborative work, role play, simulations, polling, and other means. This methodology has been repeatedly demonstrated to improve understanding, retention, and recall when compared to traditional lecture-based instruction. All Minerva instructors are trained with an emphasis on tracking learner engagement, progress, and specific educational outcomes.

When students enter class, they are met with a series of activities and discussions that reference reading and other work assigned prior to joining. Imagine being asked, immediately upon arrival, to not only recall, but comment on a scholarly article you read the previous night. Then, as the instructor selects the most interesting answer—not necessarily the most correct—you are asked to opine on your classmate’s comment. Because instructors are directed to speak less than 15 percent of the time in any class session, students are continually called on, keeping them focused so as not to be caught unprepared. Classes often also incorporate a series of small breakout group activities in which students collaborate on problems related to pre-readings or exhibits introduced in class, and the sessions typically end with a synthesis activity, such as a poll. All classes are recorded and student engagement is also tracked throughout each session, enabling instructors to evaluate in-class contributions and measure progress by comparing student understanding from class to class. This performance is a major component of each student’s final grade.

Lastly, Minerva courses are grounded in salient global concerns, from food and water scarcity to scientific advances and complex social and geopolitical dynamics. For example, in the first year, students grapple with big, multifaceted questions, such as “How can we feed the world?” or “Who should own information?” The students engage with these questions using the aforementioned Habits and Concepts: searching for the right problem, breaking it down, conducting a gap analysis, understanding constraints and analogies, and applying heuristics. These are practical concepts that will be used again and again, throughout their courses and across domains.

Beyond Classroom Walls

To augment this rigorous academic programming, Minerva devised a modern approach to experiential learning. Instead of a sequestered life on campus, students are immersed in the world, living and learning in seven diverse cultural contexts: After the first year in San Francisco, students spend the next six semesters rotating through Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, Buenos Aires, London, and Taipei. In each of these cities, students engage in a variety of experiential programs, including community projects, working with local businesses and government agencies, and student-centric activities like communal meals, club meetings, and hackathons. These programs incorporate individual coaching and are closely integrated with academics, so students receive formative feedback across multiple dimensions, including professionalism, self-management, cultural dexterity, personal responsibility, and interpersonal engagement.

Such global programming is only possible because classes take place in a digital environment: Because faculty are based anywhere, students can live around the globe while still attending their online seminars every day. Moving students seven times over the course of four years is expensive and logistically complex, but we keep costs down by leasing reasonably priced residence halls, and employing nimble teams in each city (and students manage many of these initiatives themselves, with minimal institutional support).

This approach teaches the skills sought by a variety of organizations, which typically take years of experience to acquire. The global, integrated learning accelerates their development of these universal skills, while fostering a dedication to societal participation. By being continually challenged, students learn to approach problems in a comprehensive, interdisciplinary manner, with an intellectual maturity rarely found at the undergraduate level.

Scaling for Impact

Seven years after its founding, Minerva saw its first graduating class emerge, nearly 150 strong. While most have already begun making an impact in a broad range of categories—from the sciences, technology, and business to government and social sectors—their numbers remain relatively small. Minerva set out to build the best university, not the biggest, so to have a much greater effect, the model needed to be adopted and adapted by others.

In 2018, Minerva, through its for-profit arm, began offering partners the core elements of the model: the curricular design, the pedagogical approach, the systematic assessment, and the virtual learning environment. Coupled with the deep expertise of the Minerva team, the model enables high schools, colleges and universities, organizations, and governments to help transform learning at every stage and in any part of the world. Partnerships include a top STEM university in Hong Kong, a leading US law school, and the honors students in an all-virtual college preparatory high school. Like students, as faculty and administrators are exposed to the transformative power of the Minerva model, many undergo a shift in perspective: They want more of their colleagues and peers to adopt the approach, so more learners can benefit.

While the spread of COVID-19 has disrupted most academic institutions and pushed them to seek digital solutions for remote teaching, the partnerships that Minerva establishes go far beyond that, helping transform institutions that have a genuine desire to improve the educational outcomes for their students. Like most organizations, Minerva seeks to partner with institutions that share its mission and vision about rethinking what they are teaching and how they are teaching it, whether digitally or physically. Where a digital platform enables the continuous delivery of education in a crisis, as the future of education includes increasingly virtual platforms, academic institutions will need to invest not just in technology, but also in curriculum and teaching methodologies.

What We’ve Learned Along the Way

While building a university from scratch meant we did not have to grapple with entrenched beliefs or legacy systems, there have been many challenges.

1. Gaining accreditation is crucial for establishing the credibility of academic programs, but is typically a painstaking process. New institutions are normally required to operate for a minimum of five years before being accredited, a timespan which would have made it nearly inconceivable to attract the caliber of students we sought from the outset. Minerva therefore adopted an “incubation model,” beginning our programs as part of the already-accredited Keck Graduate Institute (KGI), enabling our students to be confident their degrees would be trusted by employers.
2. The admissions process rigorously screens for cultural adaptability and resilience, essential character traits for success at Minerva, and we do not admit students we think will be unable to navigate the intellectual and emotional challenges the program includes. These are highly subjective measures, unfortunately, so we try to minimize built-in bias with automated video interviews (as live interviewers can have unconscious influences on candidate performance), distributed reviews which evaluate each piece of the process independently from the results of other components, and a consistent set of evaluation criteria used to generate scores.
3. One of our biggest challenges has been supplying financial aid for nearly 80 percent of our students. In pursuing needs-blind admissions, we underestimated how many students would be reliant on aid. This has meant a continuous effort to secure funds from philanthropic organizations, as well as to identify work-study opportunities for our students. It has also meant maintaining a relatively small student body and collaborating with partners to achieve financial viability through scale.

Hundreds of years from now, if the Minerva vision takes root, the entire educational system will be reformed. Universities everywhere, even those that are centuries-old today, will have changed their approaches, to incorporate deliberate, outcomes-driven instruction and produce legions of more informed and engaged global citizens, more creative and collaborative problem solvers, and wiser decision makers. Only then would we have accomplished our mission to nurture critical wisdom for the sake of the world.

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Read more stories by Ben Nelson, Diana El Azar & Ayo Seligman.