The Atlantic
The
Future of College?
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?
AUGUST 13, 2014
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 floor
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 flanked 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 offices 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 first 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 floor
of Minerva’s offices, 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 float 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-flesh 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 overfishing, or that other factors were
to blame. No one needed to shuffle 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 offer 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 overfishing.
(“Propaganda,” he snorted, adding that we’d talk about logical fallacies in the
next session.) The computer screen blinked off 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 flag 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 effect, to
learn. If this was the education of the future, it seemed vaguely fascistic.
Good, but fascistic.
Minerva’s headquarters are in San Francisco, and the
first class of students will live in a dorm there this year, but the university
plans to open locations in at least six other cities, including Berlin and
Buenos Aires. (Ike Edeani)
Minerva,
which operates for profit, started teaching its
inaugural class of 33 students this month. To seed this first 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 first
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 offer financial 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 afford
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
offers 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.)
Some claim education is an art and a science.
Nelson has disputed this: “It’s a science and a science.”
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, some very effective, many on
technical subjects. Coursera offers college-level classes for free
(you can pay for premium services, like actual college credit). There
can be hundreds of thousands of students 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 first students will by now
have moved into Minerva’s dorm on the fifth floor 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 different 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 field 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, for their extracurricular activities.
Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but
pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
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
officials 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 offices, research
labs, community spaces for students, or professors paid to do scholarly work
still be called a university?
If Minerva fails, it will lay off
its staff and sell its office 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 Minerva offices—where all employees work at
open-plan stations—recall a typical tech start-up far more than they do an
academic building. (Ike Edeani)
The decor in the lobby of the Minerva office 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
floor, the atmosphere is pure business, in a California-casual sort of
way. Everyone, including the top officers of the university, works at open-plan
stations. I associate scholars’ offices with chalk dust, strewn papers, and
books stacked haphazardly in contravention of fire codes. But here, I found
tidiness.
One of the Minerva employees least
scholarly in demeanor 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 Snapfish, 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 dissatisfied 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 effectively a buffet, and when you have a noncurated academic
experience, you effectively 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
education by taking the same four “Cornerstone Courses,” which introduce
core concepts and ways of thinking that cut across the sciences and humanities.
These are not 101 classes, meant to impart freshman-level knowledge of
subjects. (“The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not
exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your
freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to
inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which
are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for
example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for
controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical
techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then
builds from that foundation.
“Minerva brings us back to first principles,” saysHarry
R. Lewis, a former Harvard dean. What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?
Nelson compares this level of
direction favorably with what he found at Penn (curricular disorder), and with
what one finds at Brown (very few requirements) or Columbia (a “great books”
core curriculum). As Minerva students advance, they choose one of five majors:
arts and humanities, social sciences, computational sciences, natural sciences,
or business.
Snapfish sold for $300 million to
Hewlett-Packard in 2005, and Nelson made enough to fund two years of
planning for his dream project. He is prone to bombastic pronouncements
about Minerva, making broad claims about the state of higher education that are
at times insightful and at times speculative at best. He speaks at many
conferences, unsettling academic administrators less radical than he is by
blithely dismissing long-standing practices. “Your cash cow is the lecture, and
the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will
be obliterated.”
In academic circles, where
overt competition between institutions is a serious breach of etiquette,
Nelson is a bracing presence. (Imagine the president of Columbia telling the
assembled presidents of other Ivy League schools, as Nelson sometimes tells his
competitors, “Our goal is not to put you out of business; it is to lead you. It
is to show you that there is a better way to do what you are doing, and for you
to follow us.”)
The other taboo Nelson ignores is
acknowledgment of profit motive. “
For-profit in higher education
equates to evil,” Nelson told me, noting that most for-profit colleges are
indeed the sort of disreputable degree mills that wallpaper the Web with banner
ads. “As if nonprofits aren’t money-driven!” he howled. “They’re just
corporations that dodge their taxes.” (See
“The Law-School Scam.”)
Minerva is built to make money, but
Nelson insists that its motives will align with student interests. As evidence,
Nelson points to the fact that the school will eschew all federal funding, to
which he attributes much of the runaway cost of universities. The compliance
cost of taking federal financial aid is about $1,000 per student—a tenth of
Minerva’s tuition—and the aid wouldn’t be of any use to the majority of
Minerva’s students, who will likely come from overseas.
Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage
universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise
tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs. These effects pervade higher
education, he says, but they have nothing to do with teaching students. He
believes Minerva would end up hungering after federal money, too, if it ever
allowed itself to be tempted. Instead, like Ulysses, it will tie itself to the
mast and work with private-sector funding only. “If you put a drug”—federal
funds—“into a system, the system changes itself to fit the drug. If [Minerva]
took money from the government, in 20 years we’d be majority American, with
substantially higher tuition. And as much as you try to create barriers, if you
don’t structure it to be mission-oriented, that’s the way it will evolve.”
When talking
about Minerva’s future, Nelson says he
thinks in terms of the life spans of universities—hundreds of years as opposed
to the decades of typical corporate time horizons. Minerva’s very founding is a
rare event. “We are now building an institution that has not been attempted in
over 100 years, since the founding of Rice”—the last four-year
liberal-arts-based research institution founded in this country. It opened in
1912 and now charges $53,966 a year.
So far, Minerva has hired its
deans, who will teach all the courses for this inaugural class. It will hire
rank-and-file faculty later in the year. One of Minerva’s main strategies is to
lure a few prominent scholars from existing institutions. Other “new”
universities, especially fantastically wealthy ones like King Abdullah
University of Science and Technology, in Saudi Arabia, have attempted a similar
strategy—at times with an almost cargocult-like confidence that filling their
labs and offices with big-shot professors will turn the institutions themselves
into important players.
Among the bigger shots hired by
Minerva is Eric Bonabeau, the dean of computational sciences, who taught the
seminar I participated in. Bonabeau, a physicist who has worked in academia and
in business, studies the mathematics of swarming behavior (of bees, fish,
robots), and his research helped inspire Michael Crichton’s terrible thriller Prey.
Diane Halpern, a prominent psychologist, signed on this year as the dean of
social sciences.
Minerva’s first major hire, Stephen
M. Kosslyn, is a man I met in the fall of 1999, when I went to have my head
examined. Kosslyn taught cognitive psychology and neuroscience for 32 years at
Harvard, and during my undergraduate years I visited his lab and earned a few
dollars here and there as one of his guinea pigs. The studies usually involved
sticking my head in an fMRI machine so he and his researchers could record
activity in my brain and observe which parts fired when.
Around that time, Kosslyn’s lab
made news because it began to show how “mental imagery”—the experience of
seeing things in your mind’s eye—really works. (One study involved putting
volunteers into fMRI machines and asking them to hold an image of a cat in
their head for as long as possible. You can try this exercise now. If you’re
especially good at concentrating, the cat might vanish in a matter of a few
seconds, as soon as your brain—distractible as a puppy—comes up with another
object of attention.) Kosslyn served as Harvard’s dean of social sciences from
2008 to 2010, then spent two years at Stanford as the director of its Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 2013, after a few months of
contract work for Minerva, he resigned from Stanford and joined Minerva as its
founding dean.
Kosslyn speaks softly and slowly,
with little emotional affect. Bald and bearded, he has an owlish stare, and at
times during my recent conversations with him, he seemed to be scanning my
brain with his eyes. For purposes of illustration (and perhaps also amusement),
he will ask you to perform some cognitive task, then wait patiently while
you do it—explain a concept, say, or come up with an argument—before
telling you matter-of-factly what your mind just did. When talking
with him, you often feel as though your brain is a machine, and
his job is to know how it works better than it knows itself.
He spent much of his first year at
Minerva surveying the literature on education and the psychology of
learning. “We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell
us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some
of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and
yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
For example, he points to a 1972
study by Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart in The Journal of
Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, which shows that memory of material is
enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks. In an educational context, such tasks would
include working with material, applying it, arguing about it (rote memorization
is insufficient). The finding is hardly revolutionary, but applying it
systematically in the classroom is. Similarly, research shows that having
a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance)
another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the
durability of what is learned. Likewise, if you ask a student to explain a
concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge
it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to
discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the
problem better—even if they guess wrong.
Kosslyn had powers literally no one at Harvard—even the
president—had. He could tell people what to do, and they had to do it.
Kosslyn has begun publishing his
research on the science of learning. His most recent co-authored article, in Psychological Science
in the Public Interest, argues (against conventional wisdom) that the
traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those
who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
The pedagogical best practices
Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that
they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but
also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the
platform.
This approach does have its
efficiencies. In a normal class, a pop quiz might involve taking out paper and
pencils, not to mention eye-rolls from students. On the Minerva
platform, quizzes—often a single multiple-choice question—are over and
done in a matter of seconds, with students’ answers immediately logged and
analyzed. Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics,
for small-group work—perhaps pairing poets with business majors, to expose
students who are weak in a particular class to the thought processes of their
stronger peers. Some claim that education is an art and a science. Nelson has
disputed this: “It’s a science and a science.”
Nelson likes to compare this
approach to traditional seminars. He says he spoke to a prominent university
president—he wouldn’t say which one—early in the planning of Minerva, and he
found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based. “He said the reason
elite university education was so great was because you take an expert in the
subject, plus a bunch of smart kids, you put them in a room and apply
pressure—and magic happens,” Nelson told me, leaning
portentously on that word. “That was his analysis. They’re trying to sell
magic! Something that happens by accident! It sure didn’t happen when I was an
undergrad.”
To Kosslyn, building effective
teaching techniques directly into the platform gives Minerva a huge advantage.
“Typically, the way a professor learns to teach is completely haphazard,” he
says. “One day the person is a graduate student, and the next day, a professor
standing up giving a lecture, with almost no training.” Lectures, Kosslyn says,
are pedagogically unsound, although for universities looking to trim budgets
they are at least cost-effective, with one employee for dozens or hundreds of
tuition-paying students. “A great way to teach,” Kosslyn says drily, “but a
terrible way to learn.”
I asked him whether, at Harvard and
Stanford, he attempted to apply any of the lessons of psychology in the
classroom. He told me he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but
they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it
is sacrosanct,” he says. The very thought that he might be able to impose his
own order on it was laughable. Professors, especially tenured ones at places
like Harvard, answer to nobody.
It occurred to me that Kosslyn was
living the dream of every university administrator who has watched professors
mulishly defy even the most reasonable directives. Kosslyn had powers literally
no one at Harvard—even the president—had. He could tell people what to do, and
they had to do it.
There were
moments, during my various conversations
with Kosslyn and Nelson, when I found I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking
ball to demolish the ivory tower. The American college system is a frustrating
thing—and I say this as someone who was a satisfied customer of two undergraduate
institutions, Deep Springs College (an obscure but selective college in the
high desert of California) and Harvard. At Deep Springs, my classes rarely
exceeded five students. At Harvard, I went to many excellent lectures
and took only one class with fewer than 10 students. I didn’t sleepwalk or
drink my way through either school, and the education I received was well worth
the $16,000 a year my parents paid, after scholarships.
But the Minerva seminar did bring
back memories of many a pointless, formless discussion or lecture, and it began
to seem obvious that if Harvard had approached teaching with a little more
care, it could have improved the seminars and replaced the worst lectures with
something else.
When Eric Bonabeau assigned the
reading for his class on induction, he barely bothered to tell us what
induction was, or how it related to North Atlantic cod. When I asked him
afterward about his decision not to spend a session introducing the concept, he
said the Web had plenty of tutorials about induction, and any Minerva student
ought to be able to learn the basics on her own time, in her own way. Seminars
are for advanced discussion. And, of course, he was right.
“The reason we can get away with the model we have is
because MOOCs exist. The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will
flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than
trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do. A student who wants
an introductory economics course can turn to Coursera or Khan Academy. “We are
a university, and a MOOC is a version of publishing,” Nelson explains. “The
reason we can get away with the pedagogical model we have is because MOOCs
exist. The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
Indeed, the more I looked into
Minerva and its operations, the more I started to think that certain functions
of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become
more ubiquitous. Just as learning to read in Latin was essential before books
became widely available in other languages, gathering students in places where
they could attend lectures in person was once a necessary part of higher
education. But by now books are abundant, and so are serviceable online
lectures by knowledgeable experts.
On the other hand, no one yet knows
whether reducing a university to a smooth-running pedagogical machine will
continue to allow scholarship to thrive—or whether it will simply put
universities out of business, replace scholar-teachers with just teachers, and
retard a whole generation of research. At any great university, there are
faculty who are terrible at teaching but whose work drives their field forward
with greater momentum than the research of their classroom-competent colleagues.
Will there be a place for such people at Minerva—or anywhere, if Minerva
succeeds?
Last spring, when universities began mailing out acceptance letters and
parents all over the country shuddered as the reality of tuition bills became
more concrete, Minerva sent 69 offers. Thirty-three students decided to
enroll, a typical percentage for a liberal-arts school. Nelson told me Minerva
would admit students without regard for diversity or balance of gender.
Applicants to Minerva take a
battery of online quizzes, including spatial-reasoning tests of the sort one
might find on an IQ test. SATs are not considered, because affluent students
can boost their scores by hiring tutors. (“They’re a good way of determining
how rich a student is,” Nelson says.) If students perform well enough, Minerva
interviews them over Skype and makes them write a short essay during the
interview, to ensure that they aren’t paying a ghost writer. “The top 30
applicants get in,” he told me back in February, slicing his hand through the
air to mark the cutoff point. For more than three years, he had been
proselytizing worldwide, speaking to highschool students in California and
Qatar and Brazil. In May, he and the Minerva deans made the final chop.
Of the students who enrolled,
slightly less than 20 percent are American
*—a percentage much higher than anticipated.
(Nelson ultimately expects as many as 90 percent of the students to come from
overseas.) Perhaps not surprisingly, the students come disproportionately from
unconventional backgrounds— nearly one-tenth are from United World Colleges,
the chain of cosmopolitan hippie high schools that brings together students
from around the globe in places like Wales, Singapore, and New Mexico.
In an oddly controlling move for a
university, Minerva asked admitted students to run requests for media
interviews by its public-relations department. But the university gave me the
names of three students willing to speak.
“That’s what Minerva is offering: an experience that
lets you live multiple lives and learn not just your concentration but how to
think.”
When I got through to Ian Van
Buskirk of Marietta, Georgia, he was eager to tell me about a dugout canoe that
he had recently carved out of a two-ton oak log, using only an ax, an adze, and
a chisel, and that he planned to take on a maiden voyage in the hour after our
conversation. He told me he would have attended Duke University if Minerva
hadn’t come calling, but he said it wasn’t a particularly difficult decision,
even though Minerva lacks the prestige and 176-year history of
Duke. “There’s no reputation out there,” he told me. “But that means we
get to make the reputation ourselves. I’m creating it now, while I’m talking to
you.”
Minerva had let him try out the
same online platform I did, and Van Buskirk singled out the “level of
interaction and intensity” as a reason for attending. “It took deep
concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click
‘record’ on your tape.” He said the focus required was similar to the mind-set
he’d needed when he made his first hacks into his oak log, which could have
cracked, rendering it useless.
Another student, Shane Dabor, of
the small city of Brantford, Ontario, had planned to attend Canada’s University
of Waterloo or the University of Toronto. But his experiences with online
learning and a series of internships had led him to conclude that traditional
universities were not for him. “I already had lots of friends at university who
weren’t learning anything,” he says. “Both options seemed like a wager,
and I chose this one.”
A young Palestinian woman, Rana Abu
Diab, of Silwan, in East Jerusalem, described how she had learned English
through movies and books (a translation of the Norwegian philosophical
novel Sophie’s World was a particular favorite). “If I had
relied on my school, I would not be able to have a two-minute conversation,”
she told me in fluent English. During a year studying media at Birzeit University,
in Ramallah, she heard about Minerva and decided to scrap her other academic
plans and focus on applying there. For her, the ability to study overseas on
multiple continents, and get an American-style liberalarts education in the
process, was irresistible. “I want to explore everything and learn everything,”
she says. “And that’s what Minerva is offering: an experience that lets you
live multiple lives and learn not just your concentration but how to think.”
Minerva admitted her, and, like a third of her classmates in the founding
class, she received a supplemental scholarship, which she could use to pay for
her computer and health insurance.
Two students told me that they had
felt a little trepidation, and a need to convince themselves or their parents
that Minerva wasn’t just a moneymaking scheme. Minerva had an open house
weekend for admitted students, and (perhaps ironically) the in-person
interactions with Minerva faculty and staff helped assure them that the
university was legit. The students all now say they’re confident in
Minerva—although of course they can leave whenever they like, with little lost
but time.
Some people
consider universities sacred
places, and they might even see professors’ freedom to be the fallible
sovereigns of their own classrooms as a necessary part of what makes a
university special. To these romantics, universities are havens from a world
dominated by orthodoxy, money, and quotidian concerns. Professors get to think
independently, and students come away molded by the total experience—classes,
social life, extracurriculars—that the university provides. We spend the rest
of our lives chasing mates, money, and jobs, but at university we enjoy the
liberty to indulge aimless curiosity in subjects we know nothing about,
for purposes unrelated to efficiency or practicality.
Minerva is too young to have
attracted zealous naysayers, but it’s safe to assume that the people with this
disposition toward the university experience are least likely to be
enthusiastic about Minerva and other attempts to revolutionize
education through technical innovation. MOOCs are beloved by those too
poor for a traditional university, as well as those who like to dabble, and
those who like to learn in their pajamas. And MOOCs are not to be knocked: for
a precocious Malawian peasant girl who learns math through free lessons from
Khan Academy, the new Web resources can change her life. But the dropout rate
for online classes is about 95 percent, and they skew strongly toward
quantitative disciplines, particularly computer science, and toward privileged
male students. As Nelson is fond of pointing out, however, MOOCs will continue
to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the
possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with
hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
“Plutarch said the mind is not a vessel to be filled but
a fire to be lit. Part of my worry about these Internet start-ups is that it’s
not clear they’ll be any good at the fire-lighting part.”
The question remains as to whether
Minerva can provide what traditional universities offer now. Kosslyn’s project
of efficiently cramming learning into students’ brains is preferable to failing
to cram in anything at all. And it is designed to convey not just information,
as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become
morethoughtful citizens. But defenders of the traditional university see
efficiency as a false idol.
“Like other things that are going
on now in higher ed, Minerva brings us back to first principles,” says Harry R.
Lewis, a computer-science professor who was the dean of Harvard’s undergraduate
college from 1995 to 2003. What, he asks, does it mean to be educated? Perhaps
the process of education is a profound one, involving all sorts of leaps in
maturity that do not show up on a Kosslyn-style test of pedagogical
efficiency. “I’m sure there’s a market for people who want to be more
efficiently educated,” Lewis says. “But how do you improve the efficiency of
growing up?”
He warns that online-education
innovations tend to be oversold. “They seem to want to re-create the School of
Athens in every little hamlet on the prairie—and maybe they’ll do that,” he
told me. “But part of the process of education happens not just through good
pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working
and plying their trades.”
He calls the “hydraulic metaphor”
of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow
of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.” As Lewis
explains, “Plutarch said the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire
to be lit. Part of my worry about these Internet start-ups is that it’s not
clear they’ll be any good at the fire-lighting part.”
In February, at a university-administrator conference at a Hyatt in downtown
San Francisco, Ben Nelson spoke to a plenary session of business-school deans
from around the world. Daphne Koller of Coursera sat opposite him onstage, and
they calmly but assuredly described what sounded to me like the
destruction of the very schools where their audience members worked. Nelson
wore a bored smirk while an introductory video played, advertising the next
year’s version of the same conference. To a pair of educational entrepreneurs
boasting the low price of their new projects, the slickly produced video must
have looked like just another expensive barnacle on the hull of higher
education.
“Content is about to become free
and ubiquitous,” Koller said, an especially worrying comment for deans who
still thought the job of their universities was to teach “content.” The
institutions “that are going to survive are the ones that reimagine
themselves in this new world.”
Even if Minerva turns out not to be the venture that
upends American higher education, other innovators will crop up in its wake.
Nelson ticked off the advantages he
had over legacy institutions: the spryness of a well-funded start-up, a
student body from all over the world, and deals for faculty (they
get to keep their own intellectual property, rather than having to hand
over lucrative patents to, say, Stanford) that are likely to make Minerva
attractive.
Yet in some ways, the worst
possible outcome would be for U.S. higher education to accept Minerva as
its model and dismantle the old universities before anyone can really
be sure that it offers a satisfactory replacement. During
my conversations with the three Minerva students, I wanted to ask
whether they were confident Minerva would give them all the wonderful
intangibles and productive diversions that Harry Lewis found so important. But
then I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so
ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the
college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education. These
three young students were more resourceful than I was, and probably more
deliberate in their choice of college. But they were newcomers to higher
education, and asking them whether their fledgling alma mater could provide
these things seemed akin to asking the passengers on the Mayflower how
they liked America as soon as their feet touched Plymouth Rock.
Lewis is certainly right when he
says that Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles. But of
course the conclusions one reaches might not be flattering to traditional
colleges. One possibility is that Minerva will fail because a college degree,
for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and
raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to
an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the
machers at your alumni club. Minerva has no alumni club, and if it fails for
this reason, it will look naive and idealistic, a bet on the inherent value of
education in a world where cynicism gets better odds.
In another sense, it’s difficult to
imagine Minerva failing altogether: it will offer something that resembles a
liberal education to large segments of the Earth’s population who currently
have to choose between the long-shot possibility of getting into a traditional
U.S. school, and the more narrowly career-oriented education available in their
home country. That population might give Minerva a steady flow of tuition-paying
warm bodies even if U.S. higher education ignores it completely. It could
plausibly become the Amherst of the world beyond the borders of the United
States.
These are not, however, the terms
by which Ben Nelson defines success. To him, the brass ring is for Minerva to
force itself on the consciousness of the Yales and Swarthmores and “lead”
American universities into a new era. More modestly, we can expect Minerva to
force some universities to justify what previously could be waved off with
mentions of “magic” and a puff of smoke. Its seminar platform will challenge
professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture
with PowerPoint.
It seems only remotely possible
that in 20 years Minerva could have more students enrolled than Ohio State
will. But it is almost a certainty that the classrooms of elite
universities will in that time have come to look more and more like
Minerva classrooms, with professors and students increasingly separated
geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the
student-teacher relationship. Even if Minerva turns out not to be the venture
that upends American higher education, other innovators will crop up in its
wake to address the exact weaknesses Nelson now attacks. The idea that college
will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the
forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that
retirement comes before extinction.
At the university-administrator
conference where Nelson spoke in February, I sat at a table with an
affable bunch of deans from Australia and the United States. They listened
attentively, first with interest and then with growing alarm. Toward the end of
the conversation, the sponsoring organization’s president asked the panelists
what they expected to be said at a similar event in 2017, on the same topic of
innovative online education. (“Assuming we’re still in business,” a dean near
me whispered to no one in particular.)
Daphne Koller said she expected
Coursera to have grown in offerings into a university the size of a large state
school—after having started from scratch in 2012. Even before Nelson gave his
answer, I noticed some audience members uncomfortably shifting their weight.
The stench of fear made him bold.
“I predict that in three years,
four or five or seven or eight of you will be onstage here, presenting your
preliminary findings of your first year of a radical new conception of your
undergraduate [or] graduate program ... And the rest of you will look at two or
three of those versions and say, ‘Uh-oh.’ ” This was meant as a joke, but
hardly anyone laughed.
Note: The online
version has been changed to reflect additional information about the
composition of Minerva’s inaugural class, provided by Minerva after the
magazine went to press.
