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Inside Minerva, a Silicon Valley Bid To Start an Elite College Online

Posted by timothy on from the see-you-at-the-reunion dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this article about 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. There's no campus, and all the classes take place online, but the students all live near each other in San Francisco. As small liberal-arts colleges like Sweet Briar shut down, is this campusless college the future?

2 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. As far as I'm considered, this article ends with t by Calavar · · Score: 3, Informative

    I will never trust for-profit educational institutions:

    For-Profit Colleges Under Investigation

    Corinthian Colleges Employee: âoeWe Work For The Biggest Scam Company In The World"

    Screw U: How For-Profit Colleges Rip You Off

    How For-Profit Colleges Target Military Veterans (and Your Tax Dollars)

  2. A better article, not behind a paywall: by D-Fly · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is not really a purely online college, as the poster describes. It's an interesting mix between online and offline: all the students are supposed to live together; they do their classes on computers. The physical location can change annually too. The Atlantic had a better article about Minerva a couple of months ago, and it's not behind a paywall: http://www.theatlantic.com/fea... What's really interesting is the instant and continuous feedback from the professor described here as the Minerva method. It sounds like truly scientific learning, a much better technique than the big lecture hall format, with students zoning out half the time.

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