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Inside Minerva, a Silicon Valley Bid To Start an Elite College Online
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?
If I'm forced to live in San Fran, my room and board is going to cost more than if I had gone to a normal college.
The people you meet in college are similar to goodwill in accounting.
Online classes follow the in person paradigm: lecture and then homework. Paying attention to video lectures on a computer is just impossible for me. There is no interaction - at least in an in-person lecture, the lecturer will ask questions or call on you.
And then, getting feedback is difficult. My biggest bone to pick with Coursera is that you cannot discuss answers to homework or test questions.
In one class, I got all the practice problems correct but on the exam, I couldn't get the correct answer - even after my 4 tries allowed. Others had the same problem and others didn't. Where did we go wrong? To this day, I do not know.
If I couldn't get the exam problem correct, then I don't think I understood the concept.
And then there are the snarky comments like, "You don't belong here!".
After reporting it, nothing was done. I assumed that it must have been a TA that posted it. A snarky TA?
Never happens! /s
I have taken other online classes and they just don't cut it. Nothing beats having a real live person teach, for me anyway. I need that human contact.
How do create an "elite" college from nothing?
Isn't that officious title something a college has to earn?
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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)
The only real difference between an "elite" college and another one is reputation. They have more money and oftentimes more famous faculty and students, but these things just come as a result of the famous name. So how do you get the name? Mostly by being old. Strike against Minerva there... I was going to do this whole contrived "three strikes" metaphor, but this just isn't necessary: Minerva is for-profit, that's really all you need to know to see that this is another diploma mill. You'd have a better chance of your degree meaning something if you got it from Udacity. They don't offer full degrees, of course, but maybe some day?
I'm not sure if the people who try things like this are stupid, or think that everyone else is stupid.
College is not the equivalent of training. It is an experience that transforms people during a period of time when they are still able to be transformed. Some of that is about learning specific things that you will need later. A lot more is about the ability to train yourself to learn specific things that you may never need later - so the training is the valuable thing, not the knowledge. More is about learning how to take on experiences, but in a sandbox environment, trying things that you could not easily do elsewhere. Getting involved in clubs and activities. Being a DJ on a radio station. Learning how to live with others in close quarters. Learning how to both succeed and to fail.
Coupled with that is the exposure to people who are not you. Creatively mixing your thoughts with others in a relaxed, informal setting. Broadening your horizons. Still in a sandbox though, because you're going to screw up. You're going to piss people off. You're going to make mistakes.
I still remember the lesson I learned in my "contract negotiation" class, when my negotiating team was up against a team made up mostly of hockey players. My team, representing "labor", with one older guy on it who probably was in a union, decided that it would be a good strategy to play hardball with the other team ("management") because the older guy surmised that the hockey players could not afford to come to a stalemate because a failing grade would bounce them off the team. The strategy worked, but I was disgusted with the tactic, so I wrote a paper outlining the problems with this negotiating approach.
That sandbox is the part of college that is the most expensive. I'd guess that it costs more than half of the entire cost of the "education". That means this for-profit company is trying to take advantage of people who naively believe that "college" is just about a credential, a piece of paper that says you met a minimum set of requirements. An online "college" can not offer most of what a campus-based college offers. It can only offer the "training" part, plus maybe a little of the "learning how to learn" part.
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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They charge whatever people are willing to pay.
Choosing worthless and overpriced degrees is the responsibility of students and parents, not of universities.
The bubble will pop when students come to their senses. Until then, it remains worthwhile to charge inflated amounts for useless degrees.
You don't get the point of liberal arts education. It's all about the PARTY.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's unfair to call the current batch "idiots" when they've been lied to consistently by teachers, guidance counselors, and then professors that their college education will be both necessary and meaningful. And likely that's still true for some engineering fields (though the price is still a bubble), but for a "Grievance Studies" degree? It's one Hell of a sophisticated con job, and I have some sympathy for the marks who fall for it - how's a kid supposed to figure out that the educational system as a whole is not a source of truth?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
To me there are two kinds of elite. The classic one that generally serves only the rich elites is a university that is very hard to get into.
But the second kind would be one where they teach hard things to high levels and thus it is hard to graduate from. With an online scenario it could be possible to let pretty much everyone in and let the actual courses be the filter.
That said, I have a nephew who recently graduated from a third rate university's engineering program. Basically they taught them shit but worked them to the bone. If you didn't have a fantastic work ethic and discipline then you may very well not complete the course. But the engineering skills learned would be borderline useless.
So what I would love with an online truly elite university would be basically opensource courses. That is all the materials, videos, tests, etc would be published. This way they would have trouble concealing the fact that their course sucked.
You are confused sir. There is no fraud when someone willingly chooses poorly yet still receives a quality education in a field that is irrelevant. That's called personal choice.
I believe you're out of touch. There are people who genuinely believe that a "Women's Studies" degree, or an Anthropology degree, etc, will help them get a job and prosper, because they've been sold a bill of goods.
I'd love to see clear product labeling for degrees. "People with this degree make about the same in five years as people with no degree make at the same age", or "people in this field make above the median income, but few graduates with this degree from this college are working in this field".
We could at least provide the level of information easily available to a car shopper, no? Then perhaps market corrections would happen before the absurd sort of bubble we have today!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.