The Minerva Schools: Rethinking Higher Education

The Minerva Schools at KGI were established in 2012 by Ben Nelson with the aim of disrupting higher education. Minerva’s development was driven by a variety of factors including: inequality in college admissions, high college tuition fees and courses that left students less prepared for work. How has Minerva attempted to address these issues?

What sets Minerva’s curriculum apart from those of other universities?

The curriculum imparts universal cognitive skills and frameworks that are valued by employers such as critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communications and interrelation. These are further broken down into 80 habits of mind and foundational concepts. The way students learn them through salient contexts, ranging from food and water scarcity to unbridled scientific and technological advances to 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 actively engage with these questions, using the aforementioned habits and concepts, such as searching for the right problem, breaking it down, conducting a gap analysis, understanding constraints and analogies, and applying heuristics. Minerva students also partake in residential rotations to 7 different cities, where they engage with local civic organisations to tackle local issues.

What features does Minerva’s online learning platform have to enhance the overall learning experience of students?

What makes the Minerva education unique is that it combines an intentionally designed curriculum, with a pedagogy fully based on active learning which is then delivered over our platform, called Forum™. This is why we do not license the platform on its own, but rather partner with academic institutions who want to transform their education, through curriculum and pedagogy. The platform enables this, as it was intentionally designed for educational purposes. The interface allows live polling, breakout groups that the professor can listen in to, live collaboration tools, and quick reaction emojis. In addition, the professor has a different interface which allows him/her to see the “talk time” of each student in order to engage those who have been quieter. All these tools provide essential data points and information for continuous evaluation and feedback that the professor can then share with each student.

How does Minerva’s admission process differ to most traditional universities?

In addition to high school grades, Minerva considers each applicant’s accomplishments outside of class, their performance on a series of cognitive challenges, and their conduct during a video interview.

The process was developed with equity in mind, as we believe that talent is equally distributed. The admissions committee does not look at SAT or ACT scores, parents’ earning power or net worth, nor the typical applicant essay because all of these have been shown to bias toward wealthy applicants. Wealthy applicants are able to enlist the cadre of tutoring, test prep, and essay editing service providers that is beyond the reach of their less-privileged peers. High school transcripts, extracurricular accomplishments, and cognitive tests are less biased measures of talent, ambition, and grit, and are far better predictors of future success.

Although we do not have quotas, our student body is very geographically diverse (roughly a quarter each coming from North America, Asia, and Europe, with the remaining quarter coming from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East) and almost equally male and female.
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What evidence exists demonstrating the positive contribution that Minerva has had on its students?

Our first graduating class graduated last May and over 90% were employed or accepted in prestigious Masters programme within 6 months of graduating. Our students are encouraged and assisted in getting internships as of their first year, so when they graduate, most of them have had a few internships. We also work with some employers to incubate innovation labs that would be staffed by a group of our students.

What are the Minerva Schools’ goals for the future?

On the university side, our goals continue to provide the best education experience to our students. With Covid-19, we are fortunate that our academic component does not change and there is no disruption to our students. Obviously our global rotations’ experiential component was moved to a virtual environment and we will continue that until it is safe for our students to resume their in-person global rotations.

​Minerva also partners with academic institutions who are transforming their education, through licensing our pedagogy, curriculum and platform. This often entails co-design and tight collaboration with our partners. We do hope that we will continue partnering with other academic institutions as many seize the opportunity to re-think the experience they are offering their students.

Find out more about Minerva on https://www.minerva.kgi.edu/