Minerva University : Most Innovative University in the World.
Minerva fosters the next generation of ethical, purposeful, and bold global leaders.
Travel and learn in seven cities with students from over 80 countries while being challenged by rigorous academics and developing professional skills.
If you are looking for a university experience that will challenge you intellectually to grow in unexpected ways, Minerva is the university for you.
Experience four years of intensive education in a global context. You will gain the universal skills needed to become an analytical decision-maker, creative problem-solver, and engaged world citizen.
Live and learn together with a passionate and culturally diverse student community, as you tackle challenges that will help you prepare for a fulfilling career with societal impact.
The future of education or just hype? The rise of Minerva, the world’s most selective university
“I wanted to create a university that serves as a model for other institutions, by being indisputably the best university in the world,” bouncing up and down on a video call from San Francisco office.
“Unless you demonstrate that you are the absolute best, that you can provide an education that Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford cannot come close to, no one will listen. And we are doing exactly that.”
In 2012 Nelson founded the Minerva Project, a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup, with the aim of revolutionising higher education. It partnered with the Keck Graduate Institute to create Minerva Schools at KGI, a non-profit university programme headquartered in San Francisco.
This year Minerva received 25,000 applications from 180 countries for undergraduate entry in 2020 and admitted just 2% of them, making it the most selective degree programme in the developed world.
“I realised that colleges were fundamentally failing in their promise to educate,” he says. “A liberal arts education is supposed to teach students to think freely, critically and logically. But our elite universities no longer do that at all.”
The Minerva offering is very different to what most UK students were accustomed to, prior to the coronavirus pandemic shifting universities online. There are no lectures, faculty buildings, or exams.
All teaching is done through online video classes. There is only one programme of study for first years, and rather than reading maths or history, students take courses aimed at teaching transferrable skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving, through classes named “multimodal communications”, “empirical analyses” and “complex systems”.
Subject specialisms are chosen in the second year. There is no campus; students are housed in a residence hall in San Francisco in their first year. Subsequent year groups spend semesters variously in Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, Buenos Aires, London and Taipei.
“It’s so different from just sitting in a lecture theatre. You learn as you do, not learn by rote. And I have learned so much more in the past year than in any year of my life.”
According to Nelson, this is what makes Minerva different to its traditional counterparts, where “students sit in a class, they’re not called upon to answer questions, or apply the content to novel contexts. A professor simply talks to them.”
“Six months after their exams, students will have forgotten 90% of the course content – because they were never really taught it.”
Study after study has shown the efficacy of active learning, and Nelson says Minerva has taken that research and implemented it. As such, professors are not supposed to speak in classes for any longer than a few minutes at a time, and students are expected to contribute to class discussions and group work.