It is a definitely interesting project, but what would benefit "us" (as in, humanity, I guess) most is a nigh-free online university with respected accreditation and as much high-quality content as possible while keeping costs at a minimum.
Amazon is a good role model when you look for a for-profit giant, but I'd like the top education model to look like Wikipedia. Heck, Wikipedia is a pretty good tool for kickstarting your interest in a given field, and it has plenty of references, too.
http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/ offers courses with respected accreditation and (limited) study materials. the cost is tiny compared to tuition in the usa. no real STEM courses though.
> The school touts itself as the first elite—make that "e-lite"—American university to open in 100 years.
Olin? Too bad they screwed up their endowment and have to charge tuition now. I wonder if that will affect the quality of the student body. But Olin was definitely a try at "instant elite."
I'm reminded now of something that Bill Gates said: universities like Harvard or MIT shouldn't be lauded for churning out smart people... who were already smart before they entered Harvard, we should instead be lauding institutions that admit everyday folks from tough backgrounds that then turn them into smart and able people. In that spirit it is strange that the article goes to great pains to emphasize how "elite" this new university will be, and how 'admission requirements will be "extraordinarily high."' So, to sound not so negative here: I hope this experiment succeeds, but we should be focusing on where real and big problems lie: education for the masses, at affordable prices.
The value of great institutions lies not merely in education, but in bringing great people together. Simply attracting already smart people (or determined and otherwise talented people) is a value in and of itself.
well, yeah, but in a college, you're not just brought together to be in some sort of self-primping club, but you also do things like "work collaboratively on projects" and "pursue a guided learning track".
Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen have had a lot of interesting discussions on the role and extent of "signalling" in higher education. I think Hanson takes the extreme view that it is mostly signalling, rather than skills (human capital).
Obviously we see that at some level. "He's a college man" doesn't have the cache it did in 1920.
> we should be focusing on where real and big problems
> lie: education for the masses, at affordable prices.
You might be interested to read about the Cristo Rey school network — a group of highschools aimed at exactly that. A buddy of mine is working at the Philly one this summer which is why I've heard of it. Here's the history page: http://www.cristoreynetwork.org/page.cfm?p=367
I agree but in the same way that the original elite Facebook paved the way for today's Facebook behemoth, I imagine a successful elite e-stitution (c) will legitimize the concept, which will pave the way for something with more universal appeal.
I would like to see schooling evolve into a loose association between learners and access to learning resources (virtual and physical). I've learned far more outside formal schooling than within (at all levels up to phd).
That said, this particular article is hyperbole, as creating a institutional brand like Harvard is something you do not say you are going to do. A great example of this in recent history is Y-Combinator.
The perception of quality comes from actual quality.
The 'sticker price' comparison is really misleading here. I don't think the Wall Street Journal do anything to correct this. Here's what the article says:
> A degree [at Minerva] will cost less than half the average top-end private education, which is now over $50,000 a year
At Harvard today, the minority of students pay full price. Over 70% of the undergraduate student body are on scholarship. Notably, if your family earns less than $65,000 per year you will pay nothing to attend.
Minerva wants to charge students $20,000. There is, as far as I can tell, no financial aid policy or bursaries available. And why would there be - Minerva is, after all, for-profit.
If your family is at or below the median household income in the US then Minerva is an extremely expensive proposition. Whereas at Harvard, and many other colleges, it's free.
Even if "Minerva" was $1/year, the question is one of value. A degree from Harvard at $50k/year is more valuable than a free one from a UC Berkeley Dean's scholarship student (which is probably about the same difficulty to attain), simply due to the perception it engenders from people that matter.
My wording may be wrong. If you have something in common with someone, you are more likely to help them and want to work with them. The fact is, Harvard/Ivy/elite private school alums, on the whole, are currently in greater positions of power than Berkeley/elite public school alums (this may change in the future of course).
For that reason alone, the value of being "from Harvard" is greater than being "from Berkeley".
Agreed, but you are ignoring the opportunity cost. It is highly dubious whether a Harvard education is worth more than a UC Berkeley education + $239,996, though this distinction varies from field to field.
Not really. The opportunity cost of going to Berkeley over Harvard (and I'm specifically choosing Berkeley, a top public school with some programs having a similarly low acceptance rate to Harvard) is not knowing the people who went to Harvard, who are more likely to have powerful connections.
$200k is nothing, really, in the long term. It's one or two years of salary, whether you've gone to Harvard or Berkeley. It's the non-salary aspects that make the Harvard degree (not education) more valuable.
My point was that this distinction is dubious because while Harvard is probably worth more for some fields, like finance or law, in other fields like engineering, UC Berkeley + 240k is worth more in my opinion.
Still, depends on the purpose. Do you want to get a job at Google or Facebook? Then in engineering, Berkeley would be as good or better than Harvard. But who wants to get a job after undergrad?
What do you mean by this? Are you talking about starting a startup? You could fund your own company for $240k and work on multiple ideas in that time (assuming your first few ideas fail quickly).
A startup is only one option .. you could go to grad school, you could write a book, start a band .. you could travel etc.
Where are you getting the $240k? If you could easily get a loan for that amount to do "whatever you want" instead of for higher education, a lot more people would be doing it.
I'm pulling that amount from the cost of attending a school like Harvard (60k/year, not accounting for YOY tuition increases). The reason a lot more people don't do this is 1) irrationality when it comes to evaluating the brand of colleges, and 2) People don't tend to think in terms of opportunity costs, especially spread over 4 years (which is what the 240k represents).
It may cost that much, but you couldn't get that $240k in cash otherwise. Either your parents are paying the $240k or your taking loans or some combination thereof.
How do you get a $240k loan if you are not studying at Harvard or a similar school?
The $240k could be realized through a varying mix of: not having debt (and having to drain off 240k + interest in future income), not spending money you earned working over the summer/part-time (this won't cover it all, though), and/or a your parents giving you the college fund. Regarding the point about the parents, I readily acknowledge that not all parents would be willing to do that, but many probably (in my opinion) would.
" we come to the stunning conclusion that approximately 45.6 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from families with incomes above $200,000, placing them in the top 3.8 percent of American households. Even more shockingly, only about 4 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from the bottom quintile of U.S. incomes and a mere 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles of U.S. incomes."
Which also means that over half the students wouldn't care much about the cost of tuition.
But exactly 0% of Minerva students will come from those quintiles if the tuition is 20k with no aid. Unless they take out loans, of course, but that puts them in a much worse position than if they attended a mainstream elite school, which are all very proud of their widely publicized "no loans" financial aid [0].
> I am not sure if aid and scholarship are the same thing.
At most Ivy Leagues it effectively is. Harvard also has a 'no debt' policy, so that aid really does have very few strings attached. The Crimson article you linked to uses data from 2010/11, whereas I'm using the latest figures from the admissions office.
You can't call a university "elite" that doesn't have any history. Where is the multi billion dollar endowment? Where add the scads of important alumni? Where is the name recognition among ordinary people?
I don't think this venture will succeed but I do think that it raises an obvious point: Elite and other universities don't groom you to be elite nor do they teach you enough of the basic things that are valuable to employers and therefore to you. Instead universities spend a great deal of time on things that most people, in retrospect, would say were not useful.
If you were to ask recent top graduates about 6 months into their first job what basic useful things they learned that they should have or could have learned in school I think you would find many recurring themes.
Why are students forced to unnecessarily learn things the hard way?
I'll post a small anecdote, which I promise is not an exercise in narcissistic banality.
A couple of my friends attend Green College[0] at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I crashed in their residence room for two nights during a cross-Canada road trip at the end of July.
The short time at Green College restored my love of higher education, which had been flagging toward the end of a drawn-out CS degree at the University of Calgary. Every morning the students meet for breakfast at a hall in the center of the residence compound, between 7 and 9. This is much earlier than my usual wakeup time, which hovers between 10 and 11. Green College has students from a wide variety of disciplines, and discussions accompanying the meal were a general mash of ideas far outside what I would ever encounter when hanging around my school's CS labs. It was a joy to participate.
The experience very clearly communicated to me that this is what I've been missing. Education in a vacuum is horrendously dull when compared to all these ideas bumping into each other around the breakfast table. It's inspiring; without the social aspect, school is reduced to jumping through hoops and learning the secrets behind magic tricks.
The idea of forming a close-knit community of students then transposing it to cities around the world has me grinning. Were I younger and capable of meeting the admission requirements...
I once attended a conference and Jesus College, Oxford. I got the same feeling that you did, just the dining hall experience was way beyond what I ever experienced at UW.
But these experiences are quite expensive. It is not clear that they scale to our current egalitarian and pragmatic educational system.
The value in any educational institution is derived from the ability of its graduates to go out and create value for the rest of the world. I only skimmed the article, but I felt like it completely missed this point. People pay more to go to Harvard and Stanford because they believe they will earn more when they graduate. People pay more for Harvard and Stanford graduates because they believe they will create more value for their firm. This is why every educational institution in the world touts its notable alumni. If Minerva can't create this perception, it won't succeed.
Nelson's remarks exemplify a disturbing trend amongst technologists, and especially those trying to reform education: Misidentifying sub-par educational experiences and areas of studies as "the liberal arts," and then attributing insufficient outcomes to the liberal arts themselves.
If he went to Wharton Business school for undergrad, he does not have a liberal-arts education. History and literature are liberal arts, business is not. Yet he blames his lack of growth during undergrad years on the very same:
>My first six months, what did the consulting firm teach me? They didn't teach me the basics of how they do business. They taught me how to think. I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude. I didn't have habits of mind that a liberal arts education was supposed to have given me.
Perhaps he thinks he studied the liberal arts because he majored in Economics. But majoring in Economics within a business school is, as Wharton's website proclaims, a specialized, business-focused approach, which the site's copy actually contrasts with "a liberal arts setting." [1]
Such programs can't be grudged for failing to cultivate the mind, as their sole aim is "appl[ying] business methods and economic theory to real-world problems." Business programs will always fall-short of real-world experience in teaching business skills, since one is actually real.
If he had studied an actual "liberal art" like philosophy or history or French, he might have gotten the mental development that his program apparently lacked. I think those of us who truly delved into liberal arts programs, with the accompanying rigor, breadth of study, and dedication to teaching, found them a great boon to our mental capacities.
Edit: Another trend that's been irking me lately: the idea that you can "teach" someone to think through "critical thinking" classes:
>In the Nelson dream curriculum, all incoming students take the same four yearlong courses. His common core won't make students read the Great Books. "We want to teach you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ."
There's a reason that "Communications" programs have a reputation for being full of fluff. If you want to learn how to communicate, communicate. Trying to "study" it isn't get to help you personally. If you want to learn how to write, write about any subject, and have your teacher tear your work apart. Communications skills are taught through experience. You can't sit down and "learn" writing skills.
Nelson doesn't lament that his mind wasn't adequately "cultivated" but that he wasn't taught some basic skills that he quickly, but probably painfully, acquired on the job and which presumably he found critical in his career.
This isn't a question of "mental development" but of having useful things pointed out so that you don't have to suffer whatever damage accrues from not knowing them.
I suppose we're splitting hairs here about what he's aiming for, but consider his comments, first, about what he learned on the job:
>"My first six months, what did the consulting firm teach me? They didn't teach me the basics of how they do business. They taught me how to think. I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude.
and then his goals for Minerva:
>"We want to teach you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ."
Both these comments suggest that he's looking to improve the core critical thinking skills of his students. Indeed, he explicitly says as much. Thinking, reading, writing...these are historically fundamental goals of education.
They are not, however, merely "useful things" which can be pointed out. You cannot simply sit down and "learn" how to read/write/think, anymore than you be can taught a foreign language without actually speaking or writing it, or programming without coding.
They are "basic" in the sense that they form a foundation for other skills. What he seems to be aiming for is not "basic" in the sense that you use, which seems to cover tasks like "how to perform this financial function" or "how to use this technology." (But maybe that's not the sense you're using "basic in).
I agree that some of his comments muddy the waters; I can't say that I know exactly what he intends to do. But take this first comment for example which I think would be made by many people who had recently started working in IB or management consulting:
> I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude.
I suspect in these cases he learned some useful trick or mode of thinking in a matter of minutes by having someone point it out to him. Not so much "basic" as "simple".
And irrespective of whatever Minerva claims to do I think it is clear that many "elite" graduates feel there are simple, useful things not being taught in schools which ought to be.
One issue with Economics, as an undegrad major its denial or downplaying the utility of 'fiction'. ie, it treata fiction as the wrong half a dichotomy: truth:fiction == rational:irrational. Yet real world problem solving requires not just deduction, but imagingation (ie, possible alternative priors from which to base deductions). Like any good crime detective ;). TLDR: fiction-->imaginitive pre-visualization-->creative problem solving. STEM and wanna-be STEM subjects like econ are good for benhcmarking discrete problem solving, and for providing technical priors. for that there is no doubt. Its just not the whole picture of problem solving (esp. dealing with people, etc).
> In the Nelson dream curriculum, all incoming students take the same four yearlong courses. His common core won't make students read the Great Books. "We want to teach you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ."
I, like you, have a very hard time understanding the logic behind this. I don't have any idea how one could go about teaching a young person to think critically by sitting them down and saying, "to think critically, do A, B, C". I'm all for experimentation, and if Nelson thinks that he can do it better, I'll gladly give him the benefit of the doubt and wait for the data. I think it's hubris of the highest order for him to say that he's going to teach people to think. What he will do if he's successful is teach people how to compete in a modern technological economy, which is certainly a laudable goal.
Taking this a step further and claiming as he seems to that the Great Books are no longer necessary for students to learn critical thought seems absurd.
Just for the record as people read my comment, I will admit to being as biased as is possible to be on this subject, having gone to both the most liberal arty of all the liberal arts colleges[1] and a large liberal arts university[2].
I've sometimes wondered what a St John's style comp sci / software engineering course would look like. Reading and discussing the great literature of our field -- the books, papers and code.
As a minor quibble, I'm not sure it's fair to saddle technologists with the likes of Ben Nelson. He made money in a technological milieu, sure, but as a purely biz guy. Neither his background nor his mindset nor his interests involve technology, and he has not contributed to the advancement of technology.
Technologists can have dumb ideas too, of course. But this particular dumb idea doesn't come across as a techie's idea.
I don't think you make a very strong argument as to why studying for a specific liberal arts major, as opposed to receiving a generalized American-style "liberal arts education" (referring to the uniquely American method of having a core curriculum and general education requirements), is advantageously able to impart these vaguely defined "critical thinking" skills. You haven't given any solid reasons as to why a pre-professional economics degree does not impart critical thinking skills, especially since even those degrees require classes with a great deal of theoretical abstraction, discussion, and argument.
There's a reason that "Communications" programs have a reputation for being full of fluff. If you want to learn how to communicate, communicate. Trying to "study" it isn't get to help you personally.
I think this is awfully pedantic. Your are making an assumption that for some reason this class won't involve communication, and will just involve studying, based on a quoted snippet of what Ben Nelson said.
To be clear, I'm not necessarily arguing that it's advantageous. I'm arguing that his experience does not qualify as a liberal arts education, and he shouldn't criticize it at such. You seem to place his experience into a second category:
>as opposed to receiving a generalized American-style "liberal arts education" (referring to the uniquely American method of having a core curriculum and general education requirements)
Neither a core curriculum nor general education requirements qualify an education as "liberal." At least, they shouldn't. The liberal arts are subjects, first and foremost. The humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences. Their power lies in their great history of consideration throughout civilization, their prevailing and constant influence on the affairs of the world, and the nuanced questions that lie at their center.
The liberal arts are inherently inter-disciplinary, and thus invite exposure to more than one. Moreover, the "teaching" of the liberal arts is far different than "research" in the liberal arts, a point often missed in larger university settings. If they are not taught well, you're not receiving an education of any sort.
I'm not criticizing Nelson's education, or at least, don't mean to. But what he's criticizing is not what he thinks. It may be that pre-professional economics degrees normally do impart critical thinking skills. Nelson seems to think they don't. I don't really care; what I know is that these requirements don't meet the demands of the liberal arts: http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/academic-excellence/f...
An element of your argument relies on defining a liberal arts education in a specific way that is by no means the accurate or sole definition. American schools are quite unique in that, as opposed to universities in the UK, there is something called a "liberal arts education," which in that context is taken to mean the concept of a core curriculum / general education requirements. There is no reason that a liberal arts education as you define it is inherently interdisciplinary, there is no reason that whatever advantages you claim stem from interdisciplinary studied is not covered under a core curriculum definition of liberal arts.
Nelson seems to think they don't.
You're seriously misinterpreting what he says about how modern degrees don't impart critical thinking skills. His criticism is directed at Ivy League educations in general - not only pre-professional degrees but also liberal arts degrees: "I didn't have habits of mind that a liberal arts education was supposed to have given me. And not only did I not have it, none of my other colleagues had it—people who had graduated from Princeton and Harvard and Yale." It bears noting that Harvard has no pre-professional degrees except engineering (no business degree); it's clear his criticism is drawn out of his disappointment that a liberal arts education was supposed to give him and his colleagues critical thinking skills, but failed to do so.
Furthermore, the instant I looked at the link you posted, I could already tell that that wasn't actually the degree requirements for Wharton (I could tell that those were the requirements for a major but not for graduation). So that's a really poor example. The full degree and graduation requirements are listed here: https://spike.wharton.upenn.edu/ugrprogram/advising/curricul...
I don't think yet another institution which selects life's winners based on who they were at age 16-17 is really the solution to the country's educational problems.
Harvard my ass. He's trying to overthrow the incredibly lucrative University of Phoenix.
Also, his reductionist approach to higher education means Minerva will lose a lot of the quality of education and community that makes a top-tier program worthwhile.
If I'm a prospective student for this university (I'm not), I'm thinking I'm going to regret being videotaped in all of my classes several years down the line.
It could be worse -- from the 1940s through the 1970s Ivy League and Seven Sisters universities required incoming students to submit to being photographed in the nude, as part of a bizarre experiment in researching human body types. The result was a trove of highly embarrassing photos of people who went on to reach the highest levels of business, government and the arts.
This is the first "let's completely overhaul university" idea I've heard that doesn't completely suck. I like the ideas of world travel and reasonable tuition, and doing away with a lot of the useless cruft of a traditional university - Minereva sounds like fun, and if I was in high school right now, I'd be applying.
That said, one possible hassle I can see with this plan is that to bootstrap an "elite" reputation, and deliver these big core courses in a useful way, you're going to need some amazing professors, and as a PhD candidate with ambitions of teaching, I'm not sure I'd want to work for this university. Teaching via email and video lectures is unappealing, and (more importantly for catching top talent), I don't think it would be a good career move - they don't have the elite reputation yet, and I feel like at the end of my "flexible short term", I'd have trouble convincing a more traditional university that my experience wasn't from some online diploma mill.
Fair - I don't have a great grasp on what higher education costs Stateside, as I'm Canadian - the publicly funded schools tend to manage ~$6000/yr tuition, and the private schools aren't much more.
Higher education's product-delivery system—a professor droning to a limited number of students in a room—dates back a thousand years. The industry's physical plant (dorms, classrooms, gyms) often a century or more. Its most expensive employees, tenured faculty, can't be fired. The price of its product (tuition) and operating costs have outpaced inflation by multiples.
Why is this the case? Is teaching basically the last great guild?
How are you going to develop good professors if you only engage them as temps?
That's one of the key things that separates a great university from a teaching college. Investments in the long-term careers of research professors. Teaching is just one of their responsibilities; they also research and publish. Same for their grad students. That takes subsidies that come in part out of undergrad tuition.
So sure, if you cut that out you're going to have cheaper tuition. But if this model were actually adopted on a wide scale, you'd also dry up the supply of great professors.
As an exceptional case it might work, but only by exploiting the investments of other institutions. Very "silicon valley libertarian" in that respect.
> Professors get flexible, short-term contracts, but no tenure.
At a place like MIT or Caltech, almost all the professors are also researchers. Undergraduates have a lot of opportunity to get involved in that research.
What research opportunities will be available for Minerva students?
At a place like MIT or Caltech, almost all professors are also researchers. They really like research, and teaching is kind of a drag.
What learning opportunities will be available for MIT or Caltech students?
Now, admittedly, the above institutions take teaching seriously, and the students will get a great experience. But the same isn't true in many public flagship universities where professors prioritize research over teaching.
That being said, I prefer being a researcher to being a teacher, which is probably why I'm not a professor.
> Its most expensive employees, tenured faculty...
Someone has not paid much attention to the past 20-30 years of developments. Faculty salaries are a falling proportion of university spending. The current cost drivers are administration (both size and salaries) and capital outlays. For example, the University of California system spends only 30% of its budget on faculty salaries (that includes non-tenured faculty). And faculty are rarely, with the exception of med schools employing star surgeons, among a university's most highly paid employees. Look at what the top administrators make in comparison.
So a guy with no experience teaching in a classroom decides that he has what it takes to found a university, and then instead of trying to create a transformative experience, he's going to turn out a bunch of trust fund babies with non-accredited general studies degrees who will be almost certainly deprived of the ability to do real research on par with even small directional universities. Oh, and elite professors will just FLOCK to this school in one of the most expensive cities in the world and be rewarded with.... no tenure and no resources to conduct research.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadAmazon is a good role model when you look for a for-profit giant, but I'd like the top education model to look like Wikipedia. Heck, Wikipedia is a pretty good tool for kickstarting your interest in a given field, and it has plenty of references, too.
Olin? Too bad they screwed up their endowment and have to charge tuition now. I wonder if that will affect the quality of the student body. But Olin was definitely a try at "instant elite."
Obviously we see that at some level. "He's a college man" doesn't have the cache it did in 1920.
Getting into harvard has very little to do with smarts and has everything to do with the circumstances you were born into.
That said, this particular article is hyperbole, as creating a institutional brand like Harvard is something you do not say you are going to do. A great example of this in recent history is Y-Combinator.
The perception of quality comes from actual quality.
> A degree [at Minerva] will cost less than half the average top-end private education, which is now over $50,000 a year
At Harvard today, the minority of students pay full price. Over 70% of the undergraduate student body are on scholarship. Notably, if your family earns less than $65,000 per year you will pay nothing to attend.
Minerva wants to charge students $20,000. There is, as far as I can tell, no financial aid policy or bursaries available. And why would there be - Minerva is, after all, for-profit.
If your family is at or below the median household income in the US then Minerva is an extremely expensive proposition. Whereas at Harvard, and many other colleges, it's free.
For that reason alone, the value of being "from Harvard" is greater than being "from Berkeley".
We all live in "that world", it's not a choice ..
$200k is nothing, really, in the long term. It's one or two years of salary, whether you've gone to Harvard or Berkeley. It's the non-salary aspects that make the Harvard degree (not education) more valuable.
What do you mean by this? Are you talking about starting a startup? You could fund your own company for $240k and work on multiple ideas in that time (assuming your first few ideas fail quickly).
Where are you getting the $240k? If you could easily get a loan for that amount to do "whatever you want" instead of for higher education, a lot more people would be doing it.
How do you get a $240k loan if you are not studying at Harvard or a similar school?
I am not sure if aid and scholarship are the same thing. But according to this http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/1/26/diversity-lack-f... Over 45% of students dont even qualify for aid because their parental income is over $200,000
" we come to the stunning conclusion that approximately 45.6 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from families with incomes above $200,000, placing them in the top 3.8 percent of American households. Even more shockingly, only about 4 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from the bottom quintile of U.S. incomes and a mere 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles of U.S. incomes."
Which also means that over half the students wouldn't care much about the cost of tuition.
[0] http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/09/pf/college/no-loan_financial...
At most Ivy Leagues it effectively is. Harvard also has a 'no debt' policy, so that aid really does have very few strings attached. The Crimson article you linked to uses data from 2010/11, whereas I'm using the latest figures from the admissions office.
If you were to ask recent top graduates about 6 months into their first job what basic useful things they learned that they should have or could have learned in school I think you would find many recurring themes.
Why are students forced to unnecessarily learn things the hard way?
A couple of my friends attend Green College[0] at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I crashed in their residence room for two nights during a cross-Canada road trip at the end of July.
The short time at Green College restored my love of higher education, which had been flagging toward the end of a drawn-out CS degree at the University of Calgary. Every morning the students meet for breakfast at a hall in the center of the residence compound, between 7 and 9. This is much earlier than my usual wakeup time, which hovers between 10 and 11. Green College has students from a wide variety of disciplines, and discussions accompanying the meal were a general mash of ideas far outside what I would ever encounter when hanging around my school's CS labs. It was a joy to participate.
The experience very clearly communicated to me that this is what I've been missing. Education in a vacuum is horrendously dull when compared to all these ideas bumping into each other around the breakfast table. It's inspiring; without the social aspect, school is reduced to jumping through hoops and learning the secrets behind magic tricks.
The idea of forming a close-knit community of students then transposing it to cities around the world has me grinning. Were I younger and capable of meeting the admission requirements...
[0] http://www.greencollege.ubc.ca/
But these experiences are quite expensive. It is not clear that they scale to our current egalitarian and pragmatic educational system.
If he went to Wharton Business school for undergrad, he does not have a liberal-arts education. History and literature are liberal arts, business is not. Yet he blames his lack of growth during undergrad years on the very same:
>My first six months, what did the consulting firm teach me? They didn't teach me the basics of how they do business. They taught me how to think. I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude. I didn't have habits of mind that a liberal arts education was supposed to have given me.
Perhaps he thinks he studied the liberal arts because he majored in Economics. But majoring in Economics within a business school is, as Wharton's website proclaims, a specialized, business-focused approach, which the site's copy actually contrasts with "a liberal arts setting." [1]
Such programs can't be grudged for failing to cultivate the mind, as their sole aim is "appl[ying] business methods and economic theory to real-world problems." Business programs will always fall-short of real-world experience in teaching business skills, since one is actually real.
If he had studied an actual "liberal art" like philosophy or history or French, he might have gotten the mental development that his program apparently lacked. I think those of us who truly delved into liberal arts programs, with the accompanying rigor, breadth of study, and dedication to teaching, found them a great boon to our mental capacities.
Edit: Another trend that's been irking me lately: the idea that you can "teach" someone to think through "critical thinking" classes:
>In the Nelson dream curriculum, all incoming students take the same four yearlong courses. His common core won't make students read the Great Books. "We want to teach you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ."
There's a reason that "Communications" programs have a reputation for being full of fluff. If you want to learn how to communicate, communicate. Trying to "study" it isn't get to help you personally. If you want to learn how to write, write about any subject, and have your teacher tear your work apart. Communications skills are taught through experience. You can't sit down and "learn" writing skills.
[1] http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/academic-excellence/B...
This isn't a question of "mental development" but of having useful things pointed out so that you don't have to suffer whatever damage accrues from not knowing them.
>"My first six months, what did the consulting firm teach me? They didn't teach me the basics of how they do business. They taught me how to think. I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude.
and then his goals for Minerva:
>"We want to teach you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ."
Both these comments suggest that he's looking to improve the core critical thinking skills of his students. Indeed, he explicitly says as much. Thinking, reading, writing...these are historically fundamental goals of education.
They are not, however, merely "useful things" which can be pointed out. You cannot simply sit down and "learn" how to read/write/think, anymore than you be can taught a foreign language without actually speaking or writing it, or programming without coding.
They are "basic" in the sense that they form a foundation for other skills. What he seems to be aiming for is not "basic" in the sense that you use, which seems to cover tasks like "how to perform this financial function" or "how to use this technology." (But maybe that's not the sense you're using "basic in).
> I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude.
I suspect in these cases he learned some useful trick or mode of thinking in a matter of minutes by having someone point it out to him. Not so much "basic" as "simple".
And irrespective of whatever Minerva claims to do I think it is clear that many "elite" graduates feel there are simple, useful things not being taught in schools which ought to be.
I, like you, have a very hard time understanding the logic behind this. I don't have any idea how one could go about teaching a young person to think critically by sitting them down and saying, "to think critically, do A, B, C". I'm all for experimentation, and if Nelson thinks that he can do it better, I'll gladly give him the benefit of the doubt and wait for the data. I think it's hubris of the highest order for him to say that he's going to teach people to think. What he will do if he's successful is teach people how to compete in a modern technological economy, which is certainly a laudable goal.
Taking this a step further and claiming as he seems to that the Great Books are no longer necessary for students to learn critical thought seems absurd.
Just for the record as people read my comment, I will admit to being as biased as is possible to be on this subject, having gone to both the most liberal arty of all the liberal arts colleges[1] and a large liberal arts university[2].
[1] http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/admissions/learnmore/admission...
[2] https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/academics/
Technologists can have dumb ideas too, of course. But this particular dumb idea doesn't come across as a techie's idea.
There's a reason that "Communications" programs have a reputation for being full of fluff. If you want to learn how to communicate, communicate. Trying to "study" it isn't get to help you personally.
I think this is awfully pedantic. Your are making an assumption that for some reason this class won't involve communication, and will just involve studying, based on a quoted snippet of what Ben Nelson said.
>as opposed to receiving a generalized American-style "liberal arts education" (referring to the uniquely American method of having a core curriculum and general education requirements)
Neither a core curriculum nor general education requirements qualify an education as "liberal." At least, they shouldn't. The liberal arts are subjects, first and foremost. The humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences. Their power lies in their great history of consideration throughout civilization, their prevailing and constant influence on the affairs of the world, and the nuanced questions that lie at their center.
The liberal arts are inherently inter-disciplinary, and thus invite exposure to more than one. Moreover, the "teaching" of the liberal arts is far different than "research" in the liberal arts, a point often missed in larger university settings. If they are not taught well, you're not receiving an education of any sort.
I'm not criticizing Nelson's education, or at least, don't mean to. But what he's criticizing is not what he thinks. It may be that pre-professional economics degrees normally do impart critical thinking skills. Nelson seems to think they don't. I don't really care; what I know is that these requirements don't meet the demands of the liberal arts: http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/academic-excellence/f...
Nelson seems to think they don't.
You're seriously misinterpreting what he says about how modern degrees don't impart critical thinking skills. His criticism is directed at Ivy League educations in general - not only pre-professional degrees but also liberal arts degrees: "I didn't have habits of mind that a liberal arts education was supposed to have given me. And not only did I not have it, none of my other colleagues had it—people who had graduated from Princeton and Harvard and Yale." It bears noting that Harvard has no pre-professional degrees except engineering (no business degree); it's clear his criticism is drawn out of his disappointment that a liberal arts education was supposed to give him and his colleagues critical thinking skills, but failed to do so.
Furthermore, the instant I looked at the link you posted, I could already tell that that wasn't actually the degree requirements for Wharton (I could tell that those were the requirements for a major but not for graduation). So that's a really poor example. The full degree and graduation requirements are listed here: https://spike.wharton.upenn.edu/ugrprogram/advising/curricul...
Also, his reductionist approach to higher education means Minerva will lose a lot of the quality of education and community that makes a top-tier program worthwhile.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos for more, and http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/up-against-t... for the story of one student who went through this process, Yale graduate and talk show host Dick Cavett.
That said, one possible hassle I can see with this plan is that to bootstrap an "elite" reputation, and deliver these big core courses in a useful way, you're going to need some amazing professors, and as a PhD candidate with ambitions of teaching, I'm not sure I'd want to work for this university. Teaching via email and video lectures is unappealing, and (more importantly for catching top talent), I don't think it would be a good career move - they don't have the elite reputation yet, and I feel like at the end of my "flexible short term", I'd have trouble convincing a more traditional university that my experience wasn't from some online diploma mill.
State schools. They rock. And they're (relatively) cheap. For example, in-state tuition at the University of Texas is about $10k/yr.
Why is this the case? Is teaching basically the last great guild?
That's one of the key things that separates a great university from a teaching college. Investments in the long-term careers of research professors. Teaching is just one of their responsibilities; they also research and publish. Same for their grad students. That takes subsidies that come in part out of undergrad tuition.
So sure, if you cut that out you're going to have cheaper tuition. But if this model were actually adopted on a wide scale, you'd also dry up the supply of great professors.
As an exceptional case it might work, but only by exploiting the investments of other institutions. Very "silicon valley libertarian" in that respect.
At a place like MIT or Caltech, almost all the professors are also researchers. Undergraduates have a lot of opportunity to get involved in that research.
What research opportunities will be available for Minerva students?
At a place like MIT or Caltech, almost all professors are also researchers. They really like research, and teaching is kind of a drag.
What learning opportunities will be available for MIT or Caltech students?
Now, admittedly, the above institutions take teaching seriously, and the students will get a great experience. But the same isn't true in many public flagship universities where professors prioritize research over teaching.
That being said, I prefer being a researcher to being a teacher, which is probably why I'm not a professor.
Someone has not paid much attention to the past 20-30 years of developments. Faculty salaries are a falling proportion of university spending. The current cost drivers are administration (both size and salaries) and capital outlays. For example, the University of California system spends only 30% of its budget on faculty salaries (that includes non-tenured faculty). And faculty are rarely, with the exception of med schools employing star surgeons, among a university's most highly paid employees. Look at what the top administrators make in comparison.
Brilliant.