
The Man Who Would Overthrow Harvard - prostoalex
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578627712224845012.html
======
ahelwer
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...

[0] [http://www.greencollege.ubc.ca/](http://www.greencollege.ubc.ca/)

~~~
da02
Can you provide some examples of the ideas you bumped into? I'm curious since
I've never been in a multi-discipline env like the one you had @ Green.

------
clicks
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.

~~~
argumentum
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.

~~~
bane
We have those and they're generally free. We call them "social clubs" and
"mixers". Heck, Mensa is basically a social club for smart folk.

~~~
dnautics
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".

------
objclxt
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.

~~~
argumentum
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.

~~~
rjbond3rd
No offense to anyone, but I'll take that Berkeley kid any day.

~~~
argumentum
As may I .. that's not the point.

~~~
rjbond3rd
If you're saying "people who matter" value the superficial over substance,
then I'd further conclude that they literally don't matter.

~~~
argumentum
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".

~~~
rjbond3rd
I see what you're saying, but I'm so glad I don't live in that world anymore.

~~~
argumentum
Did you move to Mars?

We all live in "that world", it's not a choice ..

~~~
argonaut
I think rjbond might be referring to the slightly more meritocratic "world" of
SV engineering.

------
abalone
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.

------
MisterBastahrd
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.

Brilliant.

------
chasing
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.

------
_delirium
> 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.

~~~
BruceIV
The top paid public employee in most states is the football coach at one of
the state schools. At most of the others it's the basketball coach.

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rollo_tommasi
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.

------
BruceIV
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.

~~~
chasing
I agree with most of your comment, but I disagree that $20k/yr is a
"reasonable tuition" for what Minerva's offering.

State schools. They rock. And they're (relatively) cheap. For example, in-
state tuition at the University of Texas is about $10k/yr.

~~~
BruceIV
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.

------
Zigurd
> _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."

------
argumentum
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.

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tzs
> 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?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
It cuts both ways:

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.

------
fecklessyouth
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.

[1] [http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/academic-
excellence/B...](http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/academic-
excellence/BS-versus-BA.cfm)

~~~
davidmr
> 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].

[1]
[http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/admissions/learnmore/admission...](http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/admissions/learnmore/admission/program.html)

[2]
[https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/academics/](https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/academics/)

~~~
jacques_chester
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.

------
rayiner
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?

~~~
foobarqux
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?

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bsbechtel
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.

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NotOscarWilde
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.

~~~
realspeech
[http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/](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.

------
bachback
this guy is all about talking - compare that with Udacity or Khan.

------
Tycho
_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?

------
MWil
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.

~~~
smacktoward
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.

See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos)
for more, and [http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/up-
against-t...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/up-against-the-
wall/?hp&_r=0) for the story of one student who went through this process,
Yale graduate and talk show host Dick Cavett.

------
chatmasta
People go to elite universities because they are the best schools.

