Frank Bruni Comments about Minerva – An Online Liberal Arts College!

The Future of College? - The Atlantic

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, examines Minerva, an online college, and asks is this the future of higher education.   He interviews a recent graduate who praises her experiences.  Here is an excerpt.

“Hundreds of thousands of undergraduates in America won’t be allowed on their campuses this fall, or the campuses welcoming them will be hollowed-out, locked-down, revelry-leeched shadows of their former selves. What kind of college experience is that?

The kind that Natalie Kanter had by design. She did college without the campus — four demanding and exhilarating years of it. And I don’t mean that she lived off campus, commuting in as needed. There was no campus to commute to. No lecture halls. No rec center. No football stadium.

For her and her schoolmates, remote learning wasn’t a crisis-prompted compromise. It was the whole point.

Kanter, 23, belonged to the first graduating class of a sort of start-up college, Minerva, which opened about five years ago. All of its instruction is online, from professors scattered far and wide.

And while students in a given grade live together in a residential building, so that they have peers at hand and a center of gravity, they do so all around the globe, moving periodically to a new city that becomes their new campus, but only temporarily.

Kanter and her roughly 105 classmates spent their first two semesters in San Francisco, where Minerva’s bare-bones administration is, before migrating for one semester each to Berlin, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Hyderabad (India), London and then San Francisco again. Minerva has a footprint — well, more a toe dimple — in each of those places plus Taipei, Taiwan.

It’s defined not by physical structures but by a proprietary, highly interactive digital platform that professors use for their seminars. The seminars are capped at 20 students (but are usually smaller) and emphasize participation to a point where the platform — a far cry from Zoom — shows a professor how long he or she has been droning on.

“Having a campus is one of the least important parts of the university experience,” Kanter, who graduated in May 2019 and now works for the social advocacy organization DoSomething.org, told me.

Yes, she said, the “additional pizazz” of grand buildings, weathered statues and “rubbing the left foot of this or jumping into that fountain when you graduate” might have been nice. But necessary? Not for learning. Not for extracurricular enrichment, to which a campus can sometimes be a cloistering, coddling barrier.

A campus also inflates the cost of college. Tuition, fees, room and board at Minerva are about $32,000 a year — easily half the sticker price of many prestigious private colleges — for students paying full freight, which is only about 20 percent of them. That’s made possible by the absence of gleaming campus structures.”

I wrote about Minerva two years ago and this was my assessment.

“At the time of this writing it is too early to evaluate the experiences of Minerva’s first cohort of students, but the program appears to be a well-thought out alternative to a traditional liberal arts education.  Online technology is the integral facilitator of its pedagogical approaches, its curriculum, and its global context.”

Tony

 

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