On Higher Education, with Minerva University founder Ben Nelson

Welcome to the second episode of Patterns and Stories. Joining us today is Ben Nelson, the founder of Minerva University, an independent, non-profit educational institution whose classes are conducted as seminars capped at 19 students, who travel to and live together in residential housing in a new country each semester, starting their education in San Francisco, and then living in Seoul, Taipei, Hyderabad, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Berlin, and then ending their program in San Francisco. Ben founded Minerva in 2012, and before that, he was the CEO of Snapfish. We will discuss the assumptions of traditional higher education that Minerva challenged.

We are your hosts, Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik.

The AI-generated transcript was lightly edited for grammar and fluency.

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Highlights:

* By the end of summer, after their last year in high school, a typical high school student has forgotten 60 % of what they've learned in three months. It is an outrageous, colossal failure.

* In order to know something, you have to actually have space and deliberate practice in applying it. [But what the education system is doing is] the equivalent of trying to teach somebody the violin by letting them listen to the music. Even getting a piano and saying, okay, you know, press this key, press that key, press this key, and now you're done. Now you know how to be, now you're a pianist. And it's kind of absurd. Acquiring knowledge is not the same as the ability to use or deploy that knowledge.

* What cannot be replaced by an AI is the learner. Sure, you can easily make the argument that says you can train an AI to deliver content. [...] But what you cannot do is have an AI rewire somebody's neurons, so they learn something they didn't know before. [...] In fact, in an age of AI, when so many of the standard elements are done by the machine, the imperative to know becomes even greater.

* If you don't understand the core principles, you're vastly slower. You need more human resources, more brute force. And you can still be beaten by somebody with vastly fewer resources who understands the core down to first principles.

* So, how does AI actually improve learning? Well, first and foremost, by enhancing the teacher's capability.

* We're finally admitting that there is a deep rot at the core of secondary and post-secondary education, and that the only way to address it isn't with incremental tools for the teachers and professors that are stuck in the system, [but] by ensuring that we are providing an ability to reform the system and therefore uplift teachers, professors, and university and high school administrators to actually reform. And that's the core of what we're trying to do at Minerva.

Full transcript:

Ismail (00:00)

Today, we have Ben Nelson, founder of Minerva University, as our second guest on the podcast, Patterns and Stories. Welcome, Ben, to the podcast.

I was just going through the book about innovative universities, and there is a chapter dedicated to Minerva, which mentions the pitch you made to Larry Summers. Maybe you could just recount a little bit from that story, where you are, and how Minerva moved and developed.

Ben Nelson (00:41)

Sure, happy to. For those of you who may not know, Minerva was built as a prototype university – a university that demonstrates to the rest of the world what is possible when you reimagine learning and center it on wisdom or systems thinking, as opposed to