One class of traditional institution is facing a very large challenge due to the two conclusions made above: Higher education systems are not adding a lot of value to students by only teaching hard skills that are very easy to acquire from the internet and must shift their value proposition to continue adding value to the society. The last few years have seen a boom in ed-tech startups, like Coursera, Udacity, and Codecademy, all of which focus heavily on teaching students the skills they need to land or switch jobs.1<\/sup> As content knowledge becomes more accessible, the skill of the modern academic must shift away from being an distributor\u00a0of knowledge to being an integrator of knowledge, creating more personalized conditions that help students learn.2<\/sup><\/p>\n The Minerva Project \u2013 A new globalized way of higher education<\/strong><\/p>\n The Minerva Project and its founder Ben Nelson, the former CEO of Snapfish, are making a very prominent step towards the new way of higher education. What Minerva offers, according to their website, is \u2018an innovative undergraduate program that combines four years of world travel with rigorous, interdisciplinary study\u00a03<\/sup>\u2019.<\/p>\n The founding idea of Minerva is that in a world where information is never more than a click away, what matters most is not what you know. The critical thing is how you analyze and interpret that information. Therefore, the school is strictly against teaching any hard skills. You won\u2019t find any of the typical 101 courses in its freshman curriculum. The first-year students take courses with curious names such as \u201cEmpirical Analysis\u201d and \u201cMultimodal Communication\u201d instead. The entire first year at Minerva is dedicated to teaching three vital things only: critical thinking, creative thinking, and effective communication.1<\/sup><\/p>\n To facilitate the education of world leaders, Minerva Institute offers a global experience facilitated by digital tools and small group learning: All of Minerva\u2019s classes are live seminars with less than 20 students to a professor. All classes are conducted using live video conferencing platform that enables the institute to easily incorporate the latest science of learning techniques – small group learning, instant feedback, polling, etc. After their first year in California, students travel to seven major cities around the world for the rest of their 4-year education. The system values the \u2018city as your campus\u2019 approach to the traditional campus life.4<\/sup><\/p>\n In this business (or teaching, if you will) model, the critical customer (or student) promises of Minerva are accessibility and diversity. Since the school is not limited by campus space, \u00a0once any American or international student passes the bar set by school, they are in. The founder Ben Nelson notes: “What will never happen at Minerva is a student who is qualified who meets our bar but we say, ‘we already have too many of you, so you’re rejected,'”. In alignment with this promise, the school\u2019s annual tuition is only $10,000, much lower than a typical Ivy league program.5<\/sup><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2016\/11\/imrs-2.jpg\")
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