What if we designed the university from scratch? Lessons from Minerva
What would a university look like if every element were designed around what graduates should be able to do?
For this episode, we invited Ben Nelson, Founder and CEO of Minerva Project and Founder of Minerva University, to explain how Minerva designed a university around transferable learning, shared assessment, and graduates’ ability to act wisely in unfamiliar situations. We also delved into why institutional purpose, community participation, and sustained commitment are essential to meaningful reform across established universities.
You can read a summary below, and listen to the full interview in our podcast:
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Summary
Universities often promise to develop critical thinkers, effective communicators, and capable problem-solvers, yet their structures tend to reward success within individual subjects and courses. Ben Nelson, Founder and CEO of Minerva Project and Founder of Minerva University, argues that this gap between institutional purpose and educational practice sits at the heart of higher education’s difficulties. Minerva was created to demonstrate what a university could become when every part of the learning experience is designed around students’ ability to apply knowledge.
That starting point has implications far beyond one institution. It changes what students practise, how professors assess them, how learning is connected across courses, and how universities judge their contribution to the wider world. For Ben, meaningful reform therefore begins with a deceptively demanding question: what should graduates be able to do, consistently and in unfamiliar situations, after they leave?
Purpose should determine the university’s structure
Ben sees a university’s purpose as an active design principle that should shape its everyday operations. Institutions frequently describe the attributes they want graduates to develop, including critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, empathy, and cultural competence. Their curricula and assessment systems, however, remain organised primarily around academic subjects.
This disconnect matters because the institution rewards what it measures. If transferable abilities are left outside formal teaching and assessment, students are expected to acquire them incidentally. Ben argues that universities should begin with the capabilities their graduates will need, then make structural, organisational, and learning decisions that support those outcomes.
“The most important thing for any institution to learn is to recommit to purpose, and to make its structural, organisational and learning decisions from a point of view of purpose”
At Minerva, that purpose is connected to the decisions graduates will make after university. Educated people often go on to lead organisations, influence policy, vote, and make choices that affect others. Ben believes universities must prepare them to make those decisions wisely. The focus therefore shifts towards the lasting judgement students can exercise in the world.
Demonstrating real learning through transfer
Minerva’s model centres on whether students can apply what they have learned across radically different contexts. Students practise cognitive tools from subject to subject, in academic and real-world settings, across different cultures, and while producing their own work or evaluating the work of others. They must also use those tools both when thinking quickly and when they have time to deliberate.
Ben describes this breadth of application as the foundation of real learning. Recall can show that a student remembers information under familiar conditions, while transfer reveals whether they can recognise when and how to use an idea in a situation they have never encountered.
“It’s what we colloquially know as wisdom, knowing what to do in a situation you’ve never encountered before”
He uses the analogy of learning a sport to expose the limitations of fragmented education. A tennis player develops through deliberate practice, using the same skills against different opponents and under changing conditions. A succession of disconnected coaches would undermine that development. Ben sees conventional education as structurally similar: Teachers deliver separate courses, while the learner is expected to create coherence alone.
Assessment becomes a shared institutional responsibility
Teaching for transfer requires assessment that extends beyond the boundaries of a single class. A summative result can capture performance at one moment and in one context. Minerva instead gathers evidence over time so that students can see what they have mastered, which abilities need occasional reinforcement, and where they require further practice.
This approach changes the professor’s role in assessment. Each educator contributes observations to a common picture of the learner’s development, using a shared framework that follows the student through different subjects and experiences.
“In Minerva programs, the professors assess, but the institution grades, and in many ways the world grades”
The distinction reflects the variety students will encounter beyond university. No single classroom can reproduce the range of situations in which a graduate will need to interpret evidence, communicate with different audiences, anticipate consequences, or solve unfamiliar problems. An institution can come closer by connecting assessments from multiple learning environments and examining the breadth of a student’s application.
For students, this creates a more useful feedback loop. Assessment becomes information that guides future effort instead of a final judgement attached to a completed course. For universities, it requires collaboration among educators and a willingness to treat graduate development as a collective responsibility. The model depends on institutional coherence: professors may make individual assessments, but those judgements contribute to a longer and broader account of learning.
Building independently created space for a different model
Minerva’s decision to establish a new university grew from Ben’s earlier experience leading Snapfish. After the online photography company began providing its system to established retailers, he saw the advantage of first developing a product directly around the people who would use it. Starting with an enterprise partner would have meant designing around that organisation’s assumptions and requirements before the underlying experience had been fully developed.
“The ability to build for the end customer was absolutely paramount to get our product right”
In education, the equivalent end user is the learner. Ben believed that attempting to create Minerva’s model inside an existing university would introduce established expectations before the team could test a fundamentally different approach to curricula, pedagogy, and assessment. Independence gave Minerva room to design an institution around learning science and student outcomes, while still working with partners where accreditation or other capabilities were needed.
This freedom did not remove complexity. Ben acknowledges that Minerva’s first model included many mistakes and required academics joining the organisation to understand a new way of working. Its importance lay in demonstrating that a coherent alternative could operate in practice and improve through continued iteration. Once that model had been developed and refined, Minerva Project could help other universities build programmes using the same curricular, pedagogical, and assessment systems.
Reform begins with a community’s own commitments
Changing an existing university presents different challenges. Ben has encountered demands for universal agreement before work begins, concerns about academic independence, and resistance to externally proposed solutions. The most productive response, in his experience, is to involve the university community in defining its shared purpose before discussing implementation.
At one partner institution, Ben asked around 300 faculty members to identify what graduates should be capable of ten years after completing their studies. Their responses included empathy, cultural competence, the ability to distinguish facts from claims, communication tailored to an audience, and awareness of second- and third-order effects. No one named an academic subject. The exercise made visible the distance between the university’s agreed aspirations and the capabilities its conventional structures explicitly taught.
That recognition can create a foundation for reform without prescribing identical programmes across institutions. Existing subjects can remain, while shared habits of mind and foundational concepts form an overlay that students apply throughout their education. Each university can adapt the model to its context while pursuing outcomes its community has endorsed.
“That transformation process, community-wide transformation process, is crucial to make sure that it is a successful implementation”
Purpose can move discussion beyond anxiety about individual methods. Ben advises advocates to begin with the institution’s responsibility to students and society, agree why change is needed, and then consider implementation. Even with broad support, a meeting, pilot, or isolated course cannot create an enduring system; sustained attention must connect purpose with practice.
Minerva’s experience suggests that higher education can be redesigned when universities define learning through the capabilities graduates can carry into unfamiliar situations. For Ben Nelson, the work demands a clear purpose, coherent systems, community participation, and the persistence to keep refining them over time.nd to concrete problems will be better equipped to turn rapid technological change into academic and societal value.
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