Students rotate through seven countries in four years. There is no campus.
Minerva University was founded in 2012 by Ben Nelson, a former CEO of the photo-sharing company Snapfish. Classes began in September 2014 with a founding cohort of 33 students drawn from 14 countries.1 The university has no traditional campus. Students live together in residence halls, rotating through seven cities across four years, including San Francisco, Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, Buenos Aires, London, and Taipei.2
All classes are conducted through a proprietary online platform called the Active Learning Forum. Lectures are eliminated. Every session requires active student participation, and the platform tracks engagement in real time, flagging students who have not spoken.3 Class size is capped at roughly 20 students.
The admissions rate in recent years has hovered below 2 percent, making Minerva more selective than most Ivy League institutions by that measure.4
The curriculum is structured around what Minerva calls "habits of mind and foundational concepts," a set of roughly 100 cognitive skills taught in the first year and applied across all subsequent courses.5 Courses in the second through fourth years are location-integrated, meaning assignments draw on the city where students are living at the time.
Minerva received accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC) and confers bachelor's degrees. In 2021, the Minerva Project announced a partnership with the University of Miami.6 Tuition is set significantly below that of comparable selective universities in the United States.