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With $25M From Benchmark And Larry Summers Advising, Can Minerva Build An Online Ivy?
Well, we’ve said it before: Technology is changing education. It’s flipping the classroom, bringing instructional videos to the masses, and dragging online higher education into legitimacy. Investors have begun to hear the call, as was evidenced today when Benchmark Capital made its largest seed investment to date — $25 million — in a startup/university called The Minerva Project.
Sure, it’s not quite the $41 million Color raised pre-launch, but it’s certainly head-turning for an education startup. Hopefully it can avoid the rough early start and crushing expectations that come along with big seed rounds. To help it take flight, the startup is announcing that Larry Summers, former Harvard President and U.S. Secretary of Treasury will chair its advisory board.
At first blush, with this kind of big, early funding, well-known names, and outsized ambition, the project is intriguing to say the least, if not full of bravado. What do I mean? Well, describing itself as “the first elite American University to be launched in more than a century,” The Minerva Project is aiming to rethink the role of colleges and universities, taking into account the ways in which the Web has completely altered the distribution of and access to information.
Minerva Founder and CEO Ben Nelson (who is also the former CEO of Snapfish) points out the fact that the resources of the country’s elite universities are already constrained, as he cites the example of Yale, which recently made the decision to add 250 students to its incoming class. Doing so cost the top university a quarter of a billion dollars. Albeit just one example, the tuition rates at both colleges and universities is rising, saddling students with debt that often takes years, if not decades, to pay off.
By creating an educational experience that is built from online resources, Nelson says that Minerva won’t be subject to the same scarcity of resources that besets institutions today. Of course, it’s always easier to be the metaphorical new kid in school and stand on the shoulders of giants, even if those giants are getting old. An online approach to education also means that Minerva will be offering a tuition that the CEO says “is half of what it is for top colleges.”
What else is it about this new project that has attracted the attention of investors and financial gurus like Larry Summers? The Minerva Project aims to offer a liberal arts education that is defined by an “extraordinarily rigorous” learning and admissions process. Not only does Minerva want to attract the same bright young minds that attend Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, it wants a global student body, both at home and abroad.
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Sure, it’s not quite the $41 million Color raised pre-launch, but it’s certainly head-turning for an education startup. Hopefully it can avoid the rough early start and crushing expectations that come along with big seed rounds. To help it take flight, the startup is announcing that Larry Summers, former Harvard President and U.S. Secretary of Treasury will chair its advisory board.
At first blush, with this kind of big, early funding, well-known names, and outsized ambition, the project is intriguing to say the least, if not full of bravado. What do I mean? Well, describing itself as “the first elite American University to be launched in more than a century,” The Minerva Project is aiming to rethink the role of colleges and universities, taking into account the ways in which the Web has completely altered the distribution of and access to information.
Minerva Founder and CEO Ben Nelson (who is also the former CEO of Snapfish) points out the fact that the resources of the country’s elite universities are already constrained, as he cites the example of Yale, which recently made the decision to add 250 students to its incoming class. Doing so cost the top university a quarter of a billion dollars. Albeit just one example, the tuition rates at both colleges and universities is rising, saddling students with debt that often takes years, if not decades, to pay off.
By creating an educational experience that is built from online resources, Nelson says that Minerva won’t be subject to the same scarcity of resources that besets institutions today. Of course, it’s always easier to be the metaphorical new kid in school and stand on the shoulders of giants, even if those giants are getting old. An online approach to education also means that Minerva will be offering a tuition that the CEO says “is half of what it is for top colleges.”
What else is it about this new project that has attracted the attention of investors and financial gurus like Larry Summers? The Minerva Project aims to offer a liberal arts education that is defined by an “extraordinarily rigorous” learning and admissions process. Not only does Minerva want to attract the same bright young minds that attend Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, it wants a global student body, both at home and abroad.
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