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As stated in the article, I think the hardest barrier for this project will simply be the lack of branding. College has pretty much boiled down to institutional

by dd367 12y ago

As stated in the article, I think the hardest barrier for this project will simply be the lack of branding. College has pretty much boiled down to institutional prestige and the credential that comes with it. Gauging "success" within this system seems hard. It's hard to attribute success to a university when it's prestige ends up determining the calibre of its student body in the first place. And a clear feedback loop exists here. On account of the prestige associated with their college, students end up leading illustrious careers. Their "success" is a combination of their inherent pre-college skill and their credential, one could say. Now, given the Minerva project, where the feedback loop doesn't exist and the quality of students are towards the higher side, how does one begin to test the efficiency of a new system without any proper control experiment? Because of this difficulty in assessing the success or failure of this project, even though I hope and believe it works well, the general opinion might be that it failed.

prostoalex 12y ago
> College has pretty much boiled down to institutional prestige and the credential that comes with it. For top 50 maybe. But outside the first page of US News report there's very little differentiation. Quick, what's the difference between Minnesota State University, Mankato and California State University, Fullerton, and which one is more prestigious?
mathattack 12y ago
The key will be to see where the second (non-pilot) graduates go. There is room at the top for elite for-profit school. Look at http://www.avenues.org/ http://www.avenues.org/ as a N-12 example. Does it work on a large scale? That's the tougher question.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
Whenever you start something new that is supposed to have prestige, you will always run into the same problems that you have when trying to build both sides of a market. In this case I think they would benefit from artificially restricting supply in order to raise entry barriers to highest performers. I think it is key also to stack the deck from the beginning with prestigious people already affiliated with high status institutions who others want to be associated with but who are also high status on their own - that means scavenging from the institutions which are already high status. Seems like Minerva has been able to do that successfully already.

by dd367 12y ago

prostoalex 12y ago

> College has pretty much boiled down to institutional prestige and the credential that comes with it. For top 50 maybe. But outside the first page of US News report there's very little differentiation. Quick, what's the difference between Minnesota State University, Mankato and California State University, Fullerton, and which one is more prestigious?

mathattack 12y ago

The key will be to see where the second (non-pilot) graduates go. There is room at the top for elite for-profit school. Look at http://www.avenues.org/ http://www.avenues.org/ as a N-12 example. Does it work on a large scale? That's the tougher question.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

Whenever you start something new that is supposed to have prestige, you will always run into the same problems that you have when trying to build both sides of a market. In this case I think they would benefit from artificially restricting supply in order to raise entry barriers to highest performers. I think it is key also to stack the deck from the beginning with prestigious people already affiliated with high status institutions who others want to be associated with but who are also high status on their own - that means scavenging from the institutions which are already high status. Seems like Minerva has been able to do that successfully already.