Minerva began with a clear and audacious vision: build the best university in the world, using first principles to reinvent the entire higher education model. Our goal was to deliver an outstanding learning experience for the highest performing students, and to provide an example for other institutions to aspire to.
We expressed this vision with a two-word mantra: Achieving Extraordinary. This simple concept inspired a small, multidisciplinary team to accomplish what many thought was impossible.
Today, Minerva University is recognized as the most selective and the most innovative university in the world. That same spirit animates Minerva Project as we collaborate to realize the second part of the vision: helping others reinvent themselves.
We are the only organization focused on global education reform.
Minerva Project has propelled the creation of dozens of new programs, colleges, and entirely new universities. Each of these partnerships contributes to reshaping global education systems in order to elevate learning, enhance wisdom, and improve the human condition.
Ours is a humanist calling. We recognize that talent is distributed around the world, but access to high-quality learning is concentrated, closely mirroring the concentration of global wealth. Minerva aims to change this, significantly expanding access to a new, more effective way of learning. We are here to prepare the next generations of leaders, innovators, and global citizens with critical wisdom — the ability to readily apply knowledge to unfamiliar challenges, to make informed decisions, and to continuously consider the interconnected nature of life on earth — in order to enact positive, consequential change.
We recognize that our mission is ambitious and cannot be accomplished by one organization alone, regardless of its scale or success. Our vision is inclusive: to galvanize a movement of like-minded visionaries, who are committed to meaningful education reform and ready to undertake the difficult work needed to achieve it.
By expanding through partnerships, we can foster a heterogenous ecosystem of individuals and organizations, which shares a belief in the importance of critical wisdom. We can act expansively and urgently, driving change in multiple arenas at once. We can harness the power of multiple minds to tackle the massive and increasingly complex challenges we face.
Minerva is focused on accelerating the acquisition of critical wisdom by developing universal skills instead of imparting information. Our approach, a direct application of the educational sciences, dramatically improves learning outcomes compared to traditional systems, including better understanding, retention, recall, and the ability to transfer knowledge across domains and contexts.
We believe that ad-hoc or small-scale interventions, which target specific aspects of the system are doomed to incrementalism or outright failure. It is only through comprehensive reform that addresses curriculum, instruction, and assessment — as well as surrounding concerns such as equitable admissions and sustainable economics — that we can address the full scope of the change society needs.