Hello Francois...
Like you, it took me some time to find the same link from the prnewswire in order to engage with this thread's dialectic. I've been following the Minerva Project online since inception in 2012. I've watched them follow the trends that began with globalization of their model to where they are today, focusing on targeting the college prep market.
Outcomes are scant and the kind of metrics academics are used to making sense of the world are not a part of the websites Marketing thrust. This is quite obvious to me. The book and the website are clearly targeting the eyeballs and sensibilities of GenZ and their parents that are looking at the future of education and how they can leverage the new models for success.
My insights are thus. The 20th century higher education model is well...suited for the 20th century. Specifically in the USA and the Commonwealth nations, all those public universities, private colleges, professional schools, land grant research universities, community colleges et al that are carryovers from the 20th century are now faced with the reality of: shrinking growth, declining enrollments, misguided curricular modeling, reduced funding and new models for the movement of information, people, goods and capital around the world. This is also true in places like Japan, South Korea, France, Italy, UK Australia and many other developed economies.
The shrinking growth is made of a few phenomena in my understanding of the new new. The baby boom generation is now well into their retirement years and their children (the largest cohort of students ever to move through the education system) are now all graduated. This demographic reality is at the heart of shrinking education growth worldwide. Minerva is smart in that they know where the financial sweet spot of the education market lies. The targeting of specifically high-school students and their parents are the best way to grow the highest revenues when playing in the education sector. They are capitalists who are offering a service in exchange for money. Nothing more, nothing less. It appears they have developed their own methods with the new technologies of online learning and are offering them as a competitive model against the traditional 20th century model of high infrastructure cost, physical campus based communities that support traditional tropes and values of "higher education". The partnering that they are now involved with aims to bolster their profile and spread their newfound methods to more traditional educational institutions that are now struggling with the new forms of online edu.
The misguided curricular modeling that we are seeing now as the baby boomer administrators and faculty come to the end of their tenures while employed by their respective institutions is evident. Ever since the 1960s or so, the insertion of the post-modern into the curricula of learning organizations has taken root and changed the priorities of education in the developed world. The best example of this kind of perspective can be observed in the screed by Carma Gorman here in this thread. Academics who have adopted Social Justice modeling as applied to education have tipped the political scales far to the left in education and we are now seeing how it is effecting all that has been built over the span of the 20th century. (apparently all by white CIS-males).
The reduced funding that every institution of higher learning is now faced with is at the heart of most, if not all Board of Regents meetings that take place on a monthly basis across the developed world. In the USA, states have been receiving less and less from the federal and state levels of government for years now. Grant institutions like the National Science Foundation have increased their grip on the scope of what is to be researched and what is to be funded. This has reduced the amount of capital available that is spread to growing new curriculum and narrowly focusing the remaining dollars on programs that suit the goals of social engineers who are at best technocratic and at worst lost in a world of data collection and manipulation to serve goals that aim at the reduction of services at just about every level of offering. This is also true in other commonwealth nations.
This new virus focused world we now live in is a very good example of how phenomena in the 21st century are being used to shape, nudge and form new behaviors and ways of managing society (new models for the movement of information, people, goods and capital around the world). The rift between China and the United States represents a trajectory that has been in the making for some time now. We are now witnessing the decoupling of two economies that have become out of balance with one another and are now going through a period of recalibration with respect to GDP growth, IP protection, technology transfer, skilled labor supply and education accessibility. You need not be on the faculty of just one university in order to understand the now daily changes that are happening to the upcoming fall semester at colleges and universities around the world. Just follow the updates to insidehighered.com and chronicle.com to understand how traditional higher education is being altered and reduced right in front of our very eyes in ways that Minerva saw coming and prepared accordingly.
None of us has all of the answers. Many in academia claim to, and some are terrified of what is coming around the corner. It is evident in their exposure to online social media which is there for everyone to make sense out of by making a few keystrokes. Minerva is one to continue to watch because it represents the efforts of a few who were positioned in such a way at a unique period of time to leverage the changes that are going on around us. When compared to 20th century models of physical campus infrastructure, tenure, large lecture halls, socialized funding schemes that support very specific social engineered outcomes among others, it is very obvious to me that the new forms of higher ed that are willing to be criticized by the 20th century as they build their data models and histories of operation that will satisfy those who write about what others are doing, will be those that take the lead and help educate the work forces of tomorrow in a way that is competitive and cost effective.
I've taken a step back from higher education recently for obvious reasons, and am focusing my time more so in the newer areas of the practice area of design these days. I've just spent a week in San Francisco and 3 weeks in South Korea including to periods of quarantine. What I've learned about the current state of the world, design and design education are still under analysis and reflection. However, once you have devoted over 20 years to higher edu, it is difficult to just leave. I am a lurker here on this PhD listserv. I have more higher education experience than many PhDs and relish my independent status within the design community. I benefit greatly from the perspectives from scholars like yourself who operate in parts of the world that I am not familiar with.
I hope those volcanoes of Africa are inspiring you to keep progressing forward.
Cheers...
Stephen B Allard
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