The college with the lowest admissions rate — the most exclusive college in America — is Minerva University, “based out of” San Francisco.
Minerva University accepted its first students in 2014. It represents one of the far too few efforts to establish new institutions, to meet the needs and vision of our time.
Allow me to mention again, to those people with money who might be inspired by the example of Minerva University to create new institutions, that we have a 95% Off Sale on college campuses these days. You should buy one!
Let’s just read Wikipedia here:
Stanford University was, of course, begun by railroad magnate Leland Stanford in 1885. It too was innovative in its time. In the mid-19th century, the spread of the Industrial Revolution made the Renaissance-era “Liberal Arts College” obsolete. The “Liberal Arts College” of the early 19th century was a small organization, often with less than 100 students, that studied a fixed curriculum that hadn’t changed in centuries. It consisted of training in Greek and Latin, accompanied by reading of classic texts in Greek and Latin. This had proved to be a valuable and effective curriculum. It was the training that the American Founders had, and we can see what fine minds it produced. But, in the midst of the science and technology boom of the late 19th century, it became ridiculous. The best young people should be studying steam engineering, steelmaking, shipbuilding and petroleum drilling, not the poetry of Horace in the original Latin.
Thus the “college” became a “university,” with a much wider-ranging set of offerings. With this came choice — some young people would specialize in Chemistry or Civil Engineering. Even those whose preferences tended toward “Liberal Arts,” and away from what were essentially vocational skills (chemistry and civil engineering), wanted to study the History and Government of their time, or at least the previous 500 years, not discuss Thucydides in the original Greek.
Already by the 1920s, some people recognized that such a disorganized buffet menu of possibilities lost the advantages of the fixed curriculum; and that studying ancient texts in the original Greek and Latin did provide a training in non-vocational understanding, with great value and benefits, that was not being replaced by Chemistry. Young people became skilled chemists, but the kind of Great Men who founded America, or who served as its Presidents in the late 19th century, were becoming scarce among the younger generation.
The result was the midcentury Great Books efforts of people like Chicago University president Robert Hutchins, or Mortimer Adler. But even Mortimer Adler didn’t insist on reading ancient texts in their original languages. His Great Books of the Western World is entirely in English translation. But by then, the Leftist Communist influence, imported from Germany, had already corrupted the Universities to a point that made the efforts of Hutchins or Adler somewhat irrelevant. It would have been fine, if a young person could become a chemist without becoming a communist as well.
The nice thing about today’s Tech Bro-led efforts in higher education, is that these people have money, and they also know how to start new organizations. The problem is that they are mostly political doofuses, coasting along on the Leftist brainwashing that they received in college.
But if these Tech Bro-class idiots ever get a clue, they might be a new force to be reckoned with. Nicole Shanahan, wife of Google founder Sergei Brin, and Robert Kennnedy Jr.’s running mate in the 2024 election, has been telling it like she sees it.
