How to go to college during the coronavirus pandemic

“The richness that students can get by being independent, by figuring out how to navigate a place, is infinitely better for their personal development than the glee club having a room in the student center.” — Ben Nelson, founder of online college Minerva

Hundreds of thousands of undergraduates in America won’t be allowed on their campuses this fall, or the campuses welcoming them will be hollowed-out, lockeddown, revelry-leeched shadows of their former selves. What kind of college experience is that?

The kind that Natalie Kanter had by design. She did college without the campus — four demanding and exhilarating years of it. And I don’t mean that she lived off campus, commuting in as needed. There was no campus to commute to. No lecture halls. No rec center. No football stadium.

For her and her schoolmates, remote learning wasn’t a crisis-prompted compromise. It was the whole point.

Kanter, 23, belonged to the first graduating class of a sort of startup college, Minerva, which opened about five years ago. All of its instruction is online from professors scattered far and wide.

And while students in a given grade live together in a residential building so that they have peers at hand and a center of gravity, they do so all around the globe, moving periodically to a new city that becomes their new campus, but only temporarily.

Kanter and her roughly 105 classmates spent their first two semesters in San Francisco, where Minerva’s bare-bones administration is, before migrating for one semester each to Berlin; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Seoul, South Korea; Hyderabad, India; London; and then San Francisco again. Minerva has a footprint — well, more a toe dimple — in each of those places, plus Taipei, Taiwan.

It’s defined not by physical structures but by a proprietary, highly interactive digital platform that professors use for their seminars. The seminars are capped at 20 students (but are usually smaller) and emphasize participation to a point where the platform — a far cry from Zoom — shows a professor how long he or she has been droning on.

“Having a campus is one of the least important parts of the university experience,” Kanter, who graduated in May 2019 and now works for the social advocacy organization DoSomething.org, told me.

Yes, she said, the “additional pizazz” of grand buildings, weathered statues and “rubbing the left foot of this or jumping into that fountain when you graduate” might have been nice. But necessary? Not for learning. Not for extracurricular enrichment, to which a campus can sometimes be a cloistering, coddling barrier.

A campus also inflates the cost of college. Tuition, fees, and room and board at Minerva are about $32,000 a year — easily half the sticker price of many prestigious private colleges — for students paying full freight, which is only about 20% of them. That’s made possible by the absence of gleaming campus structures.

Mitchell Stevens, an associate professor of education at Stanford, told me that even before the pandemic, higher education “was in many ways being held together by prayers, BandAids, international students and a lot of debt.”

“What the pandemic creates,” he said, “is a kind of existential challenge to so many colleges and universities and business-model presumptions. That’s an opportunity for fairly radical rethinking.”

For many students, Minerva would be a disastrous psychological or practical fit. Others have obligations or limitations that forbid globetrotting.

“The richness that students can get by being independent, by figuring out how to navigate a place, is infinitely better for their personal development than the glee club having a room in the student center,” said Ben Nelson, Minerva’s founder. “They’re entrepreneurial. They can leverage what happens in the real world.”

“But what,” I asked Kanter, “about school spirit?” Does it survive a reliance on wireless and airports?

“It’s reimagined,” she said. “It’s not sitting in bleachers and chanting.” It’s about being in an unconventional group of undaunted adventurers who are having an unfamiliar college experience, in part because they’re fashioning it themselves. “That definitely gives you an adrenaline rush,” she said — a rush that may even be immune to a pandemic.