Student Achievement

All Minerva classes are synchronous and conducted on the Forum™ virtual learning platform. Seminars are capped at 20 students and focus on discussion, debate, and collaborative work sessions. This active learning approach stimulates deep cognition, enhancing your understanding of course material and furthering your ability to apply concepts to unfamiliar situations in novel ways.

In each session, your professor prompts students to participate in the lively exchange of ideas and deep engagement with course material that are the hallmarks of active learning. Classes include breakout groups, polls, simulations, and presentations, which give you numerous opportunities to develop and apply practical knowledge that is both relevant to your career and critical for the world.

One of the key characteristics of Minerva University is its global character. Students come to Minerva from all over the world to study and live in seven major world cities during the four-year undergraduate program. All undergraduate students are full-time.


We have 618 students studying in the 2020-2021 Academic Year. This year students are studying in San Francisco, Berlin, and London in the Fall and San Francisco, Taipei, and Seoul. Because of the pandemic, approximately a quarter of our students are studying remotely. They come from approximately 60 different countries, with no single country dominating the enrollment. They are approximately half men and half women.

As demonstrated in the table below, Minerva's retention overall is currently at 92% (636+104+119/ 934). Retention from first year to second year for each cohort has ranged from 88% to 98%.

Minerva expects all undergraduate students to meet Degree Learning Objectives (DLOs.) These DLOs are introduced in the first-year Cornerstone courses and consist of “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts” (HCs,) which are applied and assessed throughout the four years of study. A habit of mind is a mental skill that comes to be triggered automatically with practice; a foundational concept is fundamental knowledge that is broadly applicable, which typically does require deliberation. Each of the four core competencies, Thinking Critically, Thinking Creatively, Interacting Effectively, and Communicating Effectively, are broken down into more specific aspects (sub-competencies), and each of these aspects, in turn, includes a set of habits of mind and foundational concepts. Minerva uses both internal and external assessments to measure student learning.

The habits of mind and foundational concepts derived from Minerva’s core competencies are introduced in the first-year Cornerstone courses and continue to be assessed over the next three years in every Minerva course. This results in continuous evaluation of student performance on Minerva’s undergraduate degree learning outcomes. Outcome data are analyzed at the end of each year. The Benchmark is set at a benchmark of 3.0 (Knowledge) on the rubric scale of 1-5. Year indicates the cohort’s expected graduation or year of graduation in the case of 2020. Please note that it has been a trend over multiple years that the percentage of students achieving the Benchmark is lower in their first year and increases in subsequent years.

As students continue to be directly assessed in later courses on the habits of mind and foundation concepts introduced in the first-year curriculum, they receive feedback on their ability to transfer (utilize) these outcomes to their upper-division coursework. The percentages are the proportion of students receiving a mean of 3.0 (Knowledge) or higher on the rubric scale of 1–5.