The Role of Higher Education in the Age of AI

12 October 2026

Ben Nelson, Founder & CEO at Minerva® examines the need for human development to make the most of AI.

The age of AI poses a deep conundrum for societies: how to realize its extant and potential benefits, without sacrificing human agency or sublimating human value in service of efficiency and economic gain. To properly tackle this daunting challenge and ameliorate AI’s frequently cited downsides, the higher education system must be fundamentally reformed.

I began this effort 16 years ago when I founded Minerva Project, then built its first full-fledged prototype, Minerva University. My team and I started from first principles to reimagine every aspect of the university experience, from outreach and admissions through commencement. The results have been profound. Not only is it the first university launched since the nineteenth century to achieve a global #1 ranking, its graduates have made remarkable impacts on nearly every path they’ve pursued. But we did not stop there.

Since 2018, Minerva Project has been working with partner institutions to help them adopt the core academic model we pioneered, while adapting it to their specific students and programs. Our partners have amended and overhauled existing programs, created entirely new ones, and undertaken complete institutional transformations. We’ve reached more than 50,000 learners, across 30 institutions and twelve countries, with programs we’ve designed. In each case we are seeing similarly profound student achievements.

Unfortunately, I believe these interventions are insufficient to address the urgent needs of students and society today. We need to continue this valuable work, while also acting more boldly, more broadly. 

By establishing the Minerva University System, we will rapidly expand our reform effort. We will implement the next generation of our comprehensive institutional model in a range of contexts, to serve hundreds of thousands of students around the globe. This model centers the acquisition of durable human skills that can be transferred across disciplines and industries, and applied to entirely novel situations.

Human abilities, including discernment, ethics, emotional intelligence, inventiveness, and adaptability are becoming paramount, not only for career success, but for effective civic engagement, and quite possibly, human survival. Using evidence-based pedagogy and assessment practices, the model introduces and reinforces more than 80 measurable learning outcomes. Student application of these skills is then scored, gathered, managed, and shared across the entire learning journey. As students progress, the applications become more challenging and the contexts more sophisticated. A key metric for the ongoing evaluation of authentic learning is the variety of dimensions across which students are able to transfer their skills. Are they being applied in situations where their use is prompted or unprompted? Are they used in one discipline or across many, for critique or for production, is use unplanned or deliberative? The more of these dimensions a person is capable of transferring skills among, the more useful — and habitual — they become.

As governments, large technology companies, and the workforce at large barrel headlong into an unpredictable future shaped by pervasive AI, higher education is a last line of defense. We need to scale the acceleration of human intellectual development that Minerva has proven can be done. Our future depends on it.