Ben Nelson is a charter member of the higher education disruption crowd. Its members, often ed-tech entrepreneurs, investors and others promoting alternatives to traditional colleges and universities, believe most institutions are too expensive or ineffective, operate on too small a scale, and fail to innovate and adapt to changes in student demands.
Nelson put his (and others’) money where his mouth was nearly a decade ago when he founded the Minerva Project, which strove to outperform the nation’s best-known and most selective institutions by creating a new institution from scratch that would enroll students who could apply to Harvard and Stanford Universities but give them a higher-touch, practical education in a blended format that sent them to multiple continents.