Why I made the questionable decision to join a 'startup' university: Students

Minerva students

I graduated from a… peculiar Brazilian high school. Brazil has terrible statistics on academic achievement across the board, but my high school was an outlier. Its alumni won 8 of the 15 gold IMO medals Brazilians have ever been awarded (8 of the 10 earned since its first in 1998). The ratios are similar for other international STEM competitions. Good friends went to MIT and CMU, acquaintances went to Stanford, Harvard, and so on. The school was not selective; anyone who could afford it or who did well enough in a scholarship exam to afford it could attend, if they passed a minimum reading+math competency exam. The school just had the best resources in the country for students who wanted to excel at olympiads, and some of the best for students who wanted to go abroad.

All this is to say: I know what a T5 institution student looks like. This helps me compare Minerva students to them.

The skill distribution

Unfortunately, the skill distribution at Minerva is far from constant. Unfortunate, because the trend hasn't been strictly in the "more selective"/"higher skill"/"higher quality" direction. The class of 2019 (known as "M19") was the first of all to graduate, and it was hand-picked. They had some unreplicable selection effects - it is probably the highest-talent-density class graduated to this day. Instead of getting more selective (as acceptance rates would suggest), Minerva increased its class size for the 2020 and 2021 classes, before sizing back down for 2022 (my class). There are rumors of rapidly increasing cohort sizes to brighten the university's financial future. All this means the selectivity of Minerva classes has oscillated, and will continue to do so in the near to medium term.

(I was a TA for the only quantitative core course for freshmen. It was obvious that skill oscillated between cohorts.)

Does this matter? Of course. At Minerva specifically, it matters because:

1. Peer quality is a powerful motivator
2. The skill distribution changes your apparent option set

Minerva’s name won’t do you any favors, unlike a traditional elite university. Your classmates will be the ones to introduce you to ideas and opportunities that can actually “change your life.” This is truer still if you are the sort that doesn’t know what you want to do with said life (most college students?). Having a try-hard roommate working toward the most competitive internships from their first year can push you to try harder yourself.

Elite US universities select for some mix of personality, extracurriculars, and academic achievement/cognitive capacity, and extracurriculars in particular are strongly correlated with family socioeconomic status. Minerva tries its best to evaluate applicants from all over on a level ground, and since most students are from countries poorer than the US, there’s a background skew. Student extracurriculars more often involve cheap leadership activities than, say, expensive varsity sports leagues.

This SES skew, along with the limited majors Minerva offers, means academic backgrounds start and end lower variance than at other institutions. More students want/need jobs to pay off their loans. Most will end up doing CS. Some will do consulting or finance. A fortunate or martyrish few go into the arts.

All this affects your perception of what you can do. A brave few students insist on the hard sciences and find labs to join over the summer, manage to get into PhD programs after their Bachelors, and build up skills that can’t quite be taught online for now. That’s not the median student. The median student is exposed to a lot of startup talking points when in San Francisco, learns to code, and gets a job as a software engineer or product manager.

Besides limiting your apparent options, the small class size of uncertain selectivity also limits the apparent variance of outcomes in different fields. There are very few competitive programmers, despite the abundance of SWEs. A single-digit number of alumni have made it to the most competitive jobs in quantitative finance, low double-digits to top-tier STEM PhDs. There are no top olympiad competitors, because those tend to end up at selective elite institutions.

Perhaps that would change if Minerva took in more people.

Class size

The class size of ~150 is supposedly based on Dunbar's number - the famous "cognitive limit" to how many people with whom you can have stable relationships.

I’ve changed my mind on class size since graduating and getting to know people attending UC Berkeley. This is personal preference, but you should know your priorities and prefer consistently.

Small class sizes mean a sense of community. Large class sizes mean increasing the odds you’ll find your community.