A San Francisco start-up aiming to offer an Ivy League-level education at a fraction of the cost of elite US colleges has become more selective than Harvard or Yale in its third year of operation.
Minerva, whose students move between California, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Bangalore, Istanbul and London while studying a largely online curriculum, will announce this week that it received more than 16,000 applications from 50 countries for 306 places, for an acceptance rate of just 1.9 per cent.
Harvard last week said it had accepted a record low 5.2 per cent of the 39,000 applicants for its class of 2020, making it the most selective of the Ivy League universities. Yale’s acceptance rate stands at 6.3 per cent and Stanford, which is outside the traditional Ivy League grouping of prestigious colleges, accepts only 4.7 per cent.