The Minerva Project aims to create a high-status online university. Instead, it may be the sign of a venture-capital bubble in online education.

Harvard, by many measures the most prestigious college in the U.S., has been at it for nearly 400 years. Ben Nelson, founder of an online education startup called the Minerva Project, says he can do equally well in just three.

Minerva is one of the least-publicized but also most well-funded and audacious of the current crop of online education startups. Funded with $25 million from Benchmark Capitalone of the well-known venture-capital firm's largest-ever investmentsMinerva says it will begin accepting applicants in 2015 for an entirely Web-based college program. The resulting undergraduate degree, it promises, will have all the prestige of anything the Ivy League can offer, but at half the cost.

Many people would dismiss Minerva's notion of some sort of instant online Harvard as the fever dream of someone who had sat through one too many TED talks. But the for-profit company's assumptions about how the Internet will change education can be found, to varying degrees, in most of the scores of startups now getting venture money to do instruction online.

The level of venture-capital investments in education has nearly doubled in 2011, and now rivals figures last seen during the dot-com boom. Representative of the crop is Courseraformed by two Stanford computer scientistswhich offers a growing list of free online classes (see The Technology of Massive Open Online Courses). Even though Coursera has no clear plans for how to make money, an investor involved in its initial $16 million financing said other top VCs pleaded by phone and e-mail to get in on the deal, regardless of the price. It's the sort of enthusiasm that often signals a tech investing bubble.

Some of the new online startups are offering free "massive open online courses," or MOOCs, that lead not to a traditional college degree but to a "certification" in a specialized field like computer programming. Minerva, though, is an entirely different pedagogical species. The San Francisco-based company aims at a soup-to-nuts undergraduate education, resulting in a traditional bachelor's degree, but all via the Web, and with all of the social cachet of the country's priciest sheepskin.

It's that last claim that raises the most questions, especially since Nelson, its 36-year-old founder, has no experience in education; his previous gig was with Snapfish, a photo-sharing site bought in 2005 by Hewlett-Packard. But Nelson managed to not only score a huge investment from Benchmarkthe same VC firm that backed the likes of eBay, Yelp, and Mintbut also persuaded a group of A-list luminaries, including former Harvard president Larry Summers, to be on its board of advisors.

They no doubt responded to Nelson's high-energy personality, fully on display in a recent interview in a San Francisco coffee shop. (Minerva not only lacks an ivy-coated administration building; it doesn't even yet have a permanent office.)

Nelsons aim is nothing less than to remake higher education, in part via technology, but also by rethinking the college experience. For example, freshmen won't take traditional introductory classes, but instead will be trained in how to think. Topics will include the likes of complex systems analysis and "multi-modal communications," the latter, says Nelson, being a 21st century update on the ancient art of rhetoric.

After that, students will branch out, much as they do in a traditional liberal arts college, with a few differences. For one, Minerva won't offer anything resembling a lecture or introductory class; if students want to learn the history of philosophy, they will need to learn it themselves, perhaps by taking a class via Coursera.

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