Hundreds of thousands of undergraduates in America won’t be allowed on their campuses this fall, or the campuses welcoming them will be hollowed-out, locked-down, revelry-leeched shadows of their former selves. What kind of college experience is that?

The kind that Natalie Kanter had by design. She did college without the campus — four demanding and exhilarating years of it. And I don’t mean that she lived off campus, commuting in as needed. There was no campus to commute to. No lecture halls. No rec center. No football stadium.

For her and her schoolmates, remote learning wasn’t a crisis-prompted compromise. It was the whole point.

Kanter, 23, belonged to the first graduating class of a sort of start-up college, Minerva, which opened about five years ago. All of its instruction is online, from …continued .
[Source: New York Times]