(Reuters) – Minerva Schools of KGI doesn’t yet have accreditation, a campus or even a full faculty roster, but it is offering something even Harvard can’t – four years of free tuition for its first matriculating class.

The San Francisco-based Minerva Project, an ambitious effort to remake the higher education model, announced its tuition plan on Tuesday in hopes of attracting some of the world’s most talented and academically competitive students for the class that will enroll in the fall of 2014.

Although many details of the new school are still to be ironed out, students in subsequent years will pay tuition of $10,000 a year along with about $19,000 annually for room and board – still well below the cost of many other top U.S. universities that can run upwards of $50,000 and $60,000 a year.

“Not only are we looking at students who are intellectually brilliant, we are looking for students who have a deep intellectual thought, deep integrative thought, worldliness, excitement about seeing the world, and maturity,” said Minerva founder Ben Nelson, who ran photo service Snapfish until he sold it to Hewlett Packard in 2005.

“We’re asking a lot of them,” he said about the first class of students. “We’re asking them not only to be the first students at Minerva, but to help us shape it.”

That will include providing constant feedback, he said in an interview, adding the first class would have between 15 and 19 students.

More: