Profile of Frank Olin School of Engineering (Massachusetts)

  • Enterprising Faculty without Tenure

  • Enmeshing Learning and Doing to Teach Engineering

  • Maintaining a ‘Creative’ Culture

There are outposts in higher education that defy classification and take unique approaches to education. Deep Springs in eastern California comes to mind with its select handful of students who attend for two years and combine deep analysis of such texts as Plato’s Republic with a daily dose of ranching and farming. Another one is Cooper Union in New York. Now, among this select group, with its first graduating class in 2006, is the Franklin Olin School of Engineering located in Needham, Massachusetts, next door to Babson College, the leader in undergraduate business entrepreneurship. All three schools were endowed by entrepreneurial men who intently made them tuition free.

Olin, however, does far more than give free tuition to attract the brightest students. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “How to Succeed in Teaching without Lifetime Tenure” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703440004575548320163094444.html by Naomi Riley (November 20-21 Wall Street Journal) the Olin board of trustees set aside $200 million to create an institution to ‘give young engineers the skills to compete globally,’ by creating a ‘culture of innovation.’ The first thing the entire board decided was to not offer tenure to faculty. Richard Miller resigned his tenured position at the University of Iowa engineering school 10 years ago to become Olin’s first president. Mr. Miller said, upon his departure from University of Iowa, “There are more important things than permanent employment,” such as providing nascent engineering students with the education to be global problem solvers.

Olin’s recent graduates have graduated to work for a range of companies such as Microsoft or went on to PhD programs at MIT or UC Berkeley. All told, since its first class graduated in 2006, Olin has had 7 Fulbright Scholars, and around 18 National Science Foundation winners. That means almost 7% of all Olin graduates, over the last 4 years, have gained substantive recognition for undergraduate achievements.

About 18% of Olin’s applicants gain admission. Standardized test scores, GPA, recommendations are reviewed…then Olin does what the Math Olympiad does: it takes from its applicant pool of 900 students around a 190 finalists, and invites them to attend one of the two Candidates Weekends held in February and March. Over the weekend, the finalists break into 5-person teams for design and build projects, general discussion groups, and interviews with Olin student, faculty, and alumni. Of the 190, about 140 are offered admission for a yield of 90. Through this process Olin secures the most promising students academically, and socially. Engineering projects are usually collaborative. If an engineer does not have the social skills to deal with others effectively, it will drastically limit her effectiveness.

Additionally, Olin constantly scrutinizes its curriculum. Olin seeks a creative culture and nothing stultifies creativity like bureaucracy. That’s why Olin has no departments. Rather, the bedrock of studies is the “Olin triangle”: rigorous science, engineering fundamentals, and entrepreneurship and the liberal arts (and yes, these engineers learn to write well). Further, these three strands of the triangle form a fabric by constantly applying, to real world problems, what is learned. This is capped by Olin’s SCOPE program, Senior Capstone Program in Engineering, “in which students engage in a significant engineering project under realistic constraints of an actual client.”

Taking risks and making things happen is at the core of the entire Olin enterprise. And yes, you can get fired or get an F if things go badly. Yet, for every faculty opening there are 140 candidates. For each student who gains admission there are more than 4 who don’t. Despite these risks Mark Somerville, who joined Olin in physics, upon departing from his tenure track at Vassar, finds Olin “liberating.” There is an intoxicating zeal that emanates from a campus whose very purpose is to learn, explore and create.