Building a Better Engineer. With No Tuition or Tenure, Olin College Aims to Produce Grads for a Global Economy

Olin College http://olin.edu is the answer to an extraordinary question: If a foundation offered $460 million to start an undergraduate college of engineering from scratch, what would it be like?

And Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering is like few other schools. It has no academic departments. No tenure. No tuition. And more female students and professors, percentage-wise, than almost any other U.S. engineering school.

Then there are the classes. In an innovative course that integrates math, physics and engineering, freshmen David Gebhart and J.P. Pechan huddle over a cardboard-and-foam model they’ve built that looks like a seesaw with a wagon wheel rolling along it. The assignment: to design a gizmo controlled by a motor, write equations to describe its motion, simulate it on a computer, and build a working model that can be controlled from their laptop computers.

By DAVID WESSEL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Full Story: http://webreprints.djreprints.com/1373220600138.html

(Many thanks to Thom Sanders-Garrett of Sussex school http://www.sussexschool.org/ for passing this along. Russ)