Classes at the start-up engineering school won’t begin until 2002, but next fall Ige and 29 classmates will report to “campus” (70 vacant acres west of Boston in Needham, Mass.) to live amid the bulldozers and work with newly-hired faculty members to create the school’s curriculum. “It’s a chance for me to leave an indelible mark,” says Ige.
It’s sounds like a gamble. In a nation obsessed with college rankings, why take a flier on an unknown, unproven school? But Olin’s founders, and the families risking their kids’ futures on the venture, figure it’s a bet worth taking. Backed by up to $500 million from the Franklin W. Olin Foundation, an educational charity, they’re hoping to create a new model for teaching engineering, a discipline that educators say has become a theoretical, formula-driven grind. “We expect to become the petri dish of engineering education,” says Olin president Richard Miller, who holds engineering degrees from Caltech, MIT and the University of California, Davis. “You have to start with a clean slate because resistance to change in traditional colleges in insurmountable, at least the scope of changing we’re talking about. Change is happening everywhere, but that pace is very slow.”
Olin promises to find new ways to make the subject hands-on and fun. Students rave about the chance to custom-build a college from scratch. Parents seem especially attracted to the price tag; thanks to its endowment, Olin will offer full scholarships to every student-650 by 2006, it hopes. The competition to get in has been intense. More than 600 students (average SAT score: 1500) competed for 30 slots in the design-the-curriculum program. Many of the winners are choosing Olin over Ivy League schools; the school wait-listed one Houston valedictorian with perfect SATs.
Despite that early success, Olin’s future is hardly guaranteed. Although it’s already hired a dozen top professors from schools like MIT, and companies are already showing interest in recruiting Olin grads, finding enough students willing to choose Olin over prestige schools could be an insurmountable long-term problem. “It’s hard to sell 18-year-olds on [an innovative] curriculum,” says higher-education researcher George Dehne.
Naysayers notwithstanding, the pioneer students who’ll begin building Olin’s programs next fall are excited. “This is a chance to be at the start of an engineering revolution,” says Polina Sagalova, a Chicago student who aspires to be an astronaut. But before she joins its ranks, she’s seeing if she can defer her acceptance at Cornell.
Revolutions, after all, have been known to fail.
