A Decade Inside the Olin Oval

Ten years after a prominent foundation dumped all of its money into the creation of a tiny undergraduate engineering school from scratch, how does it shape up? 

There’s an oval in Needham, Massachusetts, where big ideas are taking shape. The oval itself isn’t that big, maybe 400 feet at its longest and 300 feet at its most narrow. Three buildings, curved to match the oval’s outer arc, surround a concrete walkway around the perimeter and an unspectacular patch of grass is bisected by walkways crossing through the center. A grassy mall stretches out radially from the space between two of these buildings, expanding in size, manicured to perfection. Two more unassuming buildings line the mall and the whole 70-acre campus is dotted with pines and fields, hemlocks and parking lots, showcasing the simple beauty of Eastern Massachusetts with a nod to the elegant traditional design of New England colleges.

That’s it. Five buildings and an oval: the layout of a campus designed to redefine engineering education in the United States for the 21^st century.

The oval is the centerpiece of the campus for the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, a tiny undergraduate engineering college with about 300 students. Opened in the Fall of 2002, Olin College is led by Richard K. Miller, a tall man with a shiny head and a bushy mustache, advanced degrees from MIT and Cal Tech and a distinguished career across many fields of engineering. Miller is a passionate advocate for thinking big when it comes to the future of higher education.

"Olin has a dual mission,” Miller explains, sitting in his office on the second floor looking out on the campus from the tip of the oval. One is the “mission inside the oval” and that amounts to educating a small number of exemplary engineering innovators every year. The second “mission outside the oval” is to create a school that is different—not for the sake of being different—“ but for the purpose of becoming an important and constant contributor to the advancement of engineering education in America and throughout the world.”

It’s a big mission for a tiny school, inside and out. Named after industrialist, engineer, and philanthropist Franklin W. Olin, the college was created after the Olin Foundation decided to shift all of its $400 million endowment away from providing resources to existing engineering schools and into the idea for an entirely new one—officially chartering Olin College in 1997.

Founded with an emphasis on engineering practice over theory, Olin has a “do-learn” philosophy designed with a strong interdisciplinary tradition rarely seen in engineering programs today. Olin’s graduates learn the social, environmental, business, and political context of engineering along with traditional applied science courses—an approach that has already produced impressive results in its first ten years of classes.

Since opening its doors, Olin has graduated five classes and unleashed more than 250 engineering innovators out into the open seas of the workplace and academia. Its alumni include four Fulbright scholars, nine National Science Foundation Scholars, and leaders in international development, biotech start-ups and energy systems companies. Yet, beginning from a blank slate hasn’t come without setbacks and controversy. Olin’s project-based learning, no-tenure philosophy, technology entrepreneurship courses and free tuition principles have elicited both envy and skepticism from a highly-entrenched culture of engineering higher education. 

And—as any start-up can attest—the growing pains have been formidable.

“There’s no more powerful force for conservation than having something to conserve,” Miller says, quoting Joseph B. Platt, founding President of Harvey Mudd College. “I’m hoping that somehow I can continue to inspire our faculty to see the value in holding the line on (the principle of continuous cultural change). Because in 20, 30, 50 years from now, this will make the difference on whether Olin falls into the same trap that every other university does or whether it continues to remain committed to improvement and change.”

While hopeful, Miller says it’s too soon to know how successful Olin will be at maintaining its innovative culture. “At the end of the day, you can’t write a memo from the president’s office that everything’s going to be different tomorrow. There has to be an appetite for this and a commitment from the community to try new things. The jury’s out.”

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“What is an engineer?” Also, “What does every engineer need to know? Don’t we need to know this before we can develop the curriculum here?” In his approximately 25 years of experience in engineering education before sitting down with a small cadre of visionaries charged with crafting Olin’s mission, to that point, Miller, 61, had never heard any of those questions seriously raised.

So when Olin’s founding faculty decided to start from scratch, they really wiped the slate clean.

Ten professors from varied backgrounds from physics to engineering, math, chemistry, and even music started by literally looking at the available definitions of engineering and discussing their own experiences in the field. Working from temporary modular housing units on the edges of the still-under-construction campus—the founding group settled on a simple definition of an engineer as “one who makes.”

The problem was, engineering education had drifted too far into the theoretical realm and away from actually creating engineers who could succeed at the practice of engineering. That was reality, they concluded. Their task, therefore, was to develop a curriculum that broke free from the traditional model of applied science teaching while still equipping engineering graduates with the right technical skill set to succeed as makers.

Sociable, with a gentle Midwestern voice that’s equal parts Carl Sagan and Ernie from Sesame Street, Miller resembles an older, taller version of Goose from Top Gun. Leaning back in his chair across from a polished, golden wood desk, he describes how a wealth of experience in improving undergraduate engineering education at the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of Iowa helped shape his vision for Olin.  

Miller had an epiphany in teaching while he was a professor in aerospace engineering at USC in the 80’s. He solicited requests for technical problems local aerospace companies were working on that could be used as hands-on, semester-long projects for the students.

One of the early trials involved an early design of what would become the International Space Station. The problem facing engineers at Martin Marietta was in the design of a structural coupling between pressurized tubes within the donut-shaped station. Essentially, they needed a coupling that could expand without twisting. 

The student team came up with an idea that used a system of pulleys and cables to solve the twisting problem. The solution impressed Martin Marietta engineers, who had basically come up with the same solution—only theirs had resulted in a $200 million patent and had won them the contract over rival aerospace giant Boeing.

Miller continues: “So the kids came up to me after this presentation and they said, ‘Dr. Miller, we have a couple questions for you. … How do you make money from ideas like this? There’s nothing in my engineering courses that says like—‘$200 million. What would you do?’ Oh and by the way I’m going to graduate in about a month and I have this employment offer and right below this signature there’s this paragraph about intellectual property and stuff like that. So if I dream about things in the shower while I’m working for them, they own this? Is that Ok for me to sign?’ And I’m saying: uh-oh… we’ve got some work to do.”

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That experience started then-Professor Miller on the track to re-thinking engineering education. Yet, not everyone at the time was as willing to change as he was and Miller found he’d have to leave USC to implement some of his ideas.

In 1992, Miller was named Dean of Engineering at the University of Iowa and he set about righting some of the wrongs he’d seen while at USC. He started by creating an opportunity for engineering students to take business management and entrepreneurship classes alongside business students at the university. After hitting resistance initially about engineering students not having enough experience in economics to contribute, Miller and the rest of the faculty were immediately impressed with the creativity and commitment of the engineers.

“It didn’t matter that they didn’t have ECON 101—they were just too bright, and too committed and they could answer the technical problems that needed to be done in the consultant part of the work,” says Miller.

The students came back to the college of engineering and asked to take more business classes. But at the time, they were only allowed to take one elective and they’d just taken it. The curriculum wasn’t flexible enough to allow any other non-engineering courses.

The paradox between the passions he saw in his students and the rigidness of the curriculum at Iowa and USC inspired Miller to make Olin’s curriculum open, hands-on and interdisciplinary. Olin students can cross-register for business and liberal arts classes at neighboring Babson College, Wellesley College, or Brandeis University (one popular option is “Harry Potter and Politics” at Babson—no joke). They’re involved in challenging hands-on projects starting on day one of freshman year, allowed to study abroad during their junior year and still graduate in four years, must start and run a business before graduating, are required to “stand and deliver” at the end of each semester to present some aspect of their academic work in public, and must complete a year-long senior design project of a real-world problem sponsored by industry.

And so far, students are happy. In the 2010 edition of Princeton Review, Olin College is ranked among the top 20 universities in the U.S. in 14 different categories, including Best Classroom Experience, Best Quality of Life, and Happiest Students. 

To Miller, rankings don’t mean everything. But they help validate his approach in upending the traditional philosophy towards engineering education. He realized “that engineers in fact don’t start with the differential equations—they end with the differential equations. It’s the ideas that are hard to come up with. And that the ideas have to be consistent with physical law—that’s where you add value—but this is much more of an artistic event than it is a scientific event.”

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Perhaps one of the biggest hallmarks at Olin is the stubborn attachment folks here need to have to the concept of continuous change.

“I think the idea and the way we express it—no one here at Olin has tenure,” says Miller. “And nothing at Olin has tenure. So don’t fall in love with it. Because we should be willing to let go of the steering wheel if there’s a better idea.”

It’s the nothing has tenure philosophy that really gets Miller revved up. “Let me just tell you some of the stereotypes which I hear all the time, that I don’t think any of us in higher education has taken seriously enough to develop a persuasive, coherent, well-researched response to. One of them is: tenure is a huge evil, it is the cause for a lot of the country’s underperformance in education, that it encourages deadwood, that it’s just completely indefensible.”

To ensure the culture at Olin doesn’t get too comfortable and stuck in its ways, Olin has a policy of periodic curricular review: every seven years the curriculum is re-designed.

But the policy of institutionalizing the blank slate has been easier said than done. As Olin has fought through its growing pains (during its inaugural semester, a group of dazed, over-worked students marched into the president’s office complaining of the workload, resulting in a moratorium on classes), the school has struggled to establish and maintain its unique identity. In some ways, maturity has brought with it aspects of academic conservatism Olin was founded to resist.

“In 1999 when we first arrived, we had nothing to conserve,” says Miller. “So we were really—every seven years is a great idea! Maybe we should make it every 3 years! Now that we’re 10 years later, we have stuff that some of our faculty members, and the rest of our community too, would not imagine ever throwing away. We think these are the reasons why we’ve been successful. So why would you ever want to throw that away? So guess what? If you hold a mirror up, we’ve become conservative. And I think there’s way more resistance to this idea in 2011 than there was in 2004. So it’s changing.”

Erika Swartz is a senior in Materials Engineering at Olin. Full of energy and heavily involved in Olin’s growth as a NINJA mentor (NINJA = Need Information Now? Jusk Ask) and as a project manager of her senior design project, Swartz admits Olin’s growth has not come without setbacks.

“Olin is kind of in puberty,” says Swartz. “We’re no longer brand new. We’re starting to develop these institutional traditions and we still have to define what our place is going to be and what our role is going to be. And I don’t know that we’ve done that yet.”

Constant feedback is Olin’s strategy for checking its gauges as it matures and tries to avoid conservatism. That involves a heavy dose of polling.

“Our students wind up being polled probably more than any other student body in North America,” says Miller. “And after awhile there’s sort of polling fatigue.”

Feedback, to Miller, is a vital component for an organization to resist complacency. “At its heart,” Miller says, “continuous improvement requires an authentic personal commitment to getting better. I think of it this way. I don’t know of a single Olympic athlete who doesn’t own a stopwatch. Ok? How are you going to know if you’re competitive in running the mile if you don’t even know what your time is in the mile? How are you as a university going to know if you’re getting better unless you’re measuring something?”

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So what is Olin’s stopwatch?  

Olin maintains an internal institutional feedback system, says Miller. It’s called the Olin Metric Project. He stands up and grabs a thick binder from one of the many bookshelves lining his office and opens it up on the table. He points to a series of gauges indicating categories of metrics on one page in the middle of the binder that look like fuel gauges on a car’s dashboard console. On first glance, the gas tanks look like they’ve been topped off in nearly every category—attracting students, providing the right experiences, and ultimately, “educating engineering innovators.”

But there are signs financial problems loom. One category—financial resources—comes in at more like two-thirds full, clearly the lowest rating documented by the Olin Metric Project. Miller explains that the economic crisis is to blame. “We dropped over a hundred million dollars in the endowment, we’re more dependent on the endowment than other institutions. Financially, that’s caused some changes in what we’re trying to do,” he says.

Financial matters have been an area of constant concern during Olin’s first ten years. Originally, Olin’s founders wanted to provide free tuition to every student, which they were able to do up until 2009 when they were forced to scale back to half-tuition scholarships for every admitted student (worth about $80,000 per student). Founders also wanted to install a “study away” requirement that would require every student to spend a semester studying outside the U.S. at no extra tuition cost. This was also scaled back to the point where now Olin students are given the flexibility in their schedules to study away, but need to cover the additional cost of the international program on their own. So far, only 20-25% of each of Olin’s five graduating classes has chosen to participate.

Beyond financial concerns, Olin has fought the notion of being “too innovative” in its approach and not providing students with the background to succeed in traditional engineering roles. Constance Bowe is a senior consultant for Partners Harvard Medical International, which advises medical schools on education reform all over the world, and author of a 2007 case study on Olin College. She uses Olin as an example to medical faculty for re-thinking med school education—but not without caution.

She points out that in adding new interdisciplinary courses in business and design, the danger is in losing foundational knowledge and creating engineers who aren’t prepared for competing in a world based in traditional assessments. “If you spend a lot of focus on these emerging competencies that people are recognizing are essential to do the kind of professional work they have to do,” she says, “you are taking some time away from those building blocks, those scientific facts.”

Bowe found Olin’s assessment approach to be one of its most valuable assets to ensuring that foundational knowledge isn’t lost. Instead of relying solely on quantitative data (as most people with technical backgrounds—as well as most technical institutions—are most comfortable doing), she says Olin’s founders “had a very intriguing way of designing an assessment plan for their school.”

She says “they had actually created a culture at Olin where assessment was actually valued by everybody who had to participate in it.” That culture, combined with regular descriptive feedback, has helped Olin’s faculty fine-tune their curriculum.

“The subjective information is actually telling you if something’s good—what it is. Or if something’s not so good—how it might be better, what the problem is. Where the numbers don’t tell you any of that,” says Bowe.

Miller feels that despite some road bumps and the difficulty in quantifying the success of Olin’s grand vision, the small college is still on the right track.

“How do you take all of those metrics and decide that they amount to what we call a ‘green’? I don’t have an algorithm for that,” Miller explains. “There’s judgment here. And in spite of the fact that engineers are always skeptical about judgment, I’m skeptical about not having judgment at the end of the day. So I’m sure it’s the right thing, but our opinions will change as we get more experienced.”

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Swartz, for one, has seen the success of the Olin Experiment firsthand and says she wouldn’t trade her four years at Olin for anywhere else. She says the value of the school—and what really sets Olin students apart from others—is the emphasis at Olin on solving challenges with undefined parameters and applying creativity and hands-on skills to come up with solutions to improve lives.

In other words, solving real problems in the real world.

Or, in Olin’s founding faculty’s definition, becoming one who makes.

“One really big thing (that makes Olin students different) is being comfortable with uncertainty and open-ended problems,” says Swartz.  

She says that where students from traditional engineering schools might get frustrated with gargantuan, open-ended problems (determining what’s halting the educational pipeline in Uganda from educating citizens past a sixth grade reading level, for example), Olin students thrive.

They’re taught from their first days on campus to “find out a little bit more about the problem space and decide ‘ok, what is the actual question that I’m trying to answer? Within this really broad problem statement, what is the specific small problem I’m trying to solve?’” says Swartz. “And I think that’s a really important real-world skill. To take something complex and break it down into a solvable unit, using the knowledge you have.”

In terms of redefining undergraduate engineering education for the 21^st century, leaders in higher education certainly face a complex problem that will need to be broken down into one solvable unit at a time.

At Olin College, among the tree-lined hills and within the visionary minds of Richard Miller and his brave un-tenured faculty in Needham, the shape of that unit is an oval.