Olin College

A view of Olin College. The dormitories are to the right; the Oval is straight ahead.

Olin College was founded by the F. W. Olin Foundation in 1997.[4] The trustees were concerned about perpetuating Franklin W. Olin's donor intent indefinitely, so the foundation's president, Lawrence W. Milas, proposed creating a college. “We always had a bias toward supporting science and engineering schools because Mr. Olin was an engineer,” Milas said. “I was concerned with whether or not this would be consistent with what Mr. Olin had ever considered. I went back and read minutes of board meetings. And sure enough, in the late 1940s, at two or three board meetings shortly before his death, he expressed the idea of starting a new institution.”[5]

By 2005, the foundation had donated most of its financial resources to the college, providing Olin with an endowment of about $460 million. Richard Miller was inaugurated as the college's first president on May 3, 2003. Miller was also the first employee of Olin College, and had been working as its president for several years before he was officially inaugurated.

In a program known as Invention 2000, Olin College hired its first faculty members and invited 30 students, known as Olin Partners, to help it form a curriculum. The students lived in temporary housing and spent their first year after high school investigating assessment and grading methods, jump-starting the student culture, and experimenting with forms of engineering education.[4]

Olin admitted its first full class of 75 students in 2002. This class included the Olin Partners, a group of deferred students known as the Virtual Olin Partners, and recent high school graduates. After admitting three more classes, the college reached its full size of approximately 300 students in fall 2005.[4] It currently has about 390 students.[6]

Olin's campus was designed by the architecture firm Perry Dean Rogers in the postmodern style. The first phase, comprising four buildings, was completed in 2002. The construction of a second dormitory, East Hall, was finished in fall 2005. Future plans include an academic building that would contain additional machine shops and project space. Olin shares many campus services, including health, public safety, and athletic facilities, with Babson College.

Sunset over Milas Hall

Olin College offers degrees in electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering, and engineering. Within the engineering program, students may concentrate in design, computing, biological engineering, materials science, or systems design, or they may design their own concentrations with the administration's approval. Students also have access to an accelerated Master of Science degree in technological entrepreneurship at Babson College, which they can obtain one semester after graduating from Olin.[7]

Unlike many institutions, Olin College does not have separate academic departments. All faculty members hold five-year renewable contracts with no opportunity for tenure.[8]

Classes emphasize context and interdisciplinary connections. Freshmen take integrated course blocks that teach engineering, calculus, and physics by exploring the relationships among the three subjects. Arts, humanities, and social sciences courses take an interdisciplinary approach to subjects such as the self ("What Is I?"), history ("History of Technology"), and art ("Wired Ensemble" and "Seeing and Hearing").

Olin also emphasizes practically grounded education, connecting concepts to real-world challenges and projects. Beginning in their first year, students receive training in Olin's machine shop for project-based work. First-year students are required to take "Design Nature", in which they design and build mechanical toys based on biological systems (such as the click beetle's jumping mechanism). Classes often take a "do-learn" format, with the application of concepts being taught before the formal introduction of the underlying theory.

As part of its mission to redefine engineering education, Olin is continually undergoing curriculum reviews. The goal of these reviews is to ensure that the college maintains a culture of change and continuous improvement. Significant aspects of the curriculum — such as student assessment, course offerings, and student workload — are considered for detailed review yearly.

Olin's academic culture is heavily influenced by its honor code. Students often take exams on their own time, without the supervision of proctors, and are generally allowed to use outside sources on exams, provided that they cite them. In general, the academic culture is highly informal, and some members of the upper administration teach classes.

Much of Olin College's curriculum is built around hands-on engineering and design projects. This project-based teaching begins in a student's first year and culminates in two senior "capstone" projects. In the engineering capstone,[9] student teams are hired by corporations, non-profit organizations, or entrepreneurial ventures for real-world engineering projects. In the arts, humanities, and social sciences capstone or the entrepreneurship capstone, students work on self-designed projects.

All accepted students receive the Olin Scholarship, which pays for half of tuition and covers cross-registration with Babson College, Wellesley College, and Brandeis University. Olin also shares clubs and intramural sports with those colleges. In addition to the Olin Scholarship, the college provides need-based grants. It used to provide full-tuition scholarships, but in 2009, responding to a significant decline in the college's endowment caused by the Great Recession, the trustees decided to reduce the scholarships to half-tuition for all students as of the 2010-11 academic year.[10] There have been no official statements on whether full scholarships will be restored if the endowment recovers.

Olin also allows students to receive funding and non-degree credit for "passionate pursuits," personal projects that the college recognizes as having academic value.

As of 2014, The Princeton Review ranked Olin College second for classroom experience, third for dormitories, third for amount of studying, fourth for student opinion of professors, fifth for ease of getting around campus, eighth for LGBT friendliness, 11th for financial aid, 11th for quality of life, 12th for science laboratory facilities, 17th for career services, and 19th for student happiness.[16]

Business Insider ranked Olin first on its "Best 20 College Campuses in the US" list in 2014.[17] It was eighth on Forbes's "Top 25 Colleges Ranked By SAT Score", with an average combined critical reading and math score of 1489.[18]

In the 2014 U.S. News & World Report college rankings, Olin was tied for third for best undergraduate engineering program among non-doctorate-granting institutions.[19] In 2012, it was tied for fourth for best undergraduate engineering program in the "electrical/electronic/communications" category.[20]

In 2006, Olin was selected by Kaplan, Inc. and Newsweek as one of "America's 25 New Ivies".[21]

In 2014, the Boston Globe published an article that criticized the school for poor management of its endowment.[22] The Globe pointed out that despite the abandonment of full-tuition scholarships, Olin's spending remained relatively constant, and payroll costs rose 16% between 2009 and 2011. It also noted that Olin's administrators received "significantly more than the median salaries of executives in comparable positions", and that Moody's had downgraded the institution's bond rating. In an open letter to the Olin community, President Richard Miller defended the decisions of the administration and rebutted several of the points made in the article. The college successfully petitioned the Globe to release an official clarification, which stated that the article had "failed to include the most recent financial information available".[23] The Boston Business Journal also challenged the Globe's assessment of Olin's finances, reporting that revenue and enrollment had "rebounded smartly" in 2013 from recession lows.[24]

• Association of Independent Technological Universities
• Argosy Foundation

• Official website