Olin College becomes Tufts' newest neighbor

This year, America's oldest college town has a new addition to its more than 60 institutions of higher education. Olin College of Engineering opened in Needham, MA on Aug. 24, making it the first new four-year college to open in the Boston area in over 50 years.

The F. W. Olin Foundation conceived Olin College as an effort to revolutionize undergraduate engineering education. The first private engineering school to open in America in more than 40 years, Olin will "place greater emphasis on contextual understanding, interdisciplinary coursework, teamwork, and communication skills," according to a college press release.

The institution "is able to start from a clean slate to fulfill these needs by incorporating the best practices from other institutions with innovations of its own," the press release said.

The school is located adjacent to Babson College, with which it has an "academic partnership" that includes sharing faculty. It is also forging ties with Wellesley and Brandeis.

The college managed to enroll 75 students in its first freshman class from 35 states and Costa Rica, despite the obvious difficulties of attracting students to a school without a reputation. Olin's first class is also extraordinarily diverse, which is atypical for many engineering schools. Twenty-three percent of the students are students of color and half are female.

"It is a challenge to recruit for a school that is just opening," Joe Hunter, Olin's director of communications, said. "I think our students were attracted to Olin because we have such a unique vision to be a continuously innovative and student-centered school. People realize that we are taking student input very seriously."

Olin's recruitment efforts were undoubtedly made easier by the fact that admitted students only have to pay about $7,500 a year for books, meals and other expenses. Tuition and room charges are covered by Olin Scholarships worth $148,000 over four years.

The school is funded by an initial endowment grant of $400 million from the Olin Foundation. (Tufts' endowment is $677 million.)

According to the Olin Foundation's website, over the past 60 years it has given $300 million to 57 private colleges and universities to construct and equip 72 buildings on their campuses. A grant from the foundation helped pay for Tufts' F.W. Olin Center, which houses the foreign language departments.

This is the first time the foundation has set up its own school. "[The foundation] wanted to have a much bigger impact by creating its own school," Hunter said. "The intention of the school is to reform engineering education by taking suggestions from the engineering community seriously and adapting them to our curriculum."

Both faculty and students were involved in developing the Olin curriculum: "All of last year, the faculty and administration were inventing curriculum. They recruited 30 students to be 'Olin Partners' and take part in the decision-making process," Hunter said.

Tufts began in much the same way. Although the University's first president, Hosea Ballou II, designed the University's earliest curriculum, 29 of Tufts first students spent a "pre-freshman" year on campus to participate in program design. Tufts, in contrast, was founded as a liberal arts institution, with the addition of its College of Engineering in 1898.

The faculty, curriculum, and facilities at Olin are "deliberately designed for fast and continuous change to adapt to technology and meet the business needs of the 21st century," the college's website reads. Olin's mission is to "prepare leaders able to predict, create and manage the technologies of the future."

Olin's president, Richard Miller, has high hopes for the new university. "By creating a college from scratch, we can approach education in a whole new way _ a way that will best serve the engineers of the new millennium."