Olin College is a very highly selective, private educational institution created by the
Franklin W. Olin Foundation[?]. It is a response to a desire for new methods within the United States engineering educational establishment. As a result, it serves an important role a pedagogical experiment. The vast financial resources of the Olin Foundation allow it to grant full tuition scholarships and, in the early years, full room scholarships to all students. It admitted its first incoming class of 75 students in 2002, and expects to grow to a maximum size of between 450 and 600 students.
Olin is located in
Needham, Massachusetts[?] in the Boston area, adjacent to the campus of
Babson College.
Olin is very different from traditional educational institutions. Not all of these differences were pioneered there, but it is the first one to combine them. They include:
- Project-based learning. Starting with freshman year, the curriculum is built around actual design and construction projects. The "capstone" project occupies about half of senior year.
- Group learning activities. Lectures are routinely interrupted to allow the students to break up into groups and solve problems independently on separate white boards.
- Small class sizes and first-name relations with faculty and staff
- A strong focus on areas of study outside the exact sciences
- "Multidisciplinary course blocks" emphasizing the connections between different areas of study
- Cross-registration with nearby institutions, presently including Babson College, Wellesley College (for both men and women), and Brandeis University.
- The development in its students of "relentless pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources they currently control" (Howard Stevenson, Harvard Business School)
- Equal enrollment of men and women
- Five-year contracts for faculty members with no opportunity for tenure[?].