It feels like most of Olin’s recent full-system change prioritizes money. I’m here with some thoughts on what we could do about our financial crisis.
Sell naming rights
Our college is named the same as Babson’s Olin Hall because the money came from the same rich dude with an ideal. So far, we only have names on Milas Hall, the Norden Auditorium, and the Miller Academic Center. Sure, that’s three people important in the founding of Olin – nice and personal. But we could totally sell out.
Let’s have a McMoneybags Campus Center. Jane Smith Dormitory. Company Name Chem Lab. We already installed a bench named after the repeat Scope sponsor Santos. My time touring colleges taught me that rich people like having their names on buildings. Hell, it even works for the car-based project teams: donate enough and your (personal or company) name goes on the vehicle.
We can get super petty with it. Comparatively small donors can get little plastic plaques on a dining hall chair. If we set a capitalistic, money-first goal, we could divvy out plenty of real estate. Who doesn’t want to live on a campus inundated with names of people and corporations far wealthier than we’ll ever be?
Profit from our fancy equipment
I’ve heard people touring the shop spaces jokingly ask if they could use them. I bet some of them would pay money for that. What about the labs? They’re not all in use 24/7.
People could pay a subscription fee for access. Make a complex calendar of when classes need things. Even after setting an expectation that students get priority over subscribers, I think there would be takers.
What about our SCOPE sponsors? Instead of selling seniors’ time and labor, can we do physical work for them? Better yet, can we do it on free student labor in exchange for course credit? Olin has high-spec equipment that we’re not using to their monetary potential. We could sell scans on the SEM or parts made on the waterjet (which already takes work orders), the CNC machines, and even the 3D printers.
Different student demographic
Leadership, I see your idea of 600 students and raise you the idea of any student over the age of 25. I don’t know of a single Oliner who wasn’t in the traditional college age range. Let’s advertise to people in their 30s looking to change careers, to 60-year-olds who are retired and have time for college. Charge them all full tuition like state schools do to out-of-state students.
Olin could use the age diversity. What little we have now is the occasional grade-skipper who’s extra young. I see a divide between ‘students’ and ‘grown-ups’ (that calling our professors by first name doesn’t change). Personally, my high school karate classes helped me learn how to befriend and respect adults as equals rather than superiors. I think that benefits me, and I can tell that hasn’t clicked for everyone.
Non-matriculated options
Olin classes are unique! Experimental! Hands-on! Cross-disciplinary! Non-traditional! Exclusively for Oliners!!!
So let’s burst the bubble. Let people come to take one class. Make their tuition disproportionately high because we’d be ‘increasing professor workload’ (the goal here is to make money). I think this would get tons of engagement from people who want to experience an Olin class for themselves, from people who want to learn a one-skill-one-class like coding in CompSci, from some company sending a cohort to take CD and change their approach to product design.
It could even tie into the Summer Institute, where we pull in professors from other colleges and teach them how to be more like Olin. If part of Olin’s mission is to put our version of teaching out there, let’s share that exact teaching with more than 100 students per year. Oliners would benefit from learning to work with people who aren’t all up on the Oliner high horse. Do any of us remember how to work with non-engineers? I don’t.
Blaze of Glory
If we’re so financially done for, let’s just admit that. Stop trying to pull money from higher tuition payments, and let’s go down like a phoenix. Declare an end date for Olin College and increase our annual spending so the endowment lasts just long enough. Leave behind a way smaller pool that pays one person for an extra few decades to send out our transcripts or whatever else we need to prove we went to a real-but-dead college.
Committing to spending the endowment would open up money to do so many important things. They don’t have to be complicated: take on fewer students and go back to full-tuition scholarships. Pay faculty better. Add more professors, more wacky and interesting classes, more funding to do research and co-curricular projects.
What do I want to see? Use the endowment to commit to another round of ‘experimental’ college. Have a fresh partner year to ideate what we want Olin to become in its final years. Rewrite our curriculum from zero based on student and faculty input. Olin’s rhetoric claims to be ‘redefining engineering education’, but our definition hasn’t changed since 2006. CALL seems to be a sad attempt to renew that experimental drive from the top down. I think instead we need to commit – as a whole community – to burn Olin down and rise from the ashes.
If you find this discussion-worthy, the FS editors can share my contact.