On Reinventing College: An Engineering Degree, a Job, and No Debt | Greenway Institute

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Mark Somerville is the founding president and co-founder of the Greenway Institute, a new engineering college in Montpelier, Vermont, opening to its first students in 2027. Before Greenway, he was part of the team that started Olin College of Engineering outside Boston, where he later served as dean of faculty and provost. Over twenty years he also helped launch Fulbright University Vietnam and new engineering programs in Brazil and the UK. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT.

The things that make college expensive are often not the things that make it good. Mark explains why it is easier to build a new institution than to change an old one, why paid work can sit at the center of learning, how the role of a teacher shifts in the age of AI, and why a college without a dining hall or a gym might actually be better for students.

Key Takeaways

• The Greenway Institute is a new nonprofit engineering college in Montpelier, Vermont. It welcomes its first students in 2027.
• Students spend two years on campus in project-based learning, then two years in paid engineering jobs, coached by faculty several times a week.
• Paid work helps students cover the cost of their degree, so they can graduate with little or no debt.
• Greenway has no dining hall or private gym. Students use the town’s services and live as part of the community.
• Greenway needs about $30 million to launch, far less than a traditional new college. Close to $5 million had been raised at the time of recording.
• Founding president Mark Somerville was part of the founding team at Olin College of Engineering, where he later served as provost.

Following the Money

Mark has spent most of his career trying new things in education. At Olin, he helped build a project-based, hands-on, design-oriented engineering curriculum. Its graduates went on to do remarkable work, and the experience gave him the startup bug.

The turning point came around 2017, when he became dean of faculty. For the first time, he had to understand the money side of the institution. He discovered how much it really cost to run Olin. That works if you have a very large endowment. It doesn’t work if you want to offer that kind of education to many more students.

Looking across US higher education, he came to a conclusion many people share: the business model itself is broken. He first tried to address this from inside Olin. Over time, he realised what many people trying to change organisations eventually learn.

it’s really hard to change an existing organization and much more powerful to start from scratch and make intentional design decisions from the outset.

So Greenway starts with one question. How do you offer a truly human, transformative education that is financially sustainable for the student and for the institution at the same time?

Strip Away What Doesn’t Matter

The first design principle sounds obvious. Focus on what really matters, and remove what doesn’t.

For Mark, two things matter most. Education should be deeply experiential, with students working on real problems for real people. And it should be deeply supportive, with meaningful mentoring from faculty and a real sense of community. Research backs both. Every college says nice things about them. Yet when you look at incentives and curricula, they are rarely what institutions actually prioritise. Mark cites a Gallup study which found that only three percent of US college students got the full set of these experiences during their time in college.

focus on the things that really matter and strip away the things that don’t.

Work at the Center of Learning

The second principle is the heart of the Greenway model. Work becomes a central part of learning, not an add-on.

Mark often asks graduates about the most important learning experience of their degree. They almost never mention a class. They talk about a summer internship, a semester working at a company, or a co-op. These are the experiences students value most, and yet educators barely scaffold them. Even at co-op schools, the work period is often a separate track with little academic credit. Faculty frequently don’t know what students actually do out there.

And what’s interesting, and I think as a professor, kind of depressing, is that they almost never talk about a class, right?

So Greenway asks a simple question. What happens if you put that experience at the center, and build the learning and reflection around it?

This one resonates with me. In my own undergrad years, I only discovered the career office in my third year. I could have explored so much more if work and study had been closer together from the start.

Two Years on Campus, Two Years at Work

The structure is clear. The first two years are residential. Students work in teams on projects, some tightly defined and some open-ended. There is very little lecturing. Mark’s view is that active learning is far more powerful and lasting than passive listening, and that ideas learned in context stick better than ideas learned in silos.

Those first two years also build strong relationships between students and faculty. That matters, because in years three and four students go out into paid, co-op-style engineering jobs, anywhere in the country. While working, they meet with a faculty mentor several times a week, often in small peer groups. It adds up to a few hours a week. That is enough to close the loop: act in the workplace, then step back and ask what just happened and what to do differently next time.

This changes what Greenway looks for in instructors. Research universities hire for knowledge creation, which is a valid but separate purpose.

there is no evidence that shows that being a good researcher makes you an effective instructor.

Many of Greenway’s instructors will bring real industry experience, not necessarily a PhD. And during the work years, the mentor is not there to be the technical expert. The role is to be a coach, the person who asks the questions that help students make sense of what they are learning on the job.

Engineering as a Way of Thinking

Traditional engineering education, Mark says, is about acquiring a long list of technical content, much of which graduates never use. Collaboration, communication, and self-directed learning get praised but rarely designed in.

AI makes this gap more urgent. As AI takes over technical work lower on the abstraction ladder, people will work at higher levels of abstraction. They will collaborate and communicate more, with each other and with AI. And because the world changes so fast, the ability to keep learning becomes the core skill.

the world is changing really fast. And so adaptability and the ability to learn in context and learn in the real world is the critical skill that young people will need

So Greenway frames engineering as a set of portable ways of thinking. A design orientation: who is this for, who are the stakeholders, what are the financial and technical limits? A systems orientation: abstracting, unboxing, and seeing how parts relate, in technical and also social and political systems.

Mark doesn’t accept the narrow definition of an engineer as someone who turns requirements into an artifact. Engineers also carry responsibility for what the requirements are, and for what happens once a system leaves the lab. Many unintended consequences of technology come from skipping those questions.

it’s important that we define engineering in a way that is broader than that, that starts with asking, you know, who are the people that are involved and ends with asking what are the ways that this system is going to interact in the world

With my own background in computer science and design, I recognise how much systems thinking travels beyond engineering. Mark sees the same thing. This kind of education opens many doors, much like a liberal arts degree. The difference is that Greenway students spend two years actually walking through some of those doors before they graduate.

AI as a Turbocharger, or a Shortcut

Mark sees much of the higher education response to AI as defensive: back to oral exams and handwritten blue books. Greenway takes a different view. What AI does for learning depends on the learner.

For a student who sees college as a credential and just wants the grade, AI is the perfect shortcut.

AI is the ultimate tool for avoiding learning.

For a curious student who wants to figure something out or make something work, it is the opposite.

AI is a turbocharger for learning, right?

That shifts the teacher’s role. Instead of delivering information and checking that it arrived, the teacher creates the conditions for intrinsic motivation and curiosity. Project-based, high-autonomy, well-supported learning is exactly that kind of environment.

Mark is also wary of the promise of AI tutoring. Personalised tutoring does outperform lectures. Part of that comes from adaptability. But part comes from the relationship with a real person, with all its motivation and emotion.

that’s not personalized tutoring, that’s depersonalized tutoring

For adult learners reskilling for a specific goal, an AI tutor can be powerful and far more affordable. For 18 to 22 year olds, so much of what happens is developmental, about values and becoming an adult, that the human relationship is essential. Where AI can help is by taking over the back-office work, like low-value grading, so instructors have more time with students.

how do you deploy AI in a way that makes the education more human, not less human.

No Dining Hall, No Gym, No Divide

Greenway removes much of what people picture as American college life: dorm dining halls, private gyms, dedicated campus services. Mark admits the traditional version is lovely. Four years in a beautiful place, meals served, friends and books around you. It also costs sixty to a hundred and twenty thousand dollars per student per year, and most people can’t access it.

He doesn’t see the Greenway approach as scarcity. He would rather students play basketball at lunchtime with a 30-year-old electrician from down the street than only with other 18-year-olds. Living in the town, cooking, shopping, and paying rent turn college into an intentional transition to adulthood. The first two years are scaffolded. The work years add independence, with support still there.

one of the ways you cross the town, gown divide is that you don’t build it in the first place.

I loved my own years of campus isolation, with time to explore ideas and no need to think about cooking. Still, in Europe we mostly study inside our cities, mixed in with everyone else. Mark sees that as something Europe gets more right, even if it sometimes throws students in at the deep end.

Concept First, Not Money First

Olin started with a foundation’s commitment of around $400 million. Plenty of money makes many things possible, and it also makes it easy to think less about the business model. Greenway works the other way around.

we are not a money-first project. We are a sort of concept-first project.

Because the business model and the education reinforce each other, Greenway needs about thirty million dollars to launch, not hundreds of millions. It is a nonprofit, so this is philanthropic capital rather than investment with financial returns. Part of the raise covers operating costs until enrolment reaches break-even. At the time of our conversation, the team had raised close to five million dollars. Accreditation adds another layer of difficulty, and Mark calls the combined financial and regulatory barriers the main reasons new institutions are so rare in the US.

Win-Wins, Not Trade-offs

For educators hoping to make education more sustainable, Mark offers three ideas.

First, step back and look at the whole system. Conversations about affordability tend to focus on instruction, on raising student to faculty ratios. Yet instruction is often only a quarter to a third of costs, and it is the part that has stayed flat. Administrative headcount is what has grown by multiples over the last thirty years.

Second, question the assumptions. Learning doesn’t only happen in classrooms, and the instructor doesn’t always need to decide what is learned.

Third, look for places where good education and good economics reinforce each other.

The fact that it is work integrated makes the education much less expensive to deliver, but it also makes it a better education.

how do we create win wins in this as opposed to what are the trade-offs that we’re gonna make is where a lot of opportunity lies.

Frequently Asked Questions

To learn more about the Greenway Institute, which opens in 2027 and is currently fundraising, or to support its mission, reach out to Mark Somerville through Greenway. Greenway also came up in my conversation with Cal Thompson, who helps design the student journey there.