Olin College

[thirtythree]

I got an e-mail from Olin College (I think because I wrote my e-mail address on my PSAT) and am wondering how they get by giving all their students full-ride scholarships. And apparently they don't have their accreditation yet but plan to get it by the time the first class graduates .. hmmm. Other than that, it looks like an interesting school. How important is the name of the college you get your degree from? Because I doubt many people have heard of this one.

 

[SuperTool]

It's prolly a scam.

 

[thirtythree]

Originally posted by: SuperTool
It's prolly a scam.

It isn't a very good scam since no one is sending them money. They went through an awful lot of trouble with that website too ..

 

[cchen]

No it's not a scam. I applied. I was accepted into their first class ever. They paid for me and my family to go up to Needham and visit their new campus. If you want more info you can pm me. It's a very competitive school trying to change the way engineering is taught.

BTW they are funded by Olin Corporation, which donates money to various schools and academia

 

[fizmeister]

Originally posted by: SuperTool
It's prolly a scam.

It isn't, considering it's a new school that's planning to be at the level of MIT within a couple of years.

Anyway, they get by because of their endowment; they were founded by a private fund, which was enough money to build a state-of-the-art campus and give free tuition for awhile (and i'm sure investment returns help fund this). It sounds like a great oppurtunity (I got a lot of literature from them a year ago when I was applying to schools), and it seemed great, but at the time I decided I'd rather go to a top university that's already very reputable and prestigious rather than go to a new one. Of course, if you want to be a part of creating new traditions and esatablishing the way a new campus runs, go for it. It sounds like a great oppurtunity all together.

 

[tcsenter]

It isn't, considering it's a new school that's planning to be at the level of MIT within a couple of years.

Anyway, they get by because of their endowment; they were founded by a private fund, which was enough money to build a state-of-the-art campus and give free tuition for awhile (and i'm sure investment returns help fund this).

Correct. I mean, if you just created a new college, what better way to attract good candidates than offering gobs of full scholarships at first?

BTW they are funded by Olin Corporation, which donates money to various schools and academia

Correction, they are funded by the Olin Foundation, a private non-profit philanthropic foundation created in 1938, which donates money to various schools and academia.

 

[SuperTool]

Is it related to Olin Hall? (Chemical Engineering building at Cornell)
/edit
Looks like it is
/edit2
Make sure to Check out the faculty

 

[axelfox]

Watch out b/c they might not come through with their accredidation in time and you'll be screwed. A law school around here (that shall be nameless) was sued by some of their students because of failure to receive accrediation.

 

[astroview]

Yea its a real school. Not sure if the university is, but the Olin foundation is traditionally aligned with right wing/conservative stuff.

 

[tcsenter]

Yea its a real school. Not sure if the university is, but the Olin foundation is traditionally aligned with right wing/conservative stuff.

lol! You have no clue what you're talking about, although I'm sure you ignorantly "gleened" your information from some left-wing website like "People for the American Way". You gotta love that name, though.

The "Franklin W. Olin" Foundation established in 1938, from which Olin College of Engineering receives funding, is not the same as the "John M. Olin" Foundation much maligned by the far-flung left. John Merril Olin was the son of Franklin W. Olin. Both were highly successful entrepeneurs, engineers, and philanthropists. Franklin is distinguished for being accepted at Cornell's School of Engineering despite having no formal education and being a professional baseball player. Whereas John was notable for his 'Teddy Roosevelt' style passion for conservation and the outdoors, in addition to creating the Olin industrial and manufacturing empire we know today.

The Franklin W. Olin Foundation exclusively supports higher education disciplines in the physical sciences of engineering, chemistry, and physics, which are inherently neither left nor right. The John M. Olin Foundation awards grants, scholarships, and fellowships to a much wider range of interests, including law, economics, social policy, environmentalism, and business.

However, UNLIKE the left-wing foundations celebrated by leftist groups such as People for the American Way, the John M. Olin Foundation supports academia without regard to political considerations. If you look at the entire spectrum of causes, interests, and schools which the John M. Olin Foundation supports, there is neither a left nor a right 'bias' to the Olin Foundation's philanthropy. They have and will continue to support academic scholarship and research which results in a respectable range of views.

Among these "right wing bastions" which the Olin Foundation supports are schools such as Stanford University, Berkeley, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, Georgetown, Yale, NYU, and a dozen others.

The only reason the left 'suddenly' has a problem with the Olin Foundation is because one of its Law and Economics Fellows from the University of Chicago has been handing the antigun movement its ass on a platter with a ground-breaking study that antigun activists and politicians wished would just go away. If you discredit the funding for the study, you can discredit the study, and you don't even have to know or address what's in it.

This is what is meant by the expression "the left will eat its own for the sake of political expediency". Numerous liberal scholars and liberal scholarship has benefitted from the Olin Foundation's grants, and the left is willing caste all that away and bring disrepute upon its own just to discredit one little old gun control study they don't like.

 

[astroview]

I stand corrected on the Olin University backing, but I stand by my position that the other Olin Foundation is conservative.

Looking at the groups that the "John M. Olin" foundation funds, there is a dominant trend towards conservative groups. I noticed oddly enough you cite liberal universities, but you do not cite which groups or members affiliated with those universities recieved the money. It is quite possible, even likely, for a university which is left wing to have faculty, students, and administration leaning towards the right.

They do support some independent groups, but the list of groups they support mainly leans towards the right.

As fof this gun control study, I had no idea it even existed before. I'm not saying either that conservatives shouldn't fund their causes. Debate between left and right is healthy and it wouldn't occur without funding by left and right wing groups. But I really don't think its honest to say that the John Olin Foundation doesn't lean right.