My new Forbes.com piece discusses how The Greenway Institute – a new university in Vermont – is making transformative engineering education more affordable. Greenway will develop a new business model for engineering education and pioneer a new form of coop education in which students are able to spend more time working in real-world environments while earning their degree. My new piece includes details of the new university based on an in-depth interview with its inaugural president and co-founder Mark Somerville, who was also a founder of Olin College of Engineering.

Several other new STEM-focused institutions have recently been founded, but without the same focus on developing a more efficient financial model. Olin College of Engineering, founded in 1997 with gifts of $460 million from the F. W. Olin Foundation, developed a new curriculum centered on project-based learning and user-centered design. The Roux Institute at Northeastern University, backed by tech entrepreneur David Roux and by the Harold Alfond Foundation, with two $100-million gifts is another example. A new STEM-focused higher education institution is planned for Bentonville, Arkansas, to offer STEM and business education for its planned 500 students. Greenway, by contrast, will use a lower-cost form of coop education in which students spend two years working on actual engineering projects while learning their subjects, and will also create a new and more efficient engineering curriculum, inspired by Olin College and other new institutions. The full article is available at this link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanpenprase/2025/07/24/the-greenway-institute–making-engineering–education-affordable/