[saalweachter]

Two thoughts:

1. If you're graduating highschool and want nothing more than to start an engineering company, and you have the credentials to get into Olin, it is probably worth-while. The social network you'll acquire at Olin will be far more tuned to startups, with a lot of former & current startup founders, VCs, and people really interested in being an early employee at a startup.

2. Whatever Olin is doing right probably doesn't scale to a significantly larger school. If you went from graduating 75 students / year to 1000, you'd lose close contact with the awesome teachers and mentors, your social network would become much more diffuse (right now you could easily know every person in your class, the class before, and the class after yours), and the friendly VCs wouldn't be able to meet and learn about every student and their aspirations.

[epalmer]

They are working with larger engineering schools to bring some of their learnings to the other schools.

http://www.olin.edu/news-events/2013/olin-insper-collaborate...

https://engineering.illinois.edu/news/article/2009-10-14-oli...

http://www.olin.edu/news-events/2013/university-texas-el-pas...

Project Based Education can scale. It just takes effort.

[beambot]

With ballooning administrative ratios... it's probably not as much effort as one would think. It just requires the University to focus on education rather than administration.