The Greenway Institute is in Montpelier, Vermont, but in theory, it could be anywhere. The start-up engineering school is both a place and a strategy for a radically different way to earn a college degree.  

“We started with the question: How do we make college more affordable and more attractive to a larger set of students?” said Mark Somerville, president of the Greenway Institute and one of its co-founders. “You do it by giving students an experience that is exciting and empowering, that will help them thrive but won’t cripple them financially.” 

Somerville believes that combining student-centered pedagogy with a resource-sensitive business model will bring many more students into higher education at a time when the absence of both is keeping them out. While its doors are not yet open, the Institute has spent three years prototyping a curriculum by which students learn engineering in unconventional classrooms, while working in the community and earning a salary. The goal is for them to graduate debt free and ready to take on the real world. 

As the Greenway Institute prepares to matriculate its first class of students, it holds broad appeal for families, faculty, and communities seeking something more and different from higher education. Its work-integrated learning model is emerging as one of the innovative ways the sector can restore the public’s trust in the value of a college degree, now at a record low. What influence the Greenway Institute has on higher education hinges on its own success, which includes the conviction that, if they build it, the students will come.  

Innovative Roots 

Mark Somerville is no stranger to disruption. He was an early team member and then provost at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, an award-winning start-up that broke the rules in engineering education with its inter-disciplinary, project-based approach. During his time at Olin, Somerville worked with and helped launch new programs and institutions in the United States and in other countries, including Fulbright University in Vietnam.  

Somerville said his two co-founders, Troy McBride and Rebecca Holcombe, had been working on pieces of the Greenway concept for some time. In 2022, they collaborated with Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and received a grant from the National Science Foundation to consider how to make engineering more appealing to more students by designing a curriculum that involved sustainable thinking as a core competency for every engineer. Greenway’s tag line is “Engineering our Sustainable Future,” but its value proposition involves a wide interpretation that includes an economic component that the Institute now markets.  

“We propose that in the age of climate change, sustainability should be something all engineers are thinking about no matter their discipline,” Somerville said. “But beyond that, we need to be thinking about how to enable people to live well and thrive on this planet.” 

With his background in innovative educational models, Somerville was frustrated at what he sees as higher education’s failure to integrate transformational education with a sustainable business model. This concern eventually led to the work-integrated learning model Greenway is promoting. Its viability involves breaking precedent by making work a central and integrated part of the learning journey: Students receive credit for working — and get support and instruction from Greenway while they are on the job.  

The four-year program involves two years of residential education that are high-touch and heavily hands-on. Greenway adopts a collaborative mastery orientation to learning, focused on process, metacognition, and developing strong relationships with faculty. This is coupled with two years of working at a company, in a credit-bearing, co-op style that lets students earn an average of $50,000 per school year. Well-paid co-ops are not unusual in engineering but integrating them into the academic process is.  

“Even schools that have really strong co-op programs don’t usually allow students to get credit when they are out in the world doing real stuff that matters to people,” Somerville said. 

At the Greenway Institute, students not only get credit for their work but are connected to a faculty member who acts as a coach and mentor throughout their two-years of employment.  

“Students are mastering a whole set of professional and design skills in the workplace that we are able to put educational scaffolding around,” Somerville said. “They are learning more because there is someone there who is helping them do the reflection work, the sense-making that is often missing in apprenticeships.” 

President Mark Somerville addresses students and staff in pilot class. Courtesy of the Greenway Institute.

The out-of-the-box pedagogy is paired with smart economics. As Somerville described it, students are earning money half the time they are in school. They are learning in-person at the school’s physical plant for half the time they are enrolled and distance-learning during the time they are out in the workplace. That set-up drives down the cost of running the institution and, thus, what it costs students to earn their degree.  

For the first classes of students coming to the Greenway Institute, that cost will be zero. According to Somerville, the free tuition is security against an accreditation process that will take until the first class of students graduates to complete, making attending Greenway a risk as well as an opportunity. With confidence in its model, the team at the Greenway Institute sees this and other challenges as just part of what you take on when you’re creating something new. 

Collaborative Pioneers 

Hannah Root had been a middle school science teacher in a rural district of the state when an opportunity at the Greenway Institute made her change course.   

“My classroom was full of hands-on, real-world projects, and we were having a blast,” she said. “But it was really hard to witness how many of these young people didn’t see themselves as pursuing higher education, even though they had tons of skills and lots of promise. I was drawn to the idea of creating a space where students, like the ones I had in my classrooms, could feel like they could succeed.” 

Root wears many hats on the small campus in Montpelier, but her primary focus is helping run the two pilot programs that are part of the curriculum development. In 2023, through a partnership with Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, the Greenway Institute enlisted a group of sophomores to participate in a credit-bearing semester away in Montpelier to pilot the project-based portion of the model. This past spring, another cohort from Elizabethtown participated in the work-integrated learning program. 

Root said the students in the pilot were attracted to Greenway’s hands-on element and the opportunity to help launch a new school. “These were students who knew they weren’t textbook learners,” she said. “They didn’t want to sit through lectures when they could go and build stuff and learn by experience.”  

One of the students was Emanuel Attah, a sophomore and mechatronics engineering major, who interned at Hallam-ICS, an engineering consulting firm near Burlington, Vermont. “I heard a presentation about Greenway in one of my classes, and I was immediately like, ‘I want to be there. This is literally calling my name,’” said Attah, who is from Nigeria. 

Attah said his time in Montpelier prepared him to be “a whole engineer,” able to tackle complex problems but also to interact with colleagues and supervisors and understand how things work in the world. In addition to work and classes, he said he and his peers received a lot of coaching.  

“Before we even got started, we’d discuss basic things like, ‘How are you going to get there? Who is your supervisor? How are you going to ask for feedback?’” he said. “One of the things we did was to define our professional tenets of behavior: ‘How are you going to show up? How are you going to be your best?’”  

Attah recalled fondly the “asset-low” living arrangements the founders designed to teach basic life skills and keep costs low. “We lived on our own. We cooked our own meals. We commuted to work by ourselves. We had an authentic, real-world experience.”  

Attah said the Greenway Institute gave him the confidence to want to stay and work in the United States after graduation. Regarding the financial advantage of earning while learning, Attah said, “It really helped me out. Otherwise, I would have had to work at some other kind of job for like 15 hours a week to help pay the bills.”  

The students aren’t the only ones who are inspired by the Greenway Institute’s innovative model. Annick Dewald is a founding faculty member at Greenway. The Smith College graduate worked briefly at Boeing before going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to receive her doctorate. There, she helped design high altitude, long endurance solar aircrafts for earth and climate observation missions. Before coming to the Institute, she worked at an aerospace start-up, where she managed a team of 14 interns tasked with building a 30-meter wingspan aircraft.   

“That start-up experience, plus working closely with students, is what drew me to the Greenway Institute,” she said. “I saw the advantages of working at a small space, where you get a lot of responsibility, you get a lot of different experiences, rather than a really clear job description and a very narrow focus.”

Dewald described her experience working with students in the spring pilot of 2025 as highly collaborative. “The community we built was really, really strong because we were all co-creators, so we broke down the hierarchy of faculty and student, where we were all on first-name basis.”  

Dewald said equity in education is something all Greenway staff care deeply about. The key elements of the Institute’s model reflect that sentiment, starting with a framing of engineering as collaborative and altruistic which may attract more women and people of color into a field from which they have felt excluded. The professional development scaffolding students receive will help first-generation engineering students succeed. And cracking the affordability nut will help make engineering education, indeed all of higher education, more accessible — or so goes the plan. 

For those who are cheering for the Greenway team, there is ample proof of concept. Since 2020, Somerville’s colleague and advisor, Ron Ulseth, has been running a similar work-integrated program at Iron Range Engineering in Minnesota. A partnership between Minnesota North College and Minnesota State University, Iron Range also connects students with paid, supervised internships, project-based learning, and a similar professional support system.  

Iron Range differs from the Greenway Institute in that it is for community college students who are majoring in engineering. Students spend a total of nine semesters, first in community college, then in Iron Range’s academy and boot camp, where Ulseth said they “learn how to be an engineer.” For their last two years, they are out working in engineering co-ops, getting paid and also earning credit toward their degree. 

Ulseth said that earning money and learning how to navigate the workplace help address the barriers that lead students towards worst-case scenarios, like leaving college with significant debt and no degree.  

“Earning money and learning how to navigate the workplace help address the barriers that lead students towards worst-case scenarios, like leaving college with significant debt and no degree.” 

“Many of our people were disadvantaged in their ability to continue their education given the structures that exist, be it racism, socioeconomic issues, or fill-in-the-blank,” said Ulseth, who recently stepped down as Iron Range program director.  

Iron Range has achieved A.B.E.T. (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accreditation and was recognized as “an emerging world leader in engineering education” in a 2018 report by M.I.T. These distinctions are important benchmarks for the Greenway Institute, as it seeks its own accreditation and the financial backing that will help it get there. Meanwhile, the team continues to develop its signature curriculum and is beginning to market the new institution to students and families. It may not be for everyone, but given the thirst for change in higher education, the Greenway Institute may well be a concept whose time has come.