MONTPELIER, Vt. — All red brick and white trim and dating from as far back as the 1870s, the buildings that frame a grassy quad on a hill above Vermont’s capital city comprise the quintessential college campus.
Behind the scenes, this holdover from the 19th century is where a group of business, college and government leaders is working on the task of reinventing higher education for the 21st.
An entirely new college is being planned here to not only change how higher education is delivered, and at what price, but to highlight ways the current business model no longer works — yet is so deeply entrenched that the easiest way to fix it is to begin again from scratch.
Called the Greenway Institute — “green” as in new — the project will adopt instructional methods proven to work well, such as real-world training under the supervision of faculty mentors, while stripping away the frills, distractions and layers of bureaucracy that make college in America so expensive.
“It’s not fancy. It’s a place where you do have a meaningful relationship with your faculty members. But you also take out your own trash,” said Mark Somerville, the founding president.
Even more unexpected than the location of this startup is the timing. Other colleges and universities are closing or at risk of closing. In Vermont alone, seven private colleges have shut down in the last 10 years.
But Somerville, the former provost of Olin College of Engineering, said this “moment of mass extinction” makes it clearer than ever that “we need new models in higher ed.”
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Several other experimental higher education institutions are also in the planning stages — enough to have been newly organized in January by Duke University into a Future Universities Alliance, of which Greenway is a member.
Project Polymath, for instance — founded by Dan Futrell, former CEO of the Pat Tillman Foundation, which gives scholarships to military veterans — proposes to mentor bachelor’s degree students beginning in 2028 through three different majors each, then place them in apprenticeships with employers for two years. It calls itself an “ROTC for the private sector.”
There is “broad agreement that something has to change, and also recognition that changing legacy institutions from within is agonizingly difficult,” said Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College, author of the book “‘Whatever It Is, I’m Against It’: Resistance to Change in Higher Education” and a member of both the Greenway and Polymath advisory boards.
These new projects, Rosenberg said, are “essentially an alternative to trying to change these institutions from within, which hasn’t been working very well.”
Greenway bought its campus in 2023 from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, which had mostly gone remote by then and would be acquired a year later by the California Institute of the Arts after enrollment declines and multimillion-dollar deficits.
Many renovations are complete, and the new school tentatively plans to open next fall. It’s raised $4.5 million toward a goal of $30 million by 2031, Somerville said — including a grant from the National Science Foundation, which it shared with partner institution Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. It’s also making money by renting out space it doesn’t need.
Greenway’s founders and advisers include tech executives, CEOs, a onetime Vermont state secretary of education, a NASA engineer and current and former administrators from Harvard, Dartmouth, Tufts and other schools. It will teach one subject: engineering.
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The project already tested its model last year on a group of students borrowed from other schools, which gave them academic credit for coming to the Greenway campus and doing hands-on work with faculty supervisors in a prototype semester. Instead of sitting in conventional classes and lectures, the students designed wind turbines and solar-powered traffic signals.
“Basically, they learned electrical, mechanical and some controls by doing, versus somebody standing at the front and saying, ‘All right, you know, this is Norton’s equivalent theorem’ [of electronic circuits] that you’ll never use in your life,” said Troy McBride, co-founder of a Vermont-based solar panel manufacturer and chair of Greenway’s board of directors.
New research by scholars at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Strada Education Foundation shows that work-based learning improves students’ likelihood of getting jobs, advancing in their careers and earning more than classmates who studied in other ways. But fewer than half of students at public four-year universities experience paid work-based learning, a separate Strada study showed. (Strada is among the funders of The Hechinger Report, which co-produced this story.)
“We’re stuck in the 1950s,” McBride said of traditional instruction. “We haven’t responded to the internet, let alone AI. We’re still memorizing things that don’t need to be memorized, and we’re not teaching skills and tools. We’re teaching facts, which is the least useful thing in these times.”
Jazz Gonzalez, who was part of Greenway’s prototype semester, said conventional lectures in his previous years in college left him wanting more.
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“A lot of the times they say, ‘This is the theory, this is how we usually apply it, and here you go, you’ll have an exam on it in a week,’ ” said Gonzalez, a Pennsylvania native who graduated in the spring from Elizabethtown. “I would always say, ‘OK, but how do I dig deeper into this? How do I use this, and how do I actually apply it to what I’m going to be doing in the future?’ ”
When Greenway is in full operation, students are expected to live on campus for two years doing projects, then go on to real-world workplaces for an additional two years while continuing to get support from faculty.
That lowers the cost to the college of providing housing. It’s also part of the educational strategy: Research shows that students who live on campus benefit from a communal setting for the first two years, according to the Association of College and University Housing Officers, with lower dropout rates than classmates who live off campus. But “by the time a student is in their junior year at most colleges, they’re, like, ‘Could I go study abroad now?’ ” Somerville said.
Greenway students will also shop and cook for themselves in communal kitchens, plan their own extracurricular activities and, if they want to go to the gym, sign up for the nearby Planet Fitness or other off-campus options.
It’s “very lean,” said Emmanuel Attah, an engineering major at Elizabethtown who was also part of Greenway’s prototype semester. He liked that, Attah said. “It goes right to the point. The students felt really in charge,” which he said was different from his previous experience in higher education.
Related: More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, new projection shows
Not having climbing walls or football games “really didn’t matter to us,” Gonzalez said.
Those kinds of amenities are among the factors driving up the cost of college. In the 10 years leading up to the pandemic, the consulting firm McKinsey found, spending on noninstructional services grew four times faster than spending on instruction. From 2012 to 2021, universities and colleges added facilities much faster than they added students, according to a separate study by the building consulting firm Gordian.
“You see tuition going up and up and up and up, and not necessarily for the reasons that a student would want them to go up, like a better educational experience,” McBride said. “A lot of it is for amenities, extras and for space sitting empty.”
Increasingly, said Somerville, “young people and their parents are looking at [college] and saying, ‘Does this actually make sense?’ ”
There’s another reason to make students responsible for cooking their own meals and scheduling their free time, said Annick Dewald, Greenway’s first faculty member: so they learn how.
“We assume that they can’t balance cooking for themselves and cleaning up for themselves, in addition to being college students, and I’m not totally sure why,” said Dewald, who teaches engineering.
“Employers have told me the hardest thing about fresh-from-college undergrads is getting them to show up on time or sleep eight hours at night or to figure out how to feed themselves,” she said. “That to me is a product of how we view college or what services we provide.”
Hannah Root, the project’s chief of staff, recounted taking the college’s “test” students food-shopping, which she called one of the most challenging moments of the prototype semester. There were “just so many real decisions that they were having to make that it was clear they hadn’t really experienced before,” such as whether or not to buy organic produce.
Without the frills, Greenway expects to charge an annual tuition of $25,000 or less, offset by what students would be paid for their in-person work — generally called “co-op” jobs by other universities and colleges that offer them. The average full-time co-op pays $25.42 an hour for juniors and $27.17 an hour for seniors, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. That comes to more than $50,000 a year.
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The average published total cost of attendance at private, nonprofit four-year universities is $65,470, College Board reports.
Greenway has to wait until it formally opens to apply for accreditation, a process that then takes at least four years. That’s one of the many examples of red tape that makes innovation challenging. It also means students won’t be eligible for federal grants or loans. Greenway’s founders said they expect the money they raise will offset that, and that accreditation would be retroactively applied to graduates’ degrees.
The plan is to grow to 500 students in Montpelier, half of them on campus at any given time, and to add other locations nationwide, Somerville said. For now, he said, Greenway needs about 370 students by 2031 to break even.
Inside College Hall at the center of the campus — four stories of iconic red-brick Second Empire-style architecture, with big arched windows and a mansard roof — the Greenway team has arranged color-coded sticky notes on a whiteboard listing the many steps it takes to start a college.
McBride pointed out the building’s big, well-lit classrooms.
“They’re perfect for work-based learning,” he said of how rooms on the 150-year-old campus are being repurposed. “Lots of big rectangular spaces. Lots of windows.”
Greenway may not be for everyone, said Rebecca Holcombe, former Vermont secretary of education and candidate for governor, and another founder.
It’s “for kids who really know what they want to do,” she said. “This is a great way to get there fast without having to pay for all the things that, frankly, you may never use or want to take advantage of.”
And while the particularly large number of closing colleges in Vermont may seem a bad omen for an effort to open a new one, Holcombe said experiencing the problem has made the state that much more focused on it.
“We’re ready to start saying, ‘OK, if not this, then what?’ ”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story about reinventing college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Liam Elder-Connors. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.
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