Alena Selezneva
Everyone and her brother in higher ed is talking about internships, experiential learning and career-connectedness. But most are going about it in a scattershot way—sometimes by discipline, sometimes by individual instructor. They’re all working within a rigid system constrained by faculty allegiances to disciplinary training, adherence to a calendar that no longer makes sense and with few professionals who really understand this stuff leading the charge.
Within a few weeks, I heard three people from completely different kinds of institutions (including my own regional comprehensive) say, “We want to be like Northeastern.” When I repeated that to someone deep in Northeastern’s co‑op system, she said, “What does that even mean? Northeastern isn’t even like Northeastern.”
As I said in a previous column, we’ve been experiencing a smoothie‑fication of higher ed—and that means there will be some winners and a whole bunch of big losers. When people ask what I’m excited about (to the extent that anyone should care what I like), it’s those leaders and institutions that are doing things differently.
I’ve been looking at institutions that organize themselves around different assumptions. It’s perhaps easiest to innovate in small private colleges or in centers at big universities. Berea and the other work colleges require labor as a condition of enrollment—students work 10 to 15 hours a week in campus jobs that fund their education. At Berea, they lean into Appalachian arts and make artisanal brooms to sell. When I heard Michael Sorrell, the long‑serving president of Paul Quinn College, talk about how that private HBCU in a food‑desert part of Dallas plowed up the football field (in Texas!) to plant an organic garden and sell the produce, I shook some imaginary pom-poms.
The consortium of these quirky colleges was ahead of the game in terms of combining learning, service, work and, most of all, affordability. But Kettering University in Flint, Mich., takes it even further. It operates from a premise that makes most of higher education look like an extended exercise in postponement. One of Kettering’s founders said, “If we taught musicians the way we teach engineers, we would make them take 12 years of music theory before we ever let them touch a piano.” That’s also true of English majors. If it were enough to just read a bunch of great books, every Ph.D. in literature would have written a great novel.
Kettering runs on 12‑week rotations. Half the student body is always gone—at Ford, Bosch, GE, Siemens, NASA, Quicken, Corning, Amazon, FermiLab, Dow and hundreds more—in paid professional roles with real deliverables and real consequences. Twelve weeks later, the cohorts switch places. For four and a half years, students alternate between classroom and workplace until the distinction between where they learn theory and where they apply it collapses.
This isn’t cooperative education as supplement—it’s built into the structure. Every student, every major, every term. The university doesn’t prepare students for work; work and classroom learning mold students in concert and from the beginning.
The academic consequences are significant. Faculty teach students returning from 12 weeks working and coming back to class with real-life knowledge of what breaks when theory meets friction. Professors who’ve been in the classroom for decades can’t pretend they hold all the expertise. They get to acknowledge that a substantial portion of professional formation happens elsewhere, with employer partners who become co‑educators.
Maintaining six hundred business partnerships requires dedicated development, continuous curriculum alignment with industry needs and a calendar that operates outside the typical academic year. Most institutions can’t manage one of those things, let alone all of them.
The outcomes are what you’d expect: 98 percent of graduates employed or in grad school within six months, median starting salary north of $76,000, many graduating debt‑free. Students earn $50–75K through co‑op work (in addition to scholarships, etc.). But those numbers measure output. What’s harder to measure is formation—the professional judgment that develops through friction and correction inside systems where decisions have consequences.
This is not experiential learning as most universities practice it. It is not a track or an enhancement. It is the organizing logic of the institution.
As AI thins out entry‑level roles and raises expectations for what human contributors can do from day one, the question isn’t whether universities should integrate work and learning. It’s whether they can reorganize themselves to do what Kettering figured out.
What’s most interesting to me is how few people really know about this quirky place. When I talked with my neighbor, a 20‑something engineer, he’d never heard of it. When I told him how the education works, he said, “That’s what I needed.” Nothing he’d gotten in his private university classes had truly prepared him for the work he does designing electrical grids.
Kettering grew out of an accredited corporate university for General Motors in the ’80s—GMI—and has done this for over a hundred years in a city that’s been through everything American industry can inflict. The university hasn’t just endured there; it’s invested in the community. During the Flint water crisis, when the drinking water got poisoned and trust evaporated, Kettering stayed put: testing water, handing out filters, rehabbing houses, doubling down on the city that raised it.
There are a gazillion institutions that describe themselves as “the best‑kept secret” in higher ed. When presidents talk about their own campuses, it usually sounds to me like an infomercial and I tune out. But what intrigues me about a place like Kettering is that it’s taken on some of the structural problems in higher ed and found ways to work around or adapt them. Not everyone needs to replicate this model, but it’s certainly worth a close look.
This is one answer to the smoothie-fication of higher ed. Kettering reminds us that education isn’t supposed to go down easy—it’s supposed to have some crunch.
