Kettering University: GM's School Becomes Its Own

The university you're passing in Flint started life in nineteen nineteen as something almost impossibly humble: a trade school called The School of Automobile Trades, opened in a city that was quickly becoming the center of the American car industry. A group of local businessmen had a simple idea, train engineers and managers for the factories that were already sprawling across Genesee County. Within four years the school had grown into a full four-year program with more than six hundred students, and it was already changing its name, first to Flint Institute of Technology, and then to something more significant.

General Motors acquired the school in the nineteen twenties and turned it into GMI, the General Motors Institute, one of the most unusual corporate universities in American history. For the next half century, GMI supplied GM with a steady stream of precisely trained engineers who arrived already knowing how the company worked, because they had spent alternating semesters inside GM plants on the cooperative education model, real factory work, real problems, real pay, alternating with classroom semesters. It was a deliberate pipeline, and it worked.

But by nineteen eighty-two, GM's relationship with Flint was fraying. The company separated from the university on July first of that year, though it kept hiring co-op students. The school, newly independent, kept the GMI initials for recognition, then in nineteen ninety-eight made the full break official, renaming itself Kettering University after Charles F. Kettering, the brilliant inventor who led General Motors research for decades and held two hundred patents, including the electric self-starter that made modern cars possible.

What did that name change mean? It meant a school built to serve one corporation had become something broader. The co-op model survived, undergraduates still alternate work terms with classroom semesters, a structure almost unique in American higher education. And the alumni list tells its own story: Mary Barra, who graduated in nineteen eighty-five when the school still carried the GMI name, went on to become CEO of General Motors itself. The student who passed through the company's school eventually ran the company.