Kettering University, Where GM Trained Its Engineers
Near Flint, Michigan
Just across the river from the old Chevy-in-the-Hole site sits Kettering University, and the two locations tell a compressed version of Flint's entire industrial story.
The school was founded in nineteen nineteen as the School of Automotive Trades, created specifically to train technical and management talent for the automobile industry that had just reorganized Flint's entire economy. The idea was cooperative education: students would alternate between classroom learning and paid work in GM's factories, gaining practical experience while earning enough to pay tuition.
By nineteen twenty-six, General Motors had acquired the school outright and renamed it General Motors Institute of Technology. It grew into one of the most distinctive engineering programs in the United States, producing generations of engineers and plant managers who shaped GM's operations worldwide. The cooperative education model it pioneered, where students rotated between study and industry work terms, became a template copied by universities across the country.
When GM began withdrawing from Flint in the nineteen eighties, the university made a painful but necessary decision: it separated from General Motors on July first, nineteen eighty-two. For a school built on its relationship with one company, that was an existential moment.
The institution renamed itself GMI Engineering and Management Institute, keeping the initials, and eventually became Kettering University in nineteen ninety-eight, named for Charles Kettering, the GM inventor who pioneered the electric starter motor and diesel locomotive technology.
Kettering still runs the co-op model. Students still alternate semesters between classroom and industry partners. The university adapted. Some would say it modeled the kind of reinvention the rest of Flint is still working to achieve.
