Kettering University, the Flint school General Motors used to own

For 56 years, an entire university in Flint belonged to a car company. General Motors didn’t just recruit at Kettering University — it owned the place outright, ran it as the General Motors Institute, and treated it as a private pipeline for the engineers and managers it needed.

The school started small in 1919 as the School of Automobile Trades, founded by a handful of Flint men who could see the auto industry growing faster than it could find trained people. By 1923 it had become the Flint Institute of Technology with a four-year co-op program and more than 600 students. Three years later GM bought it and rechristened it GMI.

That co-op idea is the school’s signature, and it has never left. Students alternate stretches of classroom work with stretches of paid work at a real employer — historically a GM plant, learning the trade with grease under their fingernails between exams. Generations of GM engineers came up exactly this way.

The marriage lasted until July 1, 1982, when GM, pulling back from Flint, cut the school loose. It kept the GMI initials at first, then in 1998 took the name Kettering University, after Charles Kettering — the GM research chief whose lab gave the world the electric automobile starter, so drivers no longer had to hand-crank an engine to life.

The co-op machinery still hums today along University Avenue, with students splitting their years between lecture halls and employers far beyond Detroit’s car makers. The name on the gate changed, and the company that once owned the whole campus stepped away. But the deal at the heart of the place — learn it in the classroom, then go build it for real — is the same one struck back in 1919.