The Foundry. A University Alternative.
A thought experiment.
What if instead of going to classes, all learning was self directed, and students simply built things in a diffused and totally free manner?
What if we built a giant lab where everybody could work and build things, complete with individual funding for developments, personal and commercial products?
What if we took the concept of a makerspace, married it to a hardware incubator and thought bigger. Much bigger.
Okay, ladies and gentleman, me and the crew have been thinking about education. Higher education is clearly not working as well as it should be for the students and is breaking down at every step of the way.
To be clear, I want to focus on engineering and science education. While what I outline here could in niche situations, apply to other fields, it is not meant to.
Student POV:
Expensive AF.
Almost zero hands on experiences. ( university sponsored) (Many a senior engineering major have lamented the lack of building things in their curriculum)
Too many distractions ( core curriculum)
Getting lost in theory.
It’s just plain not fun.
If you don’t graduate, you have almost nothing to show for your efforts. All or nothing.
School isn’t anywhere close to real world engineering.
Pretty much need an internship or a few to integrate into the workplace and build basic technical competence ( and even then companies correctly assume students are mostly incompetent off the bat).
Application process is a ridiculous hype train.
Most of the time, students are confused on what they want, and are stuck in majors that aren’t their final choice.
Also, a huge problem is that science in it’s current form is pretty broken. Only 2% of research grants are given to people 35 or under.
That’s handicapping young researchers to an unbelievable level. It’s like preventing soccer players from signing in to teams until they are 35. Horrible idea.
The Foundry.
Definitions:
Makerspace:
A public tool shop where people can build anything they want after receiving training after paying the required membership fees. Typically range in size from 2,000 - 50,000 sq. ft in size.
Foundry:
A place where people can build things, explore and learn on their own, similar to a library and a makerspace, but on a bigger scale with far more interdisciplinary interaction.
The elevator pitch:
A giant foundry, consisting of massive laboratories, libraries and shops, all accessible by anyone, no departments, devoid of lecture halls, and without a formal curriculum, relying fully on self motivation and exploration. Degrees are not granted, people can come and go as they wish. Applications are non existent, membership ( basically tuition) is paid by the month ( $200/ month estimate) granting complete and total access to the entire facility.
More details:
No curriculum - all learning is highly individual, exploratory and self directed.
No lecture halls, no formal semester long classes ( much shorter 1-3 day training classes will be provided)
No graduation, no admission process, no fancy piece of paper.
Job prospects are shown on an individual basis and judged by the things that the student has spent their time building or researching.
Year round, never stopping, no formal sports teams ( not discouraged though!).
No departments, no separation of fields/schools/colleges. All interdisciplinary.
A huge focus on finding the field that you want to work on.
A culture of building things and tackling hard problems.
Encouraging deep tech / hardware tech startups.
Individual research grants handed out like candy $1k-10k grants.
Residencies and fellowships offered ( 50-200k)
A direct pipeline to investment for company building and VC
Massive aggregation of talent pool.
Focusing on centralizing on a single campus to maximize network effects and cross pollination of knowledge ( 50k+) students.
No set graduation plan. Come when ready, leave when ready, low stakes, but effort will be made to attract top talent and offering them space and resources to build things
Hacker houses, dorms, cafeterias, gyms, labs.
Non-profit business model, but subsidized by venture capital*, government and donations.
A for profit model doesn’t really work. Also, if you think about it, universities are currently nonprofit but can still rake in money hand over fist. Not a limiting factor.
Is treated like critical public infrastructure.
Science grants are subsidized by a variety of paths (nobody but the person being given the money has control over how the money is spent)
alumni/professionals bidding on interesting topics or people they think are interesting. ( grants can stack, zero restrictions here really, almost an open market for research funding)
Pre-seed VC grants ( structured as grants, and NOT INVESTMENTS), exploration and research should not be profit driven.
Foundry funds/foundation.
Government agencies ( also with zero control over how money is spent)
Emphasis here is for young people / members to explore, build, find out what they want to work on in life and who they want to work with. An existential search almost.
A brief note on this. It’s extremely common for students to come into university with only a hazy idea of what they want to graduate with and often get shoe-horned into a career with very little idea of what it actually feels like. Being in a career and building something is not something that can be taught in a classroom. I can’t impart the feeling of being a rocket engineer to my peers by talking about it. It’s a very highly individual process to which each person much find themselves in.
A massive library with every book imaginable which prints books on demand and then inventories them. Online books are purchased, and printed on site in a matter of minutes.
Long term project storage space is allowed and allocated, as well as desks and office space.
A massive, mostly unregulated, taxed outdoor bazaar, where people can buy and sell whatever they wish, and can open and close businesses on a dime.
A signature of the foundry is there is an extremely small staff and most bureaucracy is either deleted or handled by AI.
The whole point here is to give people a playground, a place to explore and learn what they want to do with their lives instead of pigeon holing them in a classroom. For heaven’s sake, this is the correct pedagogy for young children, why should it not apply to young adults? Just pointing out that the current model doesn’t seem to be working.
10-20 year grants provided by a patron system, similar to Renaissance style patronage. Funding iconoclasts. The challenge then goes to the individual to prove they are somehow different to at least one potential patron, which in a marketplace is a lot easier than with a single source of funding.
Patronage in general and large dollar grants with long term support ( 10-20 years)
No admissions process, simply a fee and consequential enrollment immediately thereafter. I think that no matter how I spin it, while the admissions process at the beginning may be solid, over time it will warp and anyhow, it’s not necessary to restrict people from entering, those who are not a good fit for it will leave of their own accord and those who cause serious problems will be expelled.
Social groups largely through finding social orgs/builder groups. Mostly unregulated and unbureaucratic to form and join.
No high school diploma requirement - you can legitimately drop out of school to pursue this. I won’t stop you, heck I might even cheer you on. For most people, high school is a waste of time, for me it was not, but that was because I skipped class as often as possible to work in the shops :)
An emphasis on fundamental and highly technical research / engineering.
Streamlined international visa system - no additional charge.
No out of state or international tuition upcharges.
Housing is to be very cheap.
People with nothing should be able to start at the foundry, get a job within or nearby to it to pay their (very low) bills and start learning.
Hiring is pretty straightforward, post a job listing, and those who can do the job will demonstrate competence on an individual basis. Might be more work upfront but yields far superior hires.
Oh also. Huge markets within the foundry. For example, MCMASTER-CARR WAREHOUSE IN THE FOUNDRY ( if you know, you know)
Extends to similar stores. Instead of leaving the foundry to go to home depot, home depot is already in the foundry and well stocked.
Massive markets for components - think Shenzhen level of component markets, at bulk and with nearby factories.
Public transport WITHIN THE FOUNDRY. Massive trams & trains going around the college with highly strict schedules and free of charge.
Large support for personal mobility devices and separation of pedestrian walkways. No roads within the foundry. All deliveries are done via underground train tracks. No need for freight trucks, all freight is done by train or in extreme scenarios, air lifted. We do not need cars in our foundry.
If it wasn’t obvious already, this thing is going to be massive. Absolutely huge. Think the size of Texas A&M, at least, with no roads, much more dense buildings, way less classrooms and far more integrated markets.
There will obviously develop a city around the foundry and the foundry will become the Central Business District, so it is imperative to have public transport to and from the foundry.
This city will have very loose zoning laws.
Business zoning complaints will be handled on an individual basis.
Where will this thing be built? Probably Middle of Nowhere Texas ( MoNT).
We need to make it worth people’s time to move out to MoNT and a whole culture will develop with business grants for small businesses and space being allocated cheaply.
There will be a small airport adjacent to the foundry and connections to the Interstates. ( Shoutout to I-45, best highway in the US)
No direct Foundry facilitated P2P competition. * Meaning no ranking of members, no quotas for class sizes or similar shenanigans. Just free form. People naturally will compete, but the main avenue of competing for a few irrelevant general metrics ( SAT, GPA) is removed entirely and now it’s competition on real hardcore individual competence with a wide choice of ways to compete.
Also. The distinction between science, art, the trades, and engineering is way overblown. These fields are all highly related and so bringing in everyone working in these fields under one building is critical because the interpersonal growth will be huge.
*For example, if a company founded in the foundry is created, we get 5% of it, no board seats (prelim terms, not legal advice lol), investors decide to invest, company goes big, IPO’s, we sell to pour more money into the foundry.
Since this is a thought experiment. I want to present what I envision a 19 year old’s story would look like in his first couple of months at the foundry. Let’s give this man a name. Call him Hashim.
Hashim moved to The Foundry in May immediately after graduating high school in Chicago a couple months ago and started off wanting to work with computers and robots, but never really knew much about them.
He arrived at the foundry and pretty much spent his first week moving into the dorms, exploring the labs and foundry and finding some student organizations that he wanted to join, proceeded to join a group working on trash pickup drones, he also went to the job fair and got a job as a cashier selling computer mice PCBs in the foundry market. It’s a part time gig, but it pays his bills with only a couple of shifts a week. Very doable. Over time he explores more groups, realizes that he doesn’t give two hoots about robot mechanics, he just cares about making big things move so he goes and joins the hyperloop team. He realizes that their biggest problem is how difficult it is for them to pull a vacuum on a large area.
He meets Kevin, who is 20 and worked on building his own sputtering magnetron, and they chat magnets and vacuums for a while and soon become great friends. Kevin shows him the sputtering magnetron he built and coats his keys in titanium just for fun.
He’s hooked. Stunned. Never seen anything like this before. He wants to build his own little vacuum pump, so he asks the funding office for a grant, for which a $1,000 check is written on the spot, with promise for more funding upon request.
He doesn’t know the first thing about vacuum pumps, but hey he can learn pretty quick. He asks Kevin for advice and Kevin introduces him to Jim, a seasoned vacuum pump professional now working on pyrotechnic light displays.
Jim explains how a vacuum pump works, and offers to mentor Hashim and soon Hashim and Jim hash out a design for a 3d printed copper turbomolecular pump, which Hashim proceeds to print at one of the Foundry printers free of charge.
He gets it, it’s tolerances are off and it won’t spin. He tries again and again until on the 4th try, he gets it to spin, realizes it needs bearings, gets a new version printed, and keeps at it until his money runs out.
The only requirement for funding extension is to show proof-of-attempt. Meaning the foundry wants to see that you at least tried to build something, regardless of whether it worked or not. So he asks for another $3,000 and gets a check the same day.
In a matter of weeks, he has a working vacuum pump and understands many basics of engineering such as sealing, basic fluid mechanics and CTE issues common to many designs. He then starts messing around with it trying to make a bigger vacuum pump and realizes the issue is with the concrete tunnels being porous.
So for this he goes back to Kevin and the hyperloop teams, tells them what he’s been up to, impressing everyone around. He tells them that the issue they have is with the walls of the tunnel and after talking with the wall designer, they start collaborating on a solution for the wall issue.
The cycle continues, and we all have better tech because of it. For fun Hashim joins Fight Club ( doesn’t talk about it though) and rides his electric longboard around campus exploring random places not typically privy to public eyes with Kevin and some other friends. A large part of campus culture is pranks and hacks, so often times they’ll find a rollercoaster or joyride built in or on top of various buildings. One time a group of guys overnight installed a dangling RC car racetrack from the ceiling of the library, just for fun. No they weren’t punished for it.
Hashim lives in the dorms and his biggest expenses are membership fees, housing, insurance and food, which often comes out to be around $1000 a month total, so working 15 hours a week at $17/hr easily keeps him alive indefinitely.
Been procrastinating publishing this essay for a minute, but ah well, here we are.
Listen. Me and my team are building the first stepping stones for something like this. We’ve opened a makerspace in College Station and are currently building out the community for it. This is probably years away, but if you want to help accelerate it let me know.
Or if you want to talk my email is: ismailhozain AT gmail DOT com
Had me at McMaster-Carr