So, imagine an engineering college where you have a very favorable student:teacher ratio plus a 5min walk to a world class entrepreneurship education.
Many of the olin students are brilliant, quirky, very progressive, want to give back with their high quality (and what used to be 100% fully funded from endowments and grants, think its 50% now) education. Think this is a large point that gets overlooked - graduate an engineering degree debt free and it is easier to give back through a start up or social venture :)
Huge emphasis on actually building things in capstone classes. Fantastic faculty and amazing machine shop resources for such a small school. Some of the best students in my negotiations and accounting classes were from Olin. Additionally wellesley college is a 10 min bus ride for access to top-notch liberal arts classes. Lucky to have that mixture for sure.
They're definitely very different and independent schools, however. While I have several friends from Babson, my social & professional life has drifted away from there. Of the companies mentioned in the article a handful of them (like Big Belly) are the results of fruitful Olin-Babson collaborations. The majority of companies that come out of the two schools, however, have had less cross-campus collaboration than I think many would like.