Biography | Mary Barra — The Flint Institute That Paid Her to Inspect Hoods

The usual GM-lifer story starts on a factory floor and skips the school that made the floor a syllabus.

Mary Barra took her bachelor's here, when the place was still called General Motors Institute.

She entered as an 18-year-old co-op student in 1980.

CNN's fact file and a 2014 House biography both date the start to that year at Pontiac Motor Division, inspecting fenders and hoods while the Institute paid tuition.

The degree was a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering, finished in 1985.

Kettering University, which took the Institute's name on 1 January 1998, still sits at 1700 University Avenue in Flint.

The co-op model was the point of the school, sometimes nicknamed the West Point of industry: classroom weeks alternating with plant weeks.

GMI had admitted women only since 1965.

When she enrolled, the Oakland Press later noted, women were still less than a quarter of the student body.

Britannica adds that she and her older brother, Paul, were the first generation of their family to attend college.

After 1985 she stayed inside GM as a senior engineer at the Pontiac Fiero plant.

In 1988 the company sent her to Stanford Graduate School of Business on a fellowship.

She finished that MBA in 1990 and came back to manufacturing planning.

The Flint campus is a working university, not a GM museum.

The night photograph attached shows later buildings on the same grounds, including the Learning Commons completed long after her class.

The portrait is a 2014 United States government photograph.

Photo: campus, Colin Venable, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: U.S. government, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.