Biography | Mary Barra — The Flint Institute That Paid Tuition Against Pontiac Shifts

People treat General Motors Institute as a vanished company school that only trained men for a vanished Pontiac line.

Mary Teresa Makela walked into it in 1980 as an eighteen-year-old co-op student.

The campus still stands at 1700 University Avenue in Flint.

In her years it was still the General Motors Institute, the co-operative engineering college the company had run since 1919.

Women had been admitted only since 1965.

They were still a minority of the enrollment when she arrived.

The bargain was blunt.

She inspected hoods and fenders on shifts at Pontiac Motor Division while the Institute paid toward her tuition.

Pontiac was the plant her father, Ray Makela, had already given thirty-nine years as a die maker.

She finished a bachelor of science in electrical engineering in 1985.

Kettering University, which took that name in 1998, still lists the degree and still sits on this lot.

Do not look for her classrooms in a later glass box.

The Academic Building on University Avenue is the surviving teaching block of the old Institute.

After graduation she went to work as a senior engineer at the Pontiac Fiero plant.

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

That year belongs on a separate pin.

This one marks the Flint campus that made the first degree, and the Pontiac shifts that paid for it.

The Institute outlived the division that fed it.

Pontiac Motor Division closed.

The Flint riverfront factories that once stood across the water are now Chevy Commons park.

The co-op school stayed, took Charles Kettering's name, and still takes students from companies that are not GM.

Barra later joined its board of trustees.

She is a living executive.

This memory marks a dated public campus and a published degree.

It does not mark a present office or a private house.

Photo: Campus Center and Traverse at Kettering University, Colin Venable, 8 January 2023, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Mary Barra, 13 August 2014, U.S. Department of State, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.