Will Work for Education

By Craig Cox Utne Magazine
Published on September 1, 2003

Students at Berea College in the Appalachian hills of eastern
Kentucky don’t spend much time agonizing over their student loans.
They’re too busy running the school.

Each of the college’s 1,500 students receives the equivalent of
a full-tuition scholarship in exchange for working in one of the
school’s 130 departments. Some help run the college’s electric
plant while others work on the school’s farm, several affiliated
craft industries, and the school-owned hotel. This innovative
financial aid experiment has been going on at Berea since its
founding in 1859 and nicely meshes with the school’s focus on
‘democratic living.’ This is no hippie haven, either. One of the
South’s top liberal arts schools, Berea offers bachelor of arts and
bachelor of science degrees in 27 fields.

Berea is one of six colleges around the country that offer
student employment as an alternative or supplement to financial
aid. Together they form the Work Colleges Consortium. While
so-called work-study programs are common throughout academia, these
work colleges integrate work and study into what consortium
director Dennis Jacobs calls an ‘ethic of service.’ The financial
compensation and tuition aid formulas vary from school to school
(not all provide a full-tuition deal like Berea does).

Other schools in the consortium are Alice Lloyd College in Pippa
Passes, Kentucky; Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois;
College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri; Sterling College
in Craftsbury Common, Vermont; and Warren Wilson College in
Asheville, North Carolina. All are residential campuses where
students are required to work during each semester they are in
school. Students at the College of the Ozarks work at an airport
and at a water-driven mill; Alice Lloyd College students run the
college radio station and its daycare center. Compensation
arrangements vary: Most of the schools credit their students’
accounts each week, though some award grants at the beginning of
the year.

As you might expect, these arrangements have attracted
considerable attention from high school grads and parents anxious
to avoid the crushing debt of most university educations, but
Jacobs notes that it’s not just the financial aspects of the work
colleges that attract students. ‘Student work at these colleges is
a part of something bigger,’ he says. ‘Everybody takes their place
in the community. Some students who come to these colleges really
are attracted to the ‘work in common’ notion.’

A common practice on the academic landscape of the 19th century,
work colleges may be gearing up for a comeback. Jacobs notes that
some consortium members have recently expanded some programs to
make room for more students. In an era of crippling college debt,
it sounds like an idea whose time has come — again.

For more information on work colleges, visit the Work
College Consortium Web site at
www.workcolleges.org

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