A few institutions–and I mean a very few–have hewed to an older model of education called the “work college” as a means of addressing the crisis of college affordability.
Higher education affordability is on everyone’s mind these days. The crisis of college affordability is partly the result of ideological “piling on” that we’ve seen in recent years as pundits of various sorts have been providing us with exposés about all that’s wrong with contemporary higher ed. On the other hand, this bad press is partly deserved by our industry, as we have done a poor job of addressing the question of the long-term value of a higher education. Here I’m not referring to the talking points we often repeat about how much more a college grad will make in a lifetime than a high school grad. Instead, I’m referring to the larger value proposition of higher ed in terms of overall life achievement. Given the cost, the time, the average amount of indebtedness, and such, won’t many high school grads simply be better off getting a job after they graduate? Or at least, won’t they be better off to wait for a few years before attempting to go to college?
Colleges and universities pursue various means to address the crisis of affordability. Some will quote and requote the aforementioned talking points. Some have actually cut their tuition to great fanfare, largely eliminating tuition discounting and hoping to make up for any lost revenue on larger enrollment volume. Others have pursued a more direct approach by beginning to prioritize fundraising for scholarships over raising funds for capital projects.
What Is A Work College?
Work colleges are institutions of higher learning that require students to work a specified number of hours each week to help defray the cost of attending. The U.S. government formally defines a work college as a two- or four-year institution that:
- Requires all resident students and at least one-half of all students to participate in a “comprehensive work-service-learning program” for at least five hours per week (80 hours per semester), and
- “Provides students participating in the comprehensive work-learning-service program with the opportunity to contribute to their education and to the welfare of the community as a whole.” Source: Code of Federal Regulations, https://bit.ly/49AsveR
The Work Colleges Consortium, a group that represents this educational model to the world, currently has nine IHEs as members:
- Alice Lloyd College
- Berea College
- Bethany Global University
- Blackburn College
- College of the Ozarks
- Kuyper College
- Paul Quinn College
- Sterling College
- Warren Wilson College
A tenth institution, Green Mountain College, ceased operations in 2019.
A Brief History of the Work College Movement
Modern work colleges evolved from the manual labor college movement that began in the U.S. in the nineteenth century. Manual labor colleges experimented with the combination of manual labor (usually agricultural labor) with academic studies as a means of building character and perseverance, qualities that were considered as essential to the nineteenth century “gentleman” as instruction in the arts and letters. Early experimenters with this model included Villanova and Oberlin Colleges, but they soon abandoned the concept as financially infeasible. Many other manual labor colleges started and quickly failed entirely.
Only a few manual labor colleges survived into the twentieth century. Those that survived did so by adapting their model of work to account for the increasing urbanization and industrialization of American society. The most prominent of these institutions is Berea College of Kentucky. Berea survived and thrived through effective fundraising, a modernization of its work program, and a consistent focus upon its Appalachian context and the needs of that region’s students. With an endowment of approximately $1.5 billion and an enrollment of around 1,450 students, Berea has been able to bankroll a full-tuition scholarship for every enrolled student. In exchange, Berea students work a variety of jobs on campus, including traditional manual labor college jobs such as agriculture, working in the College’s hotel, restaurant, shops, and housekeeping. But students also fulfill their labor requirements as teaching assistants, lab assistants, summer internships (paid for by Berea), and working in campus life positions.
Advantages of the Work College Model
There are many advantages to the work college model as implemented by the nine schools who are members of the Work Colleges Consortium in addition to the obvious financial ones.
- Work ethics–Students in work colleges are taught the dignity and value of work from the beginning of their time on campus. And the value of that work is woven into the academic program far more comprehensively than is typically the case on other campuses.
- Experiential learning–By weaving a work program into a school’s academics, IHEs further enhance students’ critical thinking and personal growth over time.
- Enhancing community spirit–Work programs provide means for students to become meaningfully engaged with the institution’s community from their first semester of enrollment. Further, students come to associate that engagement with service to others rather than with individual achievement.
- Civic engagement–Work colleges stress students’ responsibility for improving society even during their student years and provide numerous pathways to engage in service to the wider community around the college through their work programs.
- Educational equity and inclusion–Although many IHEs were begun with the aim of improving society by enhancing opportunities for higher learning and social advancement, the reality has often been the opposite. By providing students educational services that are beyond the financial reach of larger and larger portions of society, colleges and universities have unwittingly undercut their egalitarian purpose of improving society. Work colleges reverse that trend by students with educational pathways that don’t at the same time saddle them with decades of indebtedness.
Challenges of the Work College Model
The chief challenge of the work college model today is financial feasibility, the same problem that contributed to the demise of so many manual labor colleges in the 1800s. The federally-funded College Work Program requires students to work at least 80 hours per semester and to be clearly evaluated on the quality of that work. Further, that work must clearly relate to a service component within the curriculum. The College Work Program is partially funded through an annual appropriation through the federal budget and is distributed in the form of grants. This funding method means that there is a fixed amount available each year for any participating colleges. Should additional IHEs be admitted to the program, that admission could result in a corresponding funding reduction to each participating institution. Finally, federal rules that each dollar funded must be matched by the institution’s own funds.
All of these factors mean that it is impossible to make the work college model work without either a large endowment or a robust and successful fundraising operation to support it.
Institutions need not receive federal approval to offer students institutionally-funded work study. But the more that schools depend upon such work study, the more robust infrastructure is required to oversee it in terms of Directors of Student Labor and the like. In short, even though such programs provide badly needed personal development opportunities for students, the overhead for operating student work programs is so high that most schools choose not to run them.
Work Colleges and College Affordability
The work college concept has already proven itself as a means of minimizing and in some cases even eliminating student debt. But small schools considering adopting such a model should not view it as a solution to their overall financial problems. Adopting the work college model requires huge financial resources either in the form of endowment or a very healthy development program.
On the other hand, well-endowed institutions that are genuinely concerned with the ethics surrounding heavy student indebtedness should consider this model to provide students with a pathway to minimizing debt upon graduation. It isn’t only needy or middle class families who are concerned with the value proposition of higher education today. Even well-heeled families who can afford to pay much more than average for their children to attend expensive colleges and universities will begin to demand more financial accountability from those institutions. Such accountability should become a priority for IHEs with more than $200K of endowment per student.
Further, given the current climate in higher education, I suspect that wise donors will soon begin to gravitate more toward funding scholarships than capital projects. Donors wanting to leave a significant legacy will become even more interested in helping address the college affordability crisis than they have been in the past.
Not everyone can be a Berea College. Most small institutions will never have the chance to grow an endowment of $1.5 billion. Given Berea’s current enrollment, that averages out to around $1.3 million of endowment per student. Yet according to Inside Higher Ed, there are currently 19 private IHEs with larger endowments per student than Berea College. Yes, all of these other schools provide generous financial aid programs, particularly to students of modest means. But none of them combine that aid with the concept of the value of work in the way that work colleges do. There is plenty of room for many other well-endowed schools to do more in this area.
Institutions that are seriously committed to addressing the crisis of college affordability need to redirect their development programs over the next decade. This redirection should focus on a vision of education that gives students “skin in the game” of their education without saddling them with unmanageable debt. The current model of tuition discounting masquerading as scholarships doesn’t do that. Neither does “free” community college. But the work colleges do, and so will other institutions that have the courage to follow the lead of these nine institutions and adopt at least a partial work college model.
We don’t need more schools to join the Work College Consortium. That would only further dilute the fixed amount of money the federal government allocates these schools each year. Instead, we need more private IHEs to adopt aspects of the work college model that will make college more affordable for a wider swathe of our society. Most of our schools have a stated commitment to improve society. Increasingly, our fund-raising priorities should reflect that commitment.