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Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

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Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#111

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

troupe wrote: post #93
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't comment on what's "typical", but I have known people who went to a Christian college while being atheist themselves, purely on the basis of it having a good program for the degree they wanted.

That's fair, but if someone chooses to go to an Islamic university, listing the fact that "everyone" there is a Muslim as a negative seems weird.

Oh sure, I'd expect that most people going there align with the college's beliefs. I'm just pointing out that it's not 100% and that there are non-Christians going to Christian colleges.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#112

Post by dredmorbius »

monstermachine wrote: post #92
dredmorbius wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're touching on a different problem, though one that emerges in international contexts. It's also evident at national levels where higher education is subsidised regionally, but employment is flexible at a national scale. Namely: regions which support low-cost education tend not to see its benefits if they also have a low-wage or low-tech economic base. Such states are simply subsidising brain drain to more afflue…

> This is one (of several) reasons why improved education is far less effective at increasing economic productivity than is commonly thought. (For more on this I highly recommend Ha-Joon Chang's 21 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, which has an excellent chapter on the topic.) You touch an excellent point that I never factored in when looking at why western government organizations demand free education in…

I'd never quite reached the point of thinking it was a deliberate action, but now that you mention it.

And add to this liberal skilled-worker visa entry programmes with work-to-stay requirements.

Rich nations to poor: you raise 'em, train 'em, and pension 'em. We'll work 'em, pressure down their wages and bargaining power through work-to-stay reqs, and capture all the surplus labour value.

Bond villains, eat your hearts out.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#113

Post by [deleted] »

bonoboTP wrote: post #61
js8 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually entirely disagree with the premise that students should work. I think it's wrong, aside from a perhaps holiday job. They should study, that's it. If they are not busy enough to study, then they don't study hard enough. That's why, I think, in some European countries, instead of giving debt to students, we give them a stipend. The society should be able to support students enough to study, so they wouldn't…

True, being a student should be considered a full-time job. I'm from Europe and we get stipends that depend on grades (and financial situation), and studying is at least somewhat considered a duty and responsibility towards society then, instead of the American attitude where students are service consumers, customers who must be pandered to. You can see where that attitude has led on American campuses.

[deleted]

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#115

Post by throwawaygh »

I am from Missouri and still provide a lot of advice to first gen college folks in that region.

I don't know anything about Berea, but I cannot recommend College of the Ozarks.

I can't be more clear: this is a submarine about a terrible college that no one should attend.

First, and most importantly, College of the Ozarks generally has a really terrible educational product. Really, TERRIBLE. It's difficult to over-state how bad the educational product is. Go look at their CS faculty. Almost all community colleges have way better faculty, to say nothing of other four year colleges.

Second, the work program is generous but not amazing. It's an $11K tuition waiver, which comes out to 15 hour/week job at $20/hour. Room and board is expensive, and off-campus living isn't as cheap as other options in Missouri.

Third, for students in Missouri, Truman State is an infinitely better product at roughly the same price point ($12K, and no one is stopping you from getting a part time job on or off campus...). It's a "public LAC" so the product is in the same category, but infinitely better.

Especially in CS, students are MUCH better off going to Truman State and working part-time. They'll make up the (SMALL) difference in part time job earnings through a combination of lower living expenses and way better internship placements. I'd be astounded if the average Truman CS student doesn't come out financially ahead of the average CofO student at graduation, and will eat my shoe if the Truman CS student isn't better off after 1 year of work.

Fourth, better not be homosexual or you'll be expelled / forced out. Always worth mentioning because many students don't realize this until too late.

But, again, I cannot overstate how bad of a deal CofO is compared to state schools (Truman, UMSL, Rolla) for Missouri residents, especially in high-demand fields like CS. The cost isn't that dissimilar and the faculty and educational quality at the state schools are infinitely better. I mean, go compare the CS faculty. Truman and UMSL have real CS programs staffed by real CS faculty. Rolla is a proper research university. CofO, on the other hand, has one faculty member whose industry experience is closer to "IT" than "SWE" and their curriculum is out-gunned by most community colleges. Honestly better off getting industry certs through a community college program.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#116

Post by vonnik »

dredmorbius wrote: post #7

Another is Deep Springs College, about 30 miles from Big Pine, CA. This is a two-year school, in the remote desert. Enrollment is about 30 students, coeducational since 2018. There is no tuition, but students work ~20 hours/week at jobs including cook, irrigator, butcher, groundskeeper, cowboy, "office cowboy", dairy, and feedman. The college was created to both train and accustom technical staff for powerplant engin…

Deep Springer here. Was going to add DS as well.

@dredmorbius's summary is good. Couple additions/nuances:

L.L. Nunn founded Deep Springs to train public servants/leaders. He hoped they would play a larger role in society. (Some do, some don't...). To all incoming students, the school distributes a pamphlet written by Nunn called "The Voice of the Desert", in which he articulates his vision for the school and his appreciation for the mysteries of the wilderness.

Nunn founded at least three schools in his lifetime. The first was intended to train young men to become technical staff at his power plants. (Nunn supplied Tesla with power for some of his early experiments in Telluride, CO.)

The second school was founded back east. Its student body walked out en masse to volunteer for WWI.

The third school, Deep Springs, was founded in 1917, in a location isolated enough to preserve its student body in the face of social pressures. (Worked!)

At least nominally, the student body hires and fires the faculty, determines each semester's curriculum, and conducts the admissions process to replace itself. The extent to which it does that independently varies from one school administration to another. (When I was there, we had T-shirts that said "[[frontside]] In 1917, two radical social utopias were born... [[backside]] "Only one survived.")

It's a feeder school for larger, more prestigious institutions you've heard of.

It's also a really f*cking hard place to live, work and study, because of the sheer immensity of your responsibilities, and the intensity of social interactions.

Labor: I served as the farmer's assistant, the dishwasher, and the dairy boy when I was there. The dairy boy, the feedman and the cowboy are all responsible for the care, feeding and continued survival of livestock; the butcher is responsible for their merciful killing. The farmer's assistant has to grow the alfalfa to feed the cattle (or sell). Labor's no joke, and you can't screw it up without other people suffering. Life at DS is heavily interdependent, and the consequences of mistakes are real. (I've been told this may not be true at most liberal arts colleges...)

Social: If you don't like someone at DS, chances are you will still see them 4-5 times per day, including every meal, for two years. The school has an isolation policy. It is the only human community in a high-mountain desert valley. The near towns (Big Pine and Bishop, CA) are about a 30-40min drive away, IIRC. The students stay in the Valley for the length of each term. The only ones who leave are: 1) "the driver," who picks up groceries and applicants during application season; and 2) folks with a medical appointment. That's it. It also has a "no drugs or alcohol" policy during term, the enforcement of which is variable.

You might say it's free for a reason; you pay in other ways. I made several lifelong friends there, but I'm not sure I would counsel my younger self to do it again.

Every year or so, a mainstream media outlet rediscovers it. CBS did last year: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/deep-springs-college-california...

Wikipedia has a list of notable alumni. Many are named Bill.

Bill Vollmann

William Vandenheuvel

And a third Bill who supposedly founded DARPA. I'm blanking on his last name right now.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#117

Post by throwawaygh »

troupe wrote: post #9
drewcoo wrote: post #5

Quoted post unavailable.

> They are all Christians. Is it atypical for a Christian college to be attended by Christians? I toured their campus years ago with a friend that was looking at attending the school. I'm not sure why you would go there if you weren't a Christian.

The vast majority of Christian Church-affiliated colleges in the USA are either catholic (Jesuit in particular) or Mainline. In both of those cases, the denominational ties do not preclude attendance at the college/university by non-Christians, LGBT, etc. Either in policy or in practice. If a university is Catholic or Mainline, it's pretty safe to assume that the college is open to all and that a huge % of students attending the school are not from that denomination (or particularly theistic).

Places like Wheaton (Chicago), Cedarville, Liberty, CofO, etc. are very much the outliers in terms of how church-affiliated higher ed institutions behave toward non-fundamentalist-conservative-Christians.

BTW, being Christian is not enough at CofO. The important thing is to be socially conservative and fit in with the fundy crowd. Mainline lutherans, for example, definitely aren't welcome. The national-ethnic-religious-political belief complex that is de facto required to get by at CofO is probably not even recognizable as Christianity to a European Christian eye.

Anyways, with respect to CofO, the bigotry is really not even relevant. Compare the CS faculty at Truman/Rolla/etc. vs CofO. The work study program is a $20/hr job for 15 hours a week. You can get up to $15/hr easy and your improved internship placements out of Truman/Rolla will put you ahead of CofO even before graduation. Ten years down the road there's probably close to an entire 0 in outcome differences.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#118

Post by t0suj4 »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #65

A number of people have commented on how this model of work-study is unrealistic because it relies on endowments for it to work. I think the argument can be flipped. The problem is that of incentives and the wrong culture dont allow the debt-free, work-study program to be more widespread, by leveraging endowments. Take for example a place like harvard. Consider that the objective of a harvard portfolio manager is to…

If I understand the US college debt trap correctly, the universities can raise prices however they want as long as the government can guarantee that banks loan the money to students the universities can pocket.

So universities have incentives to convince the students to take on as much debt as possible.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#119

Post by sandworm101 »

supernova87a wrote: post #27

Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, admin…

>> Having students work is not a bad thing.

My first day of law school. Big intro lecture from the Dean. "Quit your part-time jobs now. The amount of money you can earn waiting tables is a pittance compared to your tuition and scholarships." He had a good point. A student's job is to study and learn. People fail out of law school all the time. Every minute doing anything else other that studying increases the risk of that failure.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#120

Post by throwawaygh »

thereisnospork wrote: post #30
supernova87a wrote: post #27

Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, admin…

That does beg an interesting thought experiment though: what would that school look like if everything had to be done by the students. Less professoring and upper managerial responsibilities? Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors, IT students handle the networking, mechanical engineers the boilers, hospitality management majors dorm maintenance, and so on and so forth. Something like 15-20 hrs/we…

Have you ever managed an intern? Inexperienced labor often has negative value-add.

> Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors

A second semester senior without a job lined up negotiating a seven figure contract... what could go wrong?

> IT students handle the networking

This is already a thing at most colleges.

> mechanical engineers the boilers

Might be possible, but could also be a disaster.

> hospitality management majors dorm maintenance

Students already do work in dorms at front desks and so on. Business majors aren't qualified to do plumbing, electrical, etc.

Students who are qualified to do plumbing and electrical are probably better off selling that labor on the open market.

At the end of the day, the other basic problem is that at most colleges, most college students who need work can get better-paying work than the sort of work that's available on campus. Why work in Uni IT over the summer if you can get an internship literally anywhere else that probably pays better and could become a full time job?

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