What Can Work Colleges Teach Higher Ed?

Tristan Razote spent his first year at Berea College cleaning buildings. Now, as a senior, he helps protect those buildings as a cybersecurity specialist responding to malware attacks and other online threats.

Razote has made the most of his time at Berea, a work college in rural Kentucky. He’s set to graduate debt-free in the spring with a degree in computer science. He’s also a Dell-certified technician, has logged two internships, studied abroad in Taiwan and already has a job lined up with a health insurance company. Like all Berea students, he has worked at least 10 hours a week on campus every semester in exchange for free tuition.

Razote, who grew up in a low-income household in rural Tennessee, always planned to pursue a college degree. But he wasn’t sure how he would pay for it until a Berea recruiter found him while he was completing a high school internship at Oak Ridge National Labs.

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“I was pretty worried because we had been shopping around for colleges and the closest one to us was $10,000 to $15,000 a year, which is a lot of money that I didn’t have,” Razote said.

Like Razote, most students work their way through college. A 2025 Inside Higher Ed student survey found that 70 percent of respondents worked for pay, and 30 percent of those held full-time jobs. But many working students still graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

At work colleges, which give students free or reduced tuition in exchange for their labor, students don’t just have jobs—employment is built into the educational experience. And while not all graduate debt-free, they typically leave with considerable workforce experience and at least the contours of a path forward. Work colleges are centered on the idea that students can spend less on their education and get more out of it, an approach that some have followed for more than a century.

For Razote, the appeal was simple: “I can go to Berea College and save all that money and actually start with a leg up in the world,” he said.

At a time when higher education is beset with affordability challenges, public skepticism and concerns about debt and return on investment, work colleges seem to hold answers to many of those issues. In some ways, the wider sector is already borrowing from the work college playbook, with an increasing emphasis on internships, apprenticeships and credentials that reflect learned skills. Yet only nine institutions have received federal recognition as work colleges. The model’s challenge lies in how those colleges deliver on their promise of affordability and career preparation for students—and how they pay for it.

Josh Moody/Inside Higher Ed

Economics of Work Colleges

Founded by a radical abolitionist minister in 1855, Berea College has long had a pioneering spirit. It was both the first coeducational and the first racially integrated college in the South. Today Berea is probably the most visible of the nine work colleges with a federal designation, which unlocks some funding but also carries complex requirements. They represent a tiny sliver of the higher education sector, enrolling a total of about 6,000 students.

Berea is deeply rooted in the rural Kentucky town that shares its name: Stay at the college-owned hotel and a student checks you in. Buy lunch at the Berea College Farm Store and a student rings you up while another one prepares your meal. While that may be true in many small college towns where students provide a sizable portion of the workforce in local businesses, at Berea those jobs are meticulously planned to provide more than 1,400 meaningful labor experiences every year, one for each student. That allows graduates to leave with years of workforce training as well as little to no debt.

Berea went tuition-free in 1892, some 100 years before work colleges were federally recognized by legislation in 1992. Earlier this year, the college expanded its aid to cover the full cost of attendance, which will address prior affordability gaps in areas such as housing, food, student fees and more beginning next fall.

“The idea was that students who couldn’t afford college could come to Berea, contribute through their work, through their labor, to the running of the college,” Berea President Cheryl Nixon said. “I think of it as almost like a utopian barter system.”

Berea is one of three recognized work colleges where students receive free tuition. The other two are College of the Ozarks in Missouri and Alice Lloyd College, also in Kentucky, which provides free tuition to full-time students from 108 counties in its central Appalachian service area. The six other federally recognized work colleges offer students reduced tuition through various models.

Paul Quinn is both the only historically Black work college and the only one in a major city. While other work colleges have sprawling campus enterprises with farms, restaurants and hotels, Paul Quinn has a much smaller footprint—though it did convert its football field to a farm.

Founded by African Methodist Episcopal ministers in Austin in 1872, Paul Quinn began as a school for formerly enslaved people and their children and later became a trade school; it moved from Austin to Waco before establishing in Dallas in 1990.

When President Michael Sorrell took over in 2007—initially as an interim leader elevated from the board—consultants warned him that the college needed to make radical changes or prepare to close its doors. Sorrell responded by converting Paul Quinn into a work college, reducing tuition in exchange for student labor.

The college’s transformation demonstrated that institutions that haven’t traditionally been work colleges can convert—and that there is more than one way to run a work-college program.

“The beauty of the work-college model is there’s freedom in it to tweak the model. As long as you adhere to the fundamentals, there’s space for Paul Quinn to be an urban work college,” Sorrell said.

Paul Quinn has struck agreements with entities such as JP Morgan Chase, Southwest Airlines, the Dallas Zoo and others, placing students directly into work roles with those partners. While Paul Quinn relies on corporate and nonprofit partners, others lean hard on philanthropy or their endowments. Berea and College of the Ozarks have the deepest pockets among the work-college sector: Berea’s endowment is valued at more than $1.8 billion, while College of the Ozarks follows with $703 million, according to a recent study.

College of the Ozarks

And though student labor provides some cost savings, it is also a major investment for work colleges.

College of the Ozarks President Brad Johnson estimated that labor accounts for about one-third of each student’s $35,000 annual cost of attendance, with the rest covered by private donations and revenue-generating enterprises such as the campus hotel and shops.

Federal funding can also help support the model, but only partially. In fiscal year 2026, Congress set aside just over $11 million for the federal Work Colleges program, though those institutions and their students can also receive other federal aid, mainly in the form of Pell Grants and work-study.

That means outside funding is critical for work colleges to operate. According to one 2026 study, tuition accounted for a median of 25 percent of revenue at those institutions, compared to 56 percent at other private nonprofit institutions. Philanthropy, meanwhile, added up to 28 percent of revenue at work colleges versus 9 percent elsewhere.

Beyond the Degree

Work-college advocates say students earn more than a free or discounted degree; they also gain employment experience and in some cases, professional certifications, such as the Dell certification at Berea, which demonstrates proficiency in computer diagnostics and repair.

Berea students also receive a separate labor transcript on which supervisors evaluate their performance, giving graduates a record of the skills they learned through their work placements—a practice other institutions are adopting in the form of digital credential wallets.

And while campus jobs are intended to provide valuable work experiences, not all are glamorous.

“A lot of times students will come in, and one of their first jobs will be something like working in the dish pit or mowing the grass,” said Johnson, the College of the Ozarks president. “I think one of the things our students learn is that that can be meaningful, and when you are contributing to the whole, and you are serving your fellow students or serving each other, there’s something special that happens there.”

Work colleges emphasize upward mobility in campus jobs. Razote, for example, went from pushing a broom to fighting malware and developing software for the college’s labor office.

“I got real work experience and I got to share that during job interviews,” he said.

Collis Robinson, Berea’s dean of student labor, followed a similar trajectory. Robinson was unsure about going to college at all, let alone how he would pay for it—until Berea recruited him out of South Carolina in 2009. He spent his first year cleaning campus facilities and setting up for events before working his way up to financial officer for the campus activities board and later, its student director.

Now he gets to guide students on the same journey.

“Just like in a classroom, we want to see those roles progress over time. The goal is that as students come in their first year, they’re placed in an entry-level role,” he said. “But as they move up, we hope that they’re taking on more autonomy, more leadership, and you’ll have students in student manager and director roles where they’re supervising other students and helping lead.”

Some students work in roles that directly complement their intended majors. Others explore a range of options.

Lemuel Miner, a senior criminal justice major at College of the Ozarks, started in custodial work and moved into residence life before landing a job in the criminal justice department. Miner, who hopes to pursue a career in federal law enforcement, helped organize events, handled administrative duties and worked with local police. He also landed an internship last summer in Washington, D.C., where he worked with the U.S. House sergeant at arms.

Breanna Washington (pictured in lead photo), a Berea junior from Nashville, Tenn., majoring in accounting and finance, manages the broom-craft dye room in Berea’s student craft program, where students learn weaving, woodcraft and other skills to create handcrafted objects that the college sells locally and online. Traditional broom making is a practice that dates back to 1920 at Berea and is still going strong. On the surface, her job may not seem like it connects directly to her major. But Washington has learned a variety of skills in the role that can be transferable, including working as part of a team and supervising fellow students.

Josh Moody/Inside Higher Ed

Lessons for the Sector

While paid work is a necessity for millions of students across the nation, that work is often just a means to an end to pay for college or household expenses and doesn’t necessarily contribute directly to their education. At work colleges, student labor is both woven into the education and used to develop employable skills.

But higher ed Institutions don’t need a federal work-college designation to borrow from that playbook, and many already are.

Stella Welsh Kirkpatrick, assistant director for the Work Colleges Consortium, which advocates for the sector, told Inside Higher Ed that oftentimes other institutions reach out to the organization, not necessarily to adopt the model but to learn about how their approach centers workforce development.

“The schools that are interested in and are seeing success are the ones who are looking for ways to add value to students’ education, to add in not just a degree, but how can we emphasize career readiness? How can we highlight different career pathways? What are nontraditional ways that we can make our students stand out more than others?” she said.

Experts say some practices are straightforward, such as providing structured work opportunities for students, evaluating them on the skills they develop in those roles and connecting campus jobs to career pathways. At College of the Ozarks, for example, officials have mapped 69 majors to 131 workstations across campus to help students find jobs aligned with their professional interests.

Comprehensive support for working students is also vital.

Work colleges have both an academic and a labor infrastructure, coordinating those schedules to help students meet their dual obligations. Upholding that level of support requires significant resources; a 2022 study found that many aspects of the work-college model prove difficult for other institutions to borrow because of infrastructure needs, costs and other factors. But the authors noted that institutions seeking to implement elements of the work-college model need supervisors to train and mentor students and a clear system to measure what they learn.

Josh Moody/Inside Higher Ed

For Sorrell, the Paul Quinn president, the broader lesson of work colleges is about how institutions can level the playing field for students.

The students that colleges like Paul Quinn serve overwhelmingly come from low-income backgrounds and often lack the family connections and networks that help others land internships and professional opportunities. In developing partnerships with outside businesses, Paul Quinn has tried to close that gap and expand opportunities beyond its campus. The college assists with résumé development, practice interviews and other prep work to help students find their professional footing.

“At many schools, if you are wealthy, you can buy your way out of working,” he said. “We’ve created a class system on our college campuses that tracks the class system that is in place in our country. Why not create an environment where where you started doesn’t dictate where you go?”