There’s something romantic about the work college, harking back to the medieval monasteries that lit the way for Western higher education. At a work college, students learn not only in classrooms but also through jobs grand and lowly: tutoring peers, managing applications, mowing the grass, milking cows on the campus farm, cleaning toilets.
As colleges generally struggle to keep tuition increases down—in part because of all the offices they maintain and services they provide—the model seems attractive for purely financial reasons. Why hire support staff and outsource other work when you can get students to do it cheaply?
“There are so many schools that are asking about this right now,” says Robin Taffler, executive director of the Work Colleges Consortium, which represents Alice Lloyd, Berea, Blackburn, Ecclesia, Sterling, and Warren Wilson Colleges, and the College of the Ozarks. But the uninitiated soon discover, she says, that the logistics and finances of a work college are far more complicated than they might look.
This week Paul Quinn College, in Dallas, announced that it, too, would become a work college—making it the first urban and first historically black institution to do so.
And Michael J. Sorrell, who has spent the past eight years rescuing Paul Quinn from closure, seems to be guiding it into the transition with eyes wide open.
“I am under no illusion that we will save a million dollars toward the running of the school,” he says. A lawyer who consulted for businesses and sports teams before becoming president of Paul Quinn, Mr. Sorrell will earn a doctorate in higher-education administration from the University of Pennsylvania this spring. The focus of his dissertation: work colleges. For the past two years, Paul Quinn has experimented with the model with each new class.
Becoming a work college, Mr. Sorrell says, “allows us to give our students two types of education for the reasonable cost of one.” A liberal-arts foundation, learning to think critically, is crucial. But given the increasing focus on employability after college, so are practical skills and job training.
“The marketplace has consistently said that college graduates need more real-world work experience,” says Mr. Sorrell. (He got some, he adds, at his parents’ barbecue restaurant, on Chicago’s South Side.) At Paul Quinn, where 85 percent of students are eligible for Pell Grants, most need more opportunities to build their résumés.
Unusual Approach
Compared with programs at the consortium’s seven federally recognized work colleges, all located in rural areas, Paul Quinn’s approach will be unusual, akin to co-ops at institutions like Drexel and Northeastern Universities.
Some of the 285 students at Paul Quinn will work on the campus—in the dormitories or cafeteria, on the grounds or the farm—as they would at other work colleges. (Even though Paul Quinn is in the heart of Dallas, it established a farm on the former fields of its discontinued football program, selling most of its produce to a company that works with the Dallas Cowboys.) But the college is also courting local businesses as work settings.
“Being in an urban area, what you can say to students is, Want to be a doctor? Great. Your work assignment will be in a hospital, of which there are 15 locally,” Mr. Sorrell says.
Under his plan, businesses will get students’ labor for a sum that will go toward their tuition, plus stipends. A model for the program is one run by the Cristo Rey Network, a group of 28 Roman Catholic high schools around the country that place urban, underserved youth in jobs for a fee that helps support the schools.
Aspects of Paul Quinn’s plan are still unclear. Conversations with local businesses are “ongoing,” Mr. Sorrell says, declining to share the number or type that have signed on. “We’re pretty pleased with the response we have received,” is all he says. As the college grows—he would like it to enroll 2,000 students someday—it will need to find more employers to support the program.
If becoming a work college pans out as Mr. Sorrell envisions, the cost of a Paul Quinn education will drop considerably. The college is already planning to cut its sticker price to $14,275, from $23,850, mainly by doing away with tuition discounting. The work program will knock off $5,000, while Pell Grants, Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, and state grants will cover an additional $6,975 for many students. That leaves a tuition bill of $2,300—or less than $10,000 over four years.
Amateur Plumbers
It’s that kind of math that has led many struggling private colleges in recent years to consider work programs. Leaders there may have a notion of a “Henry Ford model,” says Steven L. Solnick, president of Warren Wilson College, who is on Mr. Sorrell’s dissertation committee. “You pay the students, and they buy your product, and it is some kind of magic bullet. That is a misperception.”
The reality is more complex. “Operating the college on a work model removes various degrees of freedom that you would have in normal operations of a college,” Mr. Solnick explains. When a traditional college hits tough times financially, it can lay off staff members and maybe replace them with lower-paid student workers, or it can call off or postpone various projects. At a work college, students are already doing the work of staff members—that’s the starting point—so the college can’t eliminate jobs as easily, because students need them to fulfill the mission of the place.
Does a work college save money in operations? Probably, but administrators have a hard time calculating how much. Students who are doing, say, plumbing or carpentry are paid less than professionals, but it takes them longer to do the work, and they might make more mistakes or generate more waste than the pros would. They also need continuous training: The work-force cycles through every four years.
What’s more, students’ expectations and the campus environment have changed drastically from what they were 100 years ago, when Appalachian kids traded sweat equity for education at an earlier iteration of Warren Wilson. More colleges now compete on amenities, with students spending a lot of their nonclassroom time on recreation.
“It’s difficult to reconcile that with a business model in which a lot of the services are provided by students,” Mr. Solnick says. Traditional colleges these days focus on students’ learning for a fraction of the week, “treating them as clients or guests or whatever for the rest of the time,” he says. “That is an easier model.”
The traditional model largely involves building facilities and keeping them running as cost-effectively as possible. At a work college, the jobs involve not just toil but, ideally, lessons in critical thinking, problem solving, or responsibility, which takes a lot of planning by the college. Work must not only get done, but get done meaningfully.
“Carpentry, plumbing, landscaping, or forestry are not the ends,” Mr. Solnick says. “They’re the means that we use to teach students the skills that we think will make them successful.”
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.
