Berea College, a private liberal arts school in Kentucky, charges no tuition, requires every student to work at least 10 hours a week and graduates most students with little or no debt, according to a Business Insider account by a current student.
Berea is one of 10 federally recognized work colleges in the United States and has not charged tuition since 1892, according to Business Insider. In August, the school announced that starting in Fall 2027 it would cover the full cost of attendance for all students through financial aid packages that include no loans.
Grace Mullins, a rising senior and sociology major from Indiana, told Business Insider in an as-told-to essay that Berea was the only way she could have attended college without heavy borrowing. “I don’t pay tuition; the school was the only way I could graduate without an insane amount of debt that would follow me for the rest of my life,” she said.
Mullins said her biggest costs are housing and meal plans, that most students she knows pay less than $500 a semester, and that she expects to graduate owing a little under $10,000 in loans, which she believes she can pay off by graduation. Her parents, both college-educated, were still paying off their own student loans while she was growing up, she said.
Under Berea’s model, first-year students submit a résumé and are assigned a campus job; after that, they may apply for their own positions. Mullins was assigned to the college’s child development lab, where she changed diapers and fed babies, and now works as a resident adviser in the dormitories.
Mullins said she had planned to become an elementary school teacher but changed course after taking a sociology class. “Berea gave me the ability to kind of not know what I wanted to do at first, and I had enough support to figure it out,” she said. Graduating without debt, she added, made her feel safer pursuing graduate school with a sociology degree.
Students balance classes, jobs, clubs and, for some, athletics — a workload they call “Berea Busy,” she said. “By the time I graduate, four years of work experience will already bulk up my résumé. Being part of a labor college is something that I’ll always be very proud of.”
Her relatives initially doubted the school’s model. “They were like, ‘That’s not a real school,’” Mullins recalled. “I remember nobody in my high school believing that it was real.”
Berea’s expansion of aid to cover full attendance costs is scheduled to take effect with the Fall 2027 term, according to the school’s August announcement.