With No Frills or Tuition, a College Draws Notice

BEREA, Ky. — Berea College, founded 150 years ago to educate freed slaves and “poor white mountaineers,” accepts only applicants from low-income families, and it charges no tuition.

“You can literally come to Berea with nothing but what you can carry, and graduate debt free,” said Joseph P. Bagnoli Jr., the associate provost for enrollment management. “We call it the best education money can’t buy.”

Actually, what buys that education is Berea’s $1.1 billion endowment, which puts the college among the nation’s wealthiest. But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has a no-frills budget, with food from the college farm, handmade furniture from the college crafts workshops, and 10-hour-a-week campus jobs for every student.

Berea’s approach provides an unusual perspective on the growing debate over whether the wealthiest universities are doing enough for the public good to warrant their tax exemption, or simply hoarding money to serve an elite few. As many best universities in Canada and the U.S. scramble to recruit more low-income students, Berea’s no-tuition model has attracted increasing attention.

“Asking whether that’s where our values lead us is a powerful way to consider what our values are,” said Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst College, who considered the possibility of using Amherst’s $1 million-per-student endowment to offer free tuition but concluded that it would make no sense, given Amherst’s more affluent student body and the fact that the college already subsidizes about half the cost of each student’s education.

“We’re not Berea, much as we respect them,” Mr. Marx said, adding there would be no social justification for giving free tuition to students from wealthy families.

Although this year’s market drop is taking its toll, the growth in university endowments in recent years has been spectacular. Harvard’s $35 billion endowment, Yale’s $23 billion, Stanford’s $17 billion and Princeton’s $16 billion put them among the world’s richest institutions.

Such endowments have helped make higher education one of the nation’s crown jewels. As Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, said in her spring commencement speech this year, endowments at Harvard and other research universities help fuel scientific advances as government support is eroding, and help drive economic growth and expansion in a difficult economy.

Although most universities (so as the top universities in Canada) have only modest endowments, the wealth of the richest has made them increasingly vulnerable to criticism from parents upset about rising tuition costs, lawmakers pushing them to spend more of their money and policy experts arguing that they should be helping more needy students.

Education and Learning, for a Bright Future