Berea College: 90% Pell grant eligible, 40% minorities, 45% debt-free

October 13, 2018 10:01 AM

"Berea College isn’t like most other colleges. It was founded in 1855 by a Presbyterian minister who was an abolitionist. It was the first integrated, co-educational college in the South. And it has not charged students tuition since 1892." SLAtlantic
posted by meaty shoe puppet (14 comments total)

Berea College graduate, class of 1987.

If Berea started charging tuition—even just a little bit— “we would no longer be Berea,” he says, “we would be just like any other college.”

I worked all four years at Berea. The first year, they put me in the Audio-Visual Department. That was 1983-84 and it was my job to make sure that instructors had the equipment needed to give presentations. We spent three weeks learning the equipment. There was a picky geology instructor and God help you if something went wrong like a film breaking and you didn't know how to re-thread the projector, or change the light bulb in the projector, or struggle with a portable film screen that didn't want to stay upright. You'd lug that crap across campus, then lug it back.

Thank goodness I was good at math. After that, a worker in the Math Lab (as a math tutor) for the next three years. The sub-minimum wage payment we got for our labors kept me in soda and pie.

I worked 10 hours a week then. I don't know if the students work the same hours, or longer hours now.

Four of the best years of my life. Was challenged. Learned how to write by grinding out like five or six papers a year for Religious and Historical Perspectives, about 10-12 pages each.

I had a Pell Grant and some other kind of loan. Took me forever to pay back that other loan, but I paid it back before 2000.

When I was there, we had a weekly event called Convocation, which was a lecture or a performance or some other noteworthy (but educational) event. We had to attend about a dozen of these a semester and they had no fear of cracking down if you missed any. Alex Haley gave a lecture there, and I figured I would go backstage and have him sign my book. I decided to avoid the lines and just go home. As I was cutting through the backstage area, Haley came in the other direction, and he gave me such a look. I was too intimidated to ask him anything and did not get the book signed.

To this day, I cannot say enough good things about Berea College and would recommend it to anyone.

Go Mountaineers!
posted by Roentgen at 11:02 AM on October 13, 2018 [47 favorites]

Berea is also well known internationally as an affordable American education.
posted by k8t at 1:27 PM on October 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

One of my in-laws went to Berea. When my spouse first told me about the place, I was open-mouthed with astonishment, as he shot all my ignorant stereotypes about Southern hillbillies to smithereens. (Me: "Wait, did you say this place is in...Kentucky?" Him: "Yup." Me: "...Kentucky?!!")

It's crazy and stupid that more Americans don't know about it. The reverence and awe they give to the Harvard name, they should give to Berea instead.
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 3:23 PM on October 13, 2018 [15 favorites]

spent a week on campus with my family as a kid of like ten or so. I guess my dad was doing a seminar there or something (he was a prof at IU in Bloomington ). I loved it. I don't know exactly where or how I spent my time but I remember learning this interesting and complicated game called skittles that involved setting up tiny wooden bowling pins in a playfield that was a largish wooden box divided into open-topped chambers with doorways connecting the rooms. The layout was symmetical and reminiscent of a hockey playfield or a house. Iirc players would spin a top in the central chamber and the idea and intent was to pass the top though as many rooms as possible in a spin, scoring by knocking the pins down. I am pretty sure it was impossible, at least for me. But it was fascinating.
posted by mwhybark at 6:20 PM on October 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

My parents met at Berea, and both my daughters are attending now. I was not eligible because my parents weren't low-income enough. The kids love Berea. Younger daughter transferred from a school in St. Paul, and was afraid she'd be really bored in a small town with no movie theater, but she doesn't even have time to go to a movie. The classes are demanding, the jobs are between 10 and 15 hours a week, they do clubs and volunteer work, too.
posted by Miss Cellania at 6:51 PM on October 13, 2018 [7 favorites]

Hey, my parents met at Berea, too!

I visited the campus once with my family while my sister was attending. My strongest memory is of the place is getting a sandwich at a little place whose name I'm not quite sure of. Maybe Cardinal's?
posted by Tabitha Someday at 8:14 PM on October 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

My strongest memory is of the place is getting a sandwich at a little place whose name I'm not quite sure of. Maybe Cardinal's?

Yes, Cardinal's.
posted by thedward at 11:29 PM on October 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

The reverence and awe they give to the Harvard name, they should give to Berea instead. Yup. And to community colleges, educating more Americans than any other sector, always on a shoestring. But we are instead obsessed with the old hierarchy, and won't let it go.
posted by doctornemo at 7:12 AM on October 14, 2018 [8 favorites]

Berea does fantastic work, even more impressively given the region's low resources compared to the rest of the US.

Doing what they do for all of American higher ed?

The work requirement aspect... we're almost there already, in practice. Something like 70% of students now work while taking post-secondary classes. Only a fraction of that is school-run or -managed, but the ethos of work-while-study is now a majority thing.

The endowment part... we have nearly 4500 colleges and universities in the US. Let's set aside the handful that are already billionaires (Stanford, Harvard, Swarthmore, etc) and also set aside endowment funds restricted to things other than tuition support. Call it, very roughly, a $4 trillion investment.
As an alternative, we could actually fund public higher education the way we used to, by getting the states to pay up. That's also not cheap, but is less expensive than that enormous endowment bolus. And we have some history to draw on.
(Not to mention a wild Vermont senator who suggested doing this by taxing Wall Street transactions.)
posted by doctornemo at 7:24 AM on October 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

Something like 70% of students now work while taking post-secondary classes.

An interesting factoid is that students who work a reasonable number of hours actually have better grades, on average, than students who don't work for pay at all. I believe that about 20 hours a week is the cut-off: much above that and students' grades start to take a hit, because they don't have time to focus on their coursework. Requiring students to work 10-15 hours a week might actually improve outcomes across the board.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:36 AM on October 14, 2018 [3 favorites]

Also they have bell hooks.
posted by allthinky at 1:09 PM on October 14, 2018 [4 favorites]

Not a Berea College alumnus. However:

* I grew up a literal block from the college. So close, in fact, that our home was on the college utilities system (back when they had it). I practically lived at the college library as a middle-schooler and teen.
* I have multiple relatives who graduated from Berea College. My aunt Lit (the sister of my late father) is the Elizabeth Denney mentioned in the article as enrolling after after the Day Law was repealed.
* The Berea Community School (K -12) is about a block away from the college; as a consequence, I walked up there countless times with my classmates for various events. I've climbed the Pinnacle on Mountain Day.
* Reverend Fee was friends with the parents of one of the (now long-deceased) deacons in my church (1st Baptist out on Walnut Meadow, for those of you who know the area). Deacon Fee was named after Rev. Fee.
* Somewhere in my stash, there's a photo of me as a very little girl, all dressed up, presenting a bouquet of flowers to a college May queen or some such. I don't recall what the event was --I think I was three or four. All I know is my grandmother was out and about with me in town, and apparently someone from the college saw her with me, thought I was cute, and asked her if I could be the flower girl for the event. Long story short: a few weeks later I was on a stage unhappily giving up a gorgeous bouquet of flowers to some college lady I'd never seen before or since. I still have the dress Granny made for the occasion.

I opted not to go to Berea College because, quite frankly, it was so pervasive in my life that after high school I wanted to try something different. When a full-ride scholarship offer came from another school, I took it.

But I have great love for BC and its message of inclusivity and social justice. I learned the college slogan at an early age: "God... Hath Made of One Blood All Nations of Men". Dr. Roelofs spoke last month at the dedication of the Middletown Consolidated School historical marker and re-affirmed the school's committment to that ideal, to Fee's vision. Minority and low-income students are able to attend BC because of that commitment, and I pray that it never falters.
posted by magstheaxe at 7:25 PM on October 14, 2018 [6 favorites]

When my grandmother was alive my dad and I used to pass through Berea on our way to visit her and we almost always stopped to eat at (as I recall) the restaurant there? I recall also that there was a craft store there that sold products made by the students/faculty. Pretty sure I still have some pottery I bought there. I always looked forward to stopping in Berea, tho I haven't been in nearly 30 years, probably.

Warren Wilson College in North Carolina is a somewhat similar institution.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:18 AM on October 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

octobersurprise, did you stop at Boone Tavern? That's the restaurant closest to campus.

The craft store would probably be [Log Cain](https://www.berea.edu/student-crafts/log-house-craft-gallery/), which of course features Berea College Crafts.
posted by magstheaxe at 5:30 AM on November 5, 2018