Path to Purpose: A Foundation of Learning, Growth, and Service
Foundation of the Work College Program
The Work College Program is a required and integral part of a Berea education, mandated by the Department of Education's Work Colleges legislation. Rather than a credit-hour-based model, the program follows a competency-based approach to learning, with clearly defined student learning goals and expected outcomes that guide every work assignment on campus. This foundation places the program on equal footing with Berea's academic curriculum: a required, structured part of every student's education, not an optional role on the side.
How the Program Is Governed
The Work College Program operates under the leadership of the Dean for the Work College Program, alongside the Labor Program Council. The council serves as the advisory and governance body for the program, recommending and reviewing major programmatic changes affecting experiential learning, with specific responsibility for evaluating program effectiveness. Supervisors, in turn, are responsible for putting these goals into practice: explaining to students the specific descriptors used to evaluate a given performance expectation, and modeling the habits and standards the program is built to teach.
Putting the Foundation into Practice
This foundation comes to life through the pages that follow. The program's learning goals and expected outcomes describe what students are meant to gain from their work-learning-service experience. Workplace expectations and position descriptions describe what that experience looks like day to day. And the program's connection to financial aid describes how work-learning helps students offset the cost of their education, one of the same purposes that has anchored the program since 1859.