Introduction to the Work Colleges and Path to Purpose
Introduction to the Work Colleges and Path to Purpose
What Is a Work College?
Work Colleges are an exceptional group of four-year, degree-granting liberal arts institutions that engage students in the purposeful integration of work, learning, and service. What sets Work Colleges apart is that every resident student takes part in a comprehensive work-learning-service program for all four years of enrollment. Most students serve in roles on campus, and some hold positions off campus. Through this experience, students are given real responsibility, relied upon by their community, and gain valuable experience, all while reducing the cost of their education. The Work College model is student-centered, built to enrich and deepen the educational experience rather than sit alongside it.
The members of the Work Colleges Consortium are Alice Lloyd College, Antioch College, Berea College, Blackburn College, College of the Ozarks, Kuyper College, Paul Quinn College, and Warren Wilson College.
The Work Colleges Consortium
The Work Colleges Consortium (WCC) supports these member schools in a few key ways: helping with federal compliance, conducting research across the institutions to assess student work-learning and service outcomes, sharing best practices, and supporting ongoing collaboration in the areas of work, learning, and service. The Consortium holds that the Work College model offers a rare and valuable educational experience, one worth extending and sharing with others.
Many Work College students are first-generation college participants. They graduate with a valued degree, real experience, and a strong sense of how their work and service contribute to the communities around them. They leave with a deeper self-awareness and a clearer understanding of their place in the world and what they have to contribute as individuals. Just as important, Work College students graduate with reduced, little, or no debt.
At Berea, this shared tradition takes shape as Path to Purpose, known formally as Berea's Work College Program.
Introduction to Path to Purpose
Berea's Labor Program originated in its earliest form in 1859 and expanded to become one of the College's Great Commitments. Known today as Path to Purpose, the program provides economic, educational, social, personal, and spiritual benefits to students and to those served by their work-learning. From its earliest days, Berea has enabled students to contribute to the cost of their education while building skills, exploring their strengths, and serving the college and surrounding communities. Historically, this also allowed the College to operate in a self-sustaining way, with students growing food and building the living and learning facilities they shared. As society has changed, the nature of the work has changed with it. What has remained constant is the program's underlying commitment to learning through doing.
The program originated in 1859 and was formalized into every student's educational experience in 1906, when the Berea College Catalog declared that every student must contribute at least seven hours per week to the necessary work of the College. This was raised to ten hours in 1917, a requirement that remains in effect today.
The value of student work-learning is reinforced in Berea's Great Commitments, first published in 1969 by the General Faculty and the Board of Trustees, and revised in 1993 and again in 2017. This affirms Berea's commitment "to promote learning and serving in community through the student Labor Program, honoring the dignity and utility of all work, mental and manual, and taking pride in work well done." This commitment has long been integral to Berea's educational mission, giving students real opportunity for learning, service, and work well done.
Path to Purpose is built around a few core aims:
- Support the total educational program at Berea College by teaching skills, responsibility, habits, attitudes, and processes connected to meaningful work;
- Create a lifestyle that joins doing and thinking, action and reflection, service and learning, one that carries on well beyond the college years;
- Provide opportunities for students to serve their community and others through their work;
- Support students in offsetting the cost of their education at Berea;
- Connect student work to the ongoing life of the College, alongside its educational purpose;
Taken together, these aims reflect a program built around student growth and learning, with service to the College and community as a natural extension of that growth, not the reason for it.
Work College Program assignments are structured much like academic classes. Students begin at entry-level roles and are expected to progress to positions with more skill and responsibility. Through this progression, students are expected to:
- develop strong work habits and attitudes;
- gain a clearer understanding of their own interests, skills, and areas for growth; and
- exercise creativity, problem-solving, and responsibility. Many students also grow into roles that call for leadership, standard-setting, and effective supervision.
Path to Purpose gives students the chance to build connections between the classroom and the workplace. Even more, linking academic study with work-learning-service experience builds a lasting practice of learning through work, one that supports each student's path toward purpose well beyond their time at Berea.