Tim Stroud's alarm goes off at 3:40 a.m. every weekday morning, a time when most of his classmates at the College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Mo., are fast asleep. By 4:30 a.m., he is out in the pasture in his work boots gathering the college's herd of 50 Holstein cows into the barn for their morning milking session. His unusual campus job—working in the dairy 15 hours a week—is a small price to pay for what he sees as one of the best deals today in higher education: a free degree.
At the College of the Ozarks, all students' tuition costs are offset by a mandatory work-study program. "If I was going to go to school, I was going to try to do it with the least amount of debt possible," said Stroud, a sophomore from Hume, N.Y., who wants to pursue a career in agriculture.
The cost of college is a red hot issue today, with students and parents fretting about how they will be able to foot the skyrocketing tuition bills at many private and public colleges. The College Board reported on Oct. 22 that tuition at public and private colleges for the 2007-08 academic year continued to outpace inflation (BusinessWeek.com, 10/22/07). Tuition prices at private colleges and universities average almost $24,000 this year, and that's not including room and board.
Stroud is one of several thousand students in the U.S. taking advantage of colleges that come with no sticker shock. Tuition-free colleges—also known as full-scholarship colleges—remain one of higher education's best-kept secrets. True to their name, they are institutions that guarantee to cover the entire student-body's tuition. There are only a handful of such schools in the U.S., which is one reason they are often overlooked by students, parents, and high school guidance counselors during the college search, says Sandy Baum, a senior policy analyst at the College Board. "It's not a trend of the future. It's just a certain niche market. These schools have unique situations that allow them to go tuition-free," she said.
They range from an urban college like the Cooper Union in New York's East Village to Deep Springs College, a remote, all-male school deep in the California desert. Many are specialized institutions, often focusing on engineering, such as the F.W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass.; or on music, like the Curtis Institute in Pennsylvania. A handful—the College of the Ozarks or Berea College in Kentucky—have mandatory work-study programs. Perhaps the most well-known of them is the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., which offers free college tuition in exchange for five years of service after graduation.
Students who attend these schools walk away from college with little to no loans, debt, and financial worries after they graduate. In most cases, the only fee students need to pay is room and board, a cost separate from college tuition. It's a financial situation with almost irresistible appeal for college students with limited means, said Rick Darvis, co-founder of the National Institute of Certified College Planners, an organization founded in 2002 to help families navigate the college loan and financial aid market. "For kids coming out of college today, debt-free is pretty rare," Darvis said. "As far as a kid having a summer job to help pay off college, that's not going to happen anymore."
Though finding tuition-free schools can take some legwork, parents and students say the payoff is worth it in the long run.
Pamela Clemens, the mother of Erin Clemens, a college senior, said she still remembers how relieved she was when her daughter received an acceptance letter from the College of the Ozarks. Clemens and her husband, a self-employed handyman in Lebanon, Miss., had failed to save properly for their daughter's college education and were frantic about how they were going to foot her tuition bills, she said. "We were free from the burden of figuring out where we were going to get the money or take out loans for my daughter's college education," Clemens said. "Just knowing we won't have to deal with that for all these years is just such a feeling of freedom."
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