These Western colleges are offering alternative paths to academic excellence

In 399 B.C., the Greek philosopher Socrates was put on trial for impiety and “corrupting” the youth. Socrates’ approach to ethics, morality and democracy are foundational in the Western canon, and his teachings are part and parcel of the American experiment. At his trial, however, he was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Which is to say that disagreements between democratic governments and educators have a long, storied history, and what’s playing out on American campuses today is just the latest chapter.

Harvard University’s fight with President Donald Trump is in the spotlight right now, but the public’s growing frustration with higher education stems from many things, including the staggering cost of an education and the rise of student debt, as well as the obsession with rankings that prioritize access over outcomes.

The return on investment of various institutions and degrees has been questioned too. A recent Pew poll showed that nearly a third of America doesn’t think college is worth the cost at all, and about half thinks it’s only worth it if there are no loans involved. Even if financial returns aren’t necessarily the primary purpose of learning, it’s a relatable complaint.

But young adults who want to continue their education aren’t limited to the traditional four-year programs that are too often seen as the norm. Many alternatives are found in the American West, including Brigham Young University’s Pathway Worldwide, which offers people around the world the opportunity to earn a college degree online, and colleges that focus on civilization’s great books and foundational texts, including Supreme Court decisions. There’s even a school near the Nevada/California border where, in addition to their studies, students operate a cattle ranch.

“We have an incredible diversity of higher ed institutions in this country, and they do more than just prepare people for the workforce,” said Joshua Wyner, the founder and executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute. “Higher education is a pathway to economic mobility for individuals and to developing talent that we need not just for the economy, but for democracy and lifelong learning.”

Many of these alternate paths to a degree also hark back to Socrates, using his teaching methods, which encourages students to ask hard questions, think critically for themselves and also to prize virtue as much as knowledge.

Even if the relationship between politics and education is “fraying and breaking down,” said, J. Walter Sterling, the president of St. John‘s College in Santa Fe, “in our modern democratic experiment, we have the most ambitious and beautiful formulations of that harmony,” between education and civic life.

It’s no surprise, then, that many options for nontraditional education are found on this side of the 100th meridian.

Service minded

Lance Bell, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, stumbled across Deep Springs College while flipping through a college guide book and knew right away that he found his school. Thirty miles from the nearest town and 10 from the Nevada border, Deep Springs is both a college and a fully operating cattle ranch isolated in the California high desert.

It offers an associates program to the 12 to 15 students admitted each year, each of whom receive a full scholarship, which includes room and board. Though a secular school, it’s religiously diverse, with Christians, Jews and Muslims practicing their faith, often together. While it’s a junior college, most graduates go on to places like Harvard, Oxford and Yale. When new students arrive, they sign a contract pledging to be of “service to humanity.”

Founded in 1917, the school is guided by three pillars: academics, student self-governance and manual labor. While its small size is not a solution to broadening access to education, it does offer a model different from what can be found at traditional colleges and universities.

With the help of a small faculty and staff, the 30 or so students operate the ranch, help manage the facilities and perform all jobs required to run the operation. The student body meets weekly to deliberate and take action on community issues. Meetings can extend long into the night, which is a trial for those with morning duties like milking the cows, which must be done before classes begin at 8 in the morning.

“It’s different (At other colleges). If you do things wrong, your group project fails. Versus if you do things wrong (at Deep Springs), there’s no dinner on the table.

—  Lance Bell, student at Deep Springs College

Students also serve on a number of committees that manage administrative departments like admissions and hiring. Rania Zaki, 20, a second-year student, is the chair of admissions, in charge of reading and interviewing prospective new peers. Bell, who is 19, is on a committee currently searching for a new dean.

For the 17-23 year olds who attend, it’s an immersive exposure into the rigor and requirements of being a respectable and responsible member of a community.

“It’s different,” Bell said. At other colleges, “if you do things wrong, your group project fails. Versus if you do things wrong (at Deep Springs), there’s no dinner on the table.

“I have real incentive to grow, change, show up more and do better,” he said. “It’s not just my life I’m messing up, it’s all these people around me that I care about. It’s an interesting motivation and reality that we often are blinded from in the normal higher education system.”

Self-governance, kitchen work and wrangling the cows is all in addition to a highly competitive curriculum. There are no majors; students take classes on the social and natural sciences, as well as the humanities.

There are civics seminars — with an emphasis on governance and ethics — writing classes, weekly public speaking engagements, and a wide range of electives offered by a range of visiting professors who teach in two-year stints on the ranch. Classes have included “Conservative Political Thought in America,” “Linear Algebra” and “Political Ecology of Agrifood Systems.”

Zaki, who’s also the on-campus medic after receiving first-responder training, is focused on STEM, preparing for a career in medicine and global health after she graduates.

Bell said many of his peers, even those that do not practice a specific religion, are spiritual in some way and the school is open to that open-minded exploration. Zaki, who is Muslim, cannot eat meat unless it is halal butchered and, with several of her peers and teachers, she learned how to do so while on campus. The experience was powerful, allowing her to offer part of her tradition to the community and receive something in exchange, too.

Somehow, within their already stretched-thin schedules, students find time for the Bible and Torah study groups that meet weekly. Despite the isolation principle on campus — students generally do not leave the ranch for seven or eight weeks at a time — there are religious exceptions, and Bell drives an hour to the nearest Latter-day Saint meetinghouse every Sunday.

Bell noted that the school teaches students that, even in such intense circumstances, it’s OK to fail. At the start of his time on campus, Bell made a mistake and offered a tour to a visiting academic from New Zealand at a time when he was supposed to attend class registration. When he asked for help, the curriculum chair told him he had to choose between the two and accept the consequences. Bell honored his commitment to the visitor, and the lesson has stuck with him.

“You have all this responsibility on you, you have all these people counting on you and you’re going to mess up,” he said. “How do you react to that messing up? How do you deal with it? How do you learn to apologize, how to set boundaries for yourself?”

Education via great books

St. John‘s College has two campuses, with the original in Annapolis, Maryland, and another nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Its “tutors” — the term “professor” is not used — teach a “great books” curriculum, which stems from a movement in 1930s when academics from leading colleges surmised that the best way to learn was from reading primary texts.

Which is to say, St. John‘s students read a ton of books.

The reading list is an exhaustive compilation of who’s-who across the full spectrum of the liberal arts. That’s not a political term, but a reference to the academic subjects that correlate to a general education: literature, philosophy, mathematics, natural and social sciences.

There are approximately 1,000 students across the two campuses, with about 400 undergraduates earning four-year degrees at each location. Another 200 are spread out across several in-person or remote graduate degree options. (Tuition is $40,936 for undergrads and graduate programs are up to $17,402 per semester). While it is a rigorous and competitive program, Sterling says the school admits most of those who apply. “We encourage folks, if they have an appetite to take this on, our bias is to let them take it on.”

For those that know of St. John‘s, they might “picture a list of recognizable authors, Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Kant, etc. And that’s true,” Sterling said. “What’s least well understood from the outside is the amount of mathematics and natural science that we do by studying classic texts but also by going directly in the laboratory, by doing a great deal of technical mathematical work.”

Instead of just reading a paragraph on Euclid, they’re reading his "Elements of Geometry“ and also getting into the guts of hard science by stepping into a practical. A tutor will say, “go to the board and start demonstrating these proofs, these propositions, but doing it in a conversational way and with help from one another,” said Sterling.

There are no textbooks at St. John‘s, just original works. Sterling said this approach to learning means “relying less on professorial authorities, less on secondary texts, trying to go to classic sources directly and allowing students to read and think and discuss them on their own.”

He said the school’s “radical” emphasis on the class discussions — where asking questions using the Socratic method and exploring interpretations without judgment is the norm — creates an intimate, engaged environment on campus with class conversations spilling out into the common spaces.

Since there are no classes on current events, any political conversation is had in light of what they’re reading. Any discussion on the Iraq war, for example, might be understood through Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War.

Reading and then discussing these great works tends to foster curiosity and empathy, Sterling said. This helps students once they begin reading religious texts and the great non-secular thinkers throughout history. The religious study list is “a big part of the program,” although St. John‘s College is not affiliated with any religion.

“I don’t care whether students come in or go out as Democrats or Republicans, believers or atheists,” said Sterling. “Students crisscross in all kinds of ways in their time at St. John‘s, but they’re going to come out more thoughtful, reflective, articulate, critical, evidence-based, reasoned, believers or non-believers, Democrats or Republicans, et cetera.”

“I don’t care whether students come in or go out as Democrats or Republicans, believers or atheists. Students crisscross in all kinds of ways in their time at St. John’s, but they’re going to come out more thoughtful, reflective, articulate, critical, evidence-based, reasoned, believers or non-believers, Democrats or Republicans, et cetera.”

—  J. Walter Sterling, president of St. John's College

Among several “great books” colleges in the West, there is also Wyoming Catholic College, in Lander, Wyoming, which offers a liberal arts degree based on the study of foundational texts that is also integrated with Catholicity — an active, Catholic spiritual life on campus. Featured in a roundup of “bright spots” in American higher education by the Heritage Foundation, the school was one of four the conservative think tank celebrated for “reclaiming the culture of American higher education.”

There are several curricular tracks students can take, which include humanities, maths & sciences, theology, and even the classic model of grammar, logic and rhetoric study called “trivium.” But, in addition to the spiritual life and Socratic discussions, the school, which is adjacent to the Wind River Mountains, sends incoming freshmen out on a three-week backpacking trip without their cellphones before classes begin. On graduation day, the seniors receive as regalia a “profoundly American symbol of hope, fortitude, and adventure” — they walk the stage wearing a Stetson hat.

Unconventional costs

Last year, the average cost of yearly tuition at a four-year private college was $43,505, according to U.S. News & World Report. Public universities charged out-of-state students $24,513 a year. Before taking into account books, computers, food or a place to sleep, the University of Southern California costs nearly $300,000 for a bachelor’s degree.

The average community college charges just shy of $5,000, according to the American Association of Community Colleges.

But this varies widely. Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, Wyoming, costs $8,500 a year. If you are coming from a local partner high school, Irvine Valley College in Irvine, California, is free.

“Cost really does dictate the range of opportunities available,” said Wyner, of the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program. And costs are very relevant these days, says Joe Schaffer, the president of Laramie County Community College. “We’re seeing more people turning to us — more people turn to short-term credentials — because they can get in, get out. They see the value with it.”

Every year, Wyner’s program at the Aspen Institute awards a million dollars worth of prizes to the best community colleges in the country. Though LCCC did not win an award this year, Wyner mentioned the impressive work that is being done there.

One innovation, Schaffer explained, is that LCCC partnered with the University of Wyoming and began offering dual-acceptances this year. Students are admitted to LCCC for an associates degree and, at the same time, are also accepted into the state university’s bachelor’s program. On their first day, students receive college IDs from both schools. As community college completion rates are low — often around 16% — established programs like this have seen bachelor-degree graduation rates hover around 50%.

There are many LCCC students interested in nursing since the field has a strong job market and pays a competitive wage. As a result, that program has become selective — 200 applicants for 80 slots. To make sure those students still find great opportunities, LCCC implemented a standard application for second-year specializations. If a student is not accepted into the nursing program, they’ll receive acceptances into 20 or so others. What looked like a closed door becomes a wealth of adjacent options.

Irvine Valley College, which was ranked the best community college in California by WalletHub and is among the 150 best according to the Aspen Institute, focuses on the student experience. Martha McDonald, the vice president for student services, said that they have a “caring campus environment” where students with questions are catered to: if someone needs to find an office, they are walked there, and when students look like they might drop out, the school sends individual offers to encourage students to complete their degree, even offering students the opportunity to take their final credits for free.

McDonald said they have many students who didn’t get into their dream school, but often those students wind up transferring to schools like UCLA, Stanford and Yale.

BYU-Pathway Worldwide is another opportunity for students to find value in an unconventional education model. Eric Branden Karl, the vice president of curriculum, explained that the degree is offered worldwide through BYU-Idaho and Ensign College, with as many as 75,000 students across 180 countries studying toward a degree every year.

“We’ve structured our curriculum in a very innovative way,” said Karl. “The curriculum itself is such that you take certificates that stack up to a bachelor’s degree, and every certificate is designed to give job-ready skills or employable skills along the way.”

This means that students, most of whom are part time and working already, can update their resumes and LinkedIn at the end of every semester. And, at $83 a credit for U.S. students (Harvard’s is approximately $1,689, according to SoFi), with GDP-correlated reductions for international students, the value is apparent.

Though they may not be for everyone, places like LCCC, Irvine Valley and BYU Pathways create pipelines for students to keep learning and dreaming of greater opportunities.

“While people are saying college credentials aren’t required, 85% of good jobs require some college or a bachelor’s degree,” said Wyner. “Even as people’s opinions of higher ed have decreased, their understanding that college is necessary for most careers remains strong. ... when people are surveyed, the primary reason people go to college is they want a better life.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Walter Sterling is the president of both campuses of St John’s College. He is the president of the Santa Fe campus.