The Appalachian Work College

“This is the most unlikely place that you would expect to find an institution like this. You would expect to find maybe the end of the road when you got here. And that’d be about it,” said Jerry Wayne Slone, an accounting professor and alumni president at Alice Lloyd College, the school his grandfather helped build. In eastern Kentucky, home is wherever your people come from, and the Slones’ history here far outstretches the college’s. Slone is a common surname in the county. Lloyd, I learn, is not. So until the novelty wears off, sharing the founder’s name (no relation) makes me a local celebrity.

At Berea, in the mid-nineteenth century, and at Alice Lloyd, in the early twentieth, student labor started from simple necessity—undergraduates too poor to pay found plenty of work to be done. Now, the need remains much the same. Five years ago, the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project reported 43 percent of working-class whites felt worse off than their parents; in this year’s PRRI American Values Survey, 65 percent of the same group responded “the American way of life has mostly changed for the worse since 1950.” If you’re a Scots-Irish hillbilly from eastern Kentucky, this dark outlook is more an accurate appraisal than a symptom of Trumpian nostalgia. According to the New York Times report “What’s the Matter With Eastern Kentucky?” the median income adjusted for inflation in Kentucky’s Clay County, equidistant between the two campuses, was higher in 1979 than in 2014, after decades of entrenched dependency on government assistance. Economic struggles have led to others: In 2015, Kentucky registered third in the nation in overdose deaths.

One hindrance to economic progress in eastern Kentucky is brain drain. Children of the hills set free by education and success will choose, understandably, to settle elsewhere. Kentucky work college graduates, though, keep coming back to the bereft region. Data reported by the schools demonstrate the highlands’ homeward draw: Over 80 percent of Alice Lloyd graduates return to serve the surrounding counties in their chosen profession. A significant plurality every year come to Berea from within Kentucky and a majority from southern Appalachian states—and while alumni span the globe, most have settled nearby. Biology, fortuitously, is the most popular major at both colleges. With medical care one of the region’s most dire deficits, these bio majors hold the key to the future of rural health management. Wendy Welch, director of the Graduate Medical Education Consortium of Southwestern Virginia and editor of Public Health in Appalachia, noted, “No one else ‘gets us,’ understands the unique mixture of pride and challenges found in rural culture, or believes that the solutions already seeded within these communities can be tweaked and fostered to provide long-lasting effects.” Education, the founding mission of both regionally focused institutions, comes next among top-choice majors at Alice Lloyd; likewise, of 8,000 surveyed Berea alumni, 1,455 became teachers.

Alice Lloyd guarantees tuition to all admitted students from the surrounding 108 counties. And those whose families fall within a low enough income bracket—the vast majority qualify for Pell grants (federal tuition assistance for low-income families)—cover their room and board with a combination of grants and scholarships, in addition to their 10 to 20 hours of weekly work. No student pays sticker-price tuition at Berea: Ninety-nine percent qualify for Pell, and all work wage hours to cover their living expenses.

Educators concerned with rising college costs and a student debt bubble would do well to draw lessons from the work college financial model. A low-income ceiling for admission to Berea ($53,000 for a family of four with one in college) and the geographical limits to the tuition guarantee at Alice Lloyd exclude most American families, but Berea president Lyle Roelofs thinks the model may yet catch on: “I very much believe that the Berea idea could germinate elsewhere in other institutions or even create new institutions.” He described a vision of “Berea in New Mexico, where the tribes of the American Southwest could come together,” with an attachment to the region “as powerful as the experience of Appalachia here.” Secondary schools, he said, should also consider work programs—not just to provide vocational training, but because hard work helps hammer the kinks out of adolescence.

It’s true that work college students, thoughtful and strikingly mature, bear the quiet dignity of purposeful work. While their counterparts across the country rallied for “free college” this year, students at Berea and Alice Lloyd—who technically live the dream—were busy tending their own gardens.

“Well, it’s not freely given,” Joseph Little explained, when asked why work study works so well. Joseph’s a senior sociology major at Alice Lloyd. He worked his way up, from dishwasher in the Hunger Din (the dining hall, so named for Mrs. Lloyd’s favorite Kipling poem) to resident assistant of a freshman hall. Next year, he’ll study for his counseling degree online while working as a guard at the federal prison in nearby Ashland, where his fiancée hopes to find work as well. Advising freshman residents, he teased, qualifies him to guard felons.

Joseph’s the first in a long line of coal miners to go to college. His grandparents, who raised him and five brothers, never made it past junior high. “I didn’t know what I wanted,” he said of his high school self. “But I wanted so much more than they knew.” And he wants them to want more too. His plan, once he finishes his social work degree, is to reeducate the region’s out-of-work coal miners.

His family’s from Inez, Kentucky, the tiny hill town in which Lyndon Johnson chose to announce his “war on poverty” in 1964, a day Joseph’s grandparents likely remember. What they may not have known: The architect of Johnson’s sweeping entitlements program, Kentucky congressman Carl Dewey Perkins, was an Alice Lloyd graduate. He meant well, locals contend.

Nearly fifty years before, Boston newswoman Alice Spencer Geddes Lloyd left the forbidding New England climate on doctor’s orders. She meant to revive a Presbyterian mission in the Kentucky hills and restore her constitution after suffering a stroke. Instead, local children living in a nearby valley village mistook her for a princess. Their parents implored the well-appointed foreigner to tutor their sons and daughters, building her a lean-to shack in which to live and teach. Thereafter Mrs. Lloyd left Pippa Passes only rarely, when fundraising required it. (She renamed the village after the Robert Browning poem, to honor a grant her school received from Cornell’s Browning Society.) In 1955, Ralph Edwards, host of the TV game show This Is Your Life, brought her and a cohort of former students out to his Hollywood studio. After the episode aired, including a fundraising plea from Edwards, 16 sacks of small donations overwhelmed the Pippa Passes post office. Life imitating Frank Capra, hired guards carried the money to campus, where student workers counted more than enough to keep the lights on at Alice Lloyd College. Gifts from foundations still fund a dramatic 53 percent of the school’s yearly operating income.

Alice Lloyd’s main drag, Purpose Road, runs through hills tight enough to stump your smartphone’s GPS, but Berea crowns the crest of eastern Kentucky. You can just spot the bluegrass rolling out on the western horizon. With its rare billion-dollar endowment, Berea is far wealthier—thanks to large gifts well invested, lean living, student labor, and federal aid. In its relative worldliness, Berea lacks rustic Alice Lloyd’s centripetal orbit. Fewer Bereans flock back, and many more outsiders find their way to the tourist-friendly college town. It’s a Georgian campus atop a round hill gracious as the mound Noah might have landed on. Main Street boasts a trendy café and galleries peddling handicrafts made by student workers. Broom making, in an embellished Shaker fashion, is to Berea what flatware was for the Oneida colony.

And Berea started out a utopia, too. In 1859, abolitionist John Fee incorporated “anti-slavery, anti-caste, anti-rum, anti-sin” Berea College, named for the most open-minded village in the Book of Acts. The same year, Fee and his fellow founders fled the war tide, but they returned in 1865 to enroll men, women, white folks and black—”of one blood,” they believed, as in “God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth,” Acts 17:26 and Berea’s fundamentalist, apostolic motto. Although it seems less radical now and has never required any faith commitment, Berea continues to serve the region according to its scripturally founded mission.

Founding self-sufficient schools for the forgotten children of Appalachia, well-connected social activists across two centuries agreed, was the best way to help them help themselves, to guide them to the light, to provide bootstraps to the shoeless children of the hills. Their heirs seem to see it the same way.

Alice Lloyd and Berea students do paperwork and farm work, scrape their classmates’ dishes and prepare their classmates’ paychecks, scrub dormitory bathrooms, plant flowers and weed the paths they walk. “Do students ever embezzle?” I asked Alice Lloyd’s director of student work, Kerry Ratliff, a good-natured, wiry fellow who doesn’t seem to like sitting still too long, what I thought was a natural question. “Never!” he replied. Similarly, a student wouldn’t scrawl on a wall his friend had painted, as Berea president Lyle Roelofs said.

When everyone’s work is visibly purposeful, it seems the youthful impulse to destroy loses its fire. Asked what Alice Lloyd students do for fun—how they whet their natural appetites for destruction, in other words—in the absence of keg parties and nearby bars, or really any local commerce, communications director and recent alumna Katie Hylton said, “Well, down at the boys’ dorm there’s this pipe in the ground across the creek, and they like to throw rocks at it.” They’ll turn anything into a tournament, she said. Also, a surprising proportion of restless student athletes at Alice Lloyd join the cast and crew of the yearly spring play.

In his office at Berea, President Roelofs described his students’ response to the wave of campus activism that gripped the nation last year. They marched, they demonstrated, they rose up against their food supplier’s corporate entanglements. But they didn’t shout down the administration. “Interestingly, whereas I see the student activism at many places being directed squarely at the institution where the student is enrolled, here there is a sense, ‘Well, you know, it’s pretty hard to complain radically about Berea, so I’m going to be upset about this, but in the larger social context, not so much at my own institution’—which makes it easier for the administration.”

The first Berea student I came across was a young woman with turquoise hair and a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker on the fender of her old Toyota. The second was the bellhop at the Boone Tavern Hotel, an elegant guesthouse Berea’s third president built to lighten his wife’s hostess duties. It’s partly staffed by students. My bellhop is a basketball player from New Jersey whose parents plan to help him with the few thousand dollars in room-and-board debt he’s not expecting to cover by graduation—while he tours Europe playing ball. After four years, he’s ready to see the world.

So was Catalina Certan as a teen in the exurbs of the former Soviet state of Moldova, poor, proud, hilly, and landlocked—the eastern Kentucky of Europe, in other words. She dreamed of studying abroad but balked at the cost, until a Peace Corps volunteer encouraged her to consider affordable options; on a list of the least expensive American schools, she found a “tuition-free” liberal arts college in Kentucky. From a family of accountants and now an economics major herself, Catalina assumed, “It’s a scam. It can’t be like that.” But she applied anyway, and she’s glad she did: She works for a tough but fair boss in Berea’s accounts payable office and enjoys a pedagogical leg-up on European universities. Last summer she took classes in Vienna, where lifeless lecturers made her miss Berea. State-funded schools slack off in their teaching practice, she believes, because in a system that protects itself regardless of students’ and teachers’ input and rewards, there’s no need to engage on either side. “Having this education that you pay for makes you value the education a lot more,” she said in praise of a capitalist culture. (Although with Berea, “education that you work for” might make more sense.) “The professors are there for you because they’re paid by you,” she added, remembering how her lecturers in Vienna brushed off questions and hurried home after class.

In academic dean and English professor Claude “Lafie” Crum, on the other hand, you find Alice Lloyd’s William Stoner. Like the hero of John Williams’s ageless campus novel, Lafie found his life’s work by a strange surprise, when his soul lighted on the unknown gifts of a literary calling. His favorite novel to teach new students is James Still’s River of Earth, the pinnacle of Appalachian literature, in which he first found folks like himself and his family, a forgotten people, celebrated in fiction.

Advanced seminars have their rewards, but Lafie favors labor-intensive freshman composition. He likened an Alice Lloyd freshman to someone who’s “never seen the ocean before, who sees the ocean for the first time, and you get to watch them see it.” Kentucky public schools’ commitment to standardized test preparation means a high school senior won’t have sunk their teeth into a meaty novel before they find a seat in Lafie’s freshman comp—but once they do, “they figure out how smart they really are, and they just run with it.”

There’s more to spiritual erosion in the region than missing discussion in high school classrooms, though. “The need for a school like this is more now than it ever has been,” or at least, Lafie qualified, more than in recent memory. Far too often, he said, parents or grandparents drop students off without a change of clothes for the next day. One boy spent last year’s Christmas break alone on campus because his parents—addicts, one assumes—had stolen his extra earnings over Thanksgiving.

A generation earlier, Lafie’s father let him attend Alice Lloyd but would have brought his homesick boy home to work without a word if he’d only asked. He stayed, but the same homeward draw pulled postdoctoral Lafie back to Pippa Passes—and continues to bring other graduates back to this day.

Locally, economic depression, drug addiction, and a pervasive hopelessness hang over the hills. And nationally, college debt policies aim to win over young voters. But nothing much seems to change the pattern of life at Alice Lloyd or Berea. They’ll do what they’ve always done. While the need is there, the work continues.

Alice B. Lloyd is a web producer at The Weekly Standard.