A novel Catholic trade college is on track to open in Ohio next year, aiming to teach students a skilled profession while earning a bachelor’s degree and deepening their faith.
Once students graduate from the Catholic College of St. Joseph the Worker, they will have earned a bachelor’s degree in Catholic studies while becoming carpenters, electricians, masons, or heating, ventilating, and air conditioning technicians.
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“We’re forming these students so that the head, the heart, and the hands are all combined and working together,” said Mike Sullivan, the college’s first president.
In an effort to unburden students from debt, the cost of tuition for the three-year, in-person program in Steubenville is $15,000 a year, including housing. Students are paid a salary when they train, so they can graduate with the financial freedom to start their families and be productive members of their faith communities.
“A fundamental aspect of our mission is to empower students to grow up quickly and not perpetuate adolescence throughout college,” Sullivan added. “We want them to grow up and take responsibility for themselves and for their lives so that when they’re finished with their degree, they can get married and get started with a family and be productive members of society.”
Keeping tuition low and affordable was a key part of the vision of the college in an era in which the average student loan borrower holds over $32,000 in student loan debt and U.S. borrowers hold a collective $1.7 trillion in student loans.
“It is profoundly hypocritical for a college Catholic college to promote family life and tell students the family is the basis of culture, that it is the path to restoration, and then set them on a financial path that tends them away from that beautiful truth that they teach,” Jacob Fareed Imam, the college’s vice president of finance, told the Washington Examiner.
The college was founded by a group of Catholic men led by Imam, an Oxford University doctoral candidate; Sullivan, a local entrepreneur and contractor; and Alex Renn, the college’s vice president of operations. They say their goal is to “produce faithful Christians who are virtuous citizens, intellectually formed, and capable of building up the church in their communities.”
They want the college to help address the worker shortage for skilled trades while instilling honor and virtue in professions such as carpentry that date back to Jesus Christ himself. Catholic tradition teaches that St. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus and the college’s namesake, was a carpenter who passed his trade on to his foster son.
Imam told the Washington Examiner that the idea for the college came from a conversation he had with a friend who worked in the admissions office of a Catholic college. The friend, Imam said, was feeling guilty about his role in assisting prospective students with obtaining loans, knowing they would be saddled with debt for the next several decades and thus inhibiting their future career and family prospects.
With that in mind, 2 1/2 years ago, Imam sought out Sullivan, a Steubenville local who owns a contracting company specializing in cabinetry and home renovation. Sullivan says he always wondered “why we don’t have a good solid Catholic trade school.”
“It’s difficult to get skilled tradesmen with a solid character, and the character formation is sometimes really lacking in many cases,” he told the Washington Examiner. “I’ve always sort of seen a vacuum there that could be filled very easily with a school model like this.”
The college plans to welcome its first students in the fall of 2023 and is already accepting applications. Once accepted, students will attend the college in person for three years.
The college has three possible tracks that incrementally build on each other.
In the first track, a student begins with a “gap year” or year of “discernment,” in which they will be empowered to sample the various trades to find out if such a career is right for them. Those who chose discernment can either leave the school with a “craftsmanship certificate” or continue through the college’s three-year bachelor’s program, which is the second track.
The third and final track transitions students who have completed the bachelor’s program at the college’s campus in Steubenville to an apprenticeship with a skilled tradesman anywhere in the country while still taking a handful of online classes through the college.
The combined bachelor’s and apprentice track takes a total of six years.
The founders of the college see the bachelor’s degree as a key way of convincing skeptics to take a look at their programs, even as cultural attitudes on education encourage high school students to only consider college as their next educational step.
“So you’ve got a student who wants to pursue the trades, but maybe his parents want him to pursue a BA … and then the other side of that is the BA is going to be a solid foundation for the way they live their life and set [the student] up so they’re really conversant with family life, economics, politics, and the Catholic theological tradition and philosophy,” Sullivan said.
The college charges $15,000 per year for in-person classes, which includes housing. The additional apprenticeship years cost $5,000 each for a six-year total cost of $60,000. In the meantime, students are earning a salary for their work.
“What you find when somebody is in debt is that they are not free,” Imam said. “You just don’t have the funds to be able to start what you have dreamed of starting. You don’t even have the freedom to dream of starting something in the same way. We just find that to be critically un-American, let alone critically un-Catholic.”
While the low cost of attending the College of St. Joseph the Worker and the accompanying “paid to train” factor was an important part of Imam’s vision for the school, it was also about, as he says, destroying the “stigma” around the trades, which he says is a reflection of the Christian ethic.
“[Jesus Christ] is the first time that you find in a major religion someone giving the dignity to manual labor,” Imam said. “His path really did transform our view of manual labor, and I think as the society has grown less Christian, we’ve forgotten that truth.”
The traditional trades and other skilled jobs have encountered an ever-growing labor shortage. One estimate from the National Electrical Contractors Association showed that for every 7,000 new electricians entering the workforce, 10,000 retired. Imam credits this somewhat to globalization, but he said the need for skilled tradesmen has never been more acute.
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“I think many people are just starting to return to the trades, in part because it’s the one thing that is absolutely local that cannot be exported,” Imam said. “You can export so much production, but you have to build the home here, [and] you have to erect the building here. You can’t do that anywhere else. It needs to be done here.”
