Berea: The Little College That Could

Berea College’s no-tuition model, minimal student debt, and commitment to opportunity have propelled the small Kentucky school to the top of the Washington Monthly’s 2025 College Guide and Rankings.

Unlike other rankings that emphasize “prestige” and selectivity, the Monthly measures what really counts—commitments to public service, research, and social mobility. Founded by an abolitionist minister as the first interracial, coeducational college in the South, tiny Berea college now serves about 1,550 students. Ninety-nine percent are low- and moderate-income Pell Grant recipients, who pay no tuition and graduate nearly debt-free. Most remain in the region, strengthening its economy and future.

Editor in Chief Paul Glastris spoke with Berea President Cheryl Nixon about the college’s philosophy, approach and formula for student success. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Paul Glastris: Dr. Nixon, congratulations! How does it feel to the ranked the number one college in America?

Cheryl Nixon: Of course it’s thrilling. We are just absolutely over the moon, and I think you know what I’m going to say. It’s because this ranking is trying to come up with a different way to assess the value of higher ed. We’re just so proud that Berea can be number one in this way of putting a different lens on what makes higher ed work and what makes higher ed important.

Paul Glastris: Tell us more about Berea and its history.

Cheryl Nixon: We’re in Berea, Kentucky, and Berea, the college, was founded before the city. We’re a small college, only about 1,550 students, but that allows us to do a very unique model. We were the first interracial co-educational college in the South founded by an abolitionist minister, so we sort of had a radical founding. 

One of the things we’ve done to carry through on that idea of a radical mission is to say that education is about opportunity, especially for people that might feel that educational doors are closed to them. Over time, that mission has become more and more focused on educational access for students that don’t have economic means. Our mission is to accept students who have great academic possibility and promise. They bring their gifts to us. They bring their talents to us. We want to give them a gift in return, which is trying to fund as much of their education as possible. 

Right now, our entering class is 99 percent Pell eligible.  That means that typically the family income is going to be $40,000 to $50,000 a year or less. And starting in 1892—over a hundred years ago, we moved to a no-tuition model as a  “work college,” which means that students work on campus to help defray their costs. We now receive federal funding as a federal work college, and all of our students have a job on campus for all four years.

Paul Glastris: Is that the same as work study? Most students know about work study, but work college is different.

Cheryl Nixon: It’s a version of work study, but it is a very different version in that every student on campus is required to work for 10 hours a week at least. What they get is a scholarship that goes directly against their tuition costs rather than getting a paycheck that would come to them that they would then have to budget toward college costs. 

This is a way for students to have a guaranteed job all four years, and it gives them a substantial scholarship of around $10,000 a year. 

We are also very proud that we have lots of jobs on campus that allow students to explore different talents and interests. For example, Berea has a farm and a forest, so if you’re an agricultural major, you might decide to go work on the farm. You might be required to do that to align with a class. Or you might be a computer science major who’s always loved the forest and the idea of being out in nature. So you might do that as a job as a break from your academic classes. However, another student might want to do our forestry minor, and so they’re working in the forest as part of their academic program. 

We also have a great craft program that’s nationally known, and some of our craft work is in the Smithsonian. Some of our students work in our craft department. 

So we have a wide range of jobs that are a bit out of the box, alongside things like tutoring, service work in the community with things like our food bank, or as teaching assistants on campus. We also have students who work in our IT department who repair broken computers or create new software designs. And those students are definitely on their way to a good job when they graduate.

Paul Glastris: Tell us a little bit about the demographics of your students. Are they mostly from the area, from Kentucky, or from around the country?

Cheryl Nixon: Our mission is serving our region. We do take students from across the country and internationally, but primarily from Kentucky and Appalachia—65 percent of our students are from that region. Outreach into small rural communities is part of our mission.

Moreover, 72 percent of our alumni stay in the region. We feel that a part of our mission is to be that engine of opportunity in terms of service to the community, in terms of mobility, in terms of the types of jobs that are needed in our region. We really take that seriously. We draw from our region and return students to it.

Paul Glastris: I’d also love for you to tell us more about your academic rigor. I’ve got to tell you, students online say Berea is really academically very tough. 

Cheryl Nixon: It is. We want to have students that want that academic challenge and to feel that they can get the highest quality possible education without having to worry about cost. 

So nursing, for example, is very rigorous, but that’s exactly the type of career that’s needed in rural Appalachia. We need nurses. 

Our top two majors are computer science and business. We need people who are going to be the smartest entrepreneurial or managerial thinkers that can go out and help our region.

We also want our students to go to graduate school. We need doctors. We definitely want our students to see that if that is their path, they’re very well prepared to go in that direction too.

Paul Glastris: Maybe it’s the rigor that explains some of your numbers, but the average earnings of a Berea student nine years after they start college is $5,000 greater than you would predict by the demographics of those students. In other words, similar students going to similar schools make $5,000 less than Berea students nine years out. How do you explain that? And it’s Kentucky, right? It’s not like you’re in Silicon Valley and the average salary is high. 

Cheryl Nixon: I think there’s several reasons, one of which is that we are proving that the liberal arts is a route towards high-paying jobs. Why? Because we’re a small campus where students get to know their faculty. They’re in small classes, so it is rigorous. They have to engage in depth, they have to be quick on their feet. They have to know how to work as teams. They have to know how to pivot and be flexible in solutioning. Also, they’re going to be in small laboratories where they’re getting hands-on experience, say, in the latest medical technologies. And they will have a faculty member by their side training them. So those are some of the things I think most colleges would say a liberal arts education does well—a small college experience and making sure that the students have that mentorship of a faculty member. 

We feel that our students are getting a very rigorous, well-rounded education. We combine that with the work college model and that is where they will learn skills that are the essential backbones of what you need in the real world, whether it’s time management, problem solving, oral communication, doing presentations, and even things like being able to take direction from a supervisor. Our students have four years of practicing that. 

Paul Glastris: Let me quote a couple more figures from the rankings that I just think our audience ought to know about. The net price of a year at Berea is $3,395—about a quarter what the average price net price of a public university is in this country—and you have, I believe, the lowest debt level of graduates of any college in the country. How do you do it?  

Cheryl Nixon: The average debt that we’re seeing for our students right now is around $2,500.

Every year we’re chipping away at this because we feel this is our mission: to prove there are ways to show a different economic model for higher ed. And right now, 

80 percent of our entering first-year class is paying zero for their education. And that means zero tuition. None of our students pay tuition, but that also is zero for housing, food, and fees. So again, we are trying to get students to get as close to zero as possible. And if they do have to take out a loan, we are trying to get that as low as possible.

And I will be honest, the biggest issue is that we have to work within federal financial aid, and we have to follow rules that FAFSA sets in place. So we can’t over-award. In other words, we cannot give students more funding than their FAFSA dictates. So that’s why some students might have a small amount of debt. 

The next groundbreaking thing we hope to do is to offer students a summer job or a summer payment possibility that is equivalent to whatever their FAFSA or their term bill is saying they have to pay. So if they’re being told you have to pay $2,000 because you have that family ability, we’ll give you a summer job that could pay that $2,000.

How do we to this? I like to think of it as a three-legged stool. Number one is the work college model. Secondly, we do have federal funding in the form of Pell Grants, and students are often getting a state scholarship. But third, the biggest contribution to their education is that we do have a large endowment. A hundred years ago, when we went tuition free, it was just a stroke of genius that we started to ask for small donations – not from one big donor but many small donations. 

So we have a large endowment—about $1.5-$1.6 billion—and all of the returns from that endowment are used 100 percet to fund our students’ education. 

Paul Glastris: Now  that we’ve convinced students that they should apply, how do they maximize their chance of getting into Berea?

Cheryl Nixon: They can just look on our website, find our admissions connection, and ask for more information. We ask students right away to make sure that they meet our financial criteria because we want students that need economic support. Students have to meet a financial need criteria. We’re not asking you for tuition.

Paul Glastris: You know, every other college in the country does the opposite, right? 

Cheryl Nixon: Right, but we’re trying not to accept you if you have too much money. I know it sounds like a crazy model, but clearly it’s taken us over 100 years to build this model up. But of course, we’re very proud of it. So we do check your financial background. And we do check that you want to be at a smaller campus where you will be challenged. You’ll be asked to think deep thoughts. You’ll be asked to do hands-on projects, do some undergraduate research, do that internship. 

Paul Glastris: Tell us a little bit about yourself, Dr. Nixon. You did go to a very elite school—you got your Phd, I believe, at Harvard. But you’ve spent most of your career not in the areas of higher education that cater to the classic elite student from an upper middle class family. Tell us about your path to Berea.

Cheryl Nixon: I started my academic career as an English professor. And you wouldn’t know it today, but I was one of those shy kids that loved to read under the covers and found my calling in books. I worked at institutions where I was working with first-year students and trying to get them to have that love of literature and reading also.

I spent most of my career at University of Massachusetts Boston, and UMass-Boston has the mission of trying to serve the citizens of Boston. It’s a commuter campus and has that principled idea of access to education. I started teaching literature classes there and realized my passion became trying to make sure that students were successful in reading and writing, especially when English was not their first language. 

That pivoted me to become increasingly passionate about how can we make sure that we open the doors of opportunity for students to get a college degree.

After working at UMass-Boston, I worked at a small liberal arts college in Colorado—Fort Lewis College—which is a non-tribal Native American serving institution, wanting to work again with a population that often had some barriers to educational opportunity. 

Whether it’s recent immigrants to the United States, Native Americans, or here in Appalachia, rural students, the through-line has been students that maybe haven’t had economic ability to pay and for whom that shouldn’t be a barrier. I’m a big believer in the old fashioned thing called the “American dream” and that education is the route to get there.

The post Berea: The Little College That Could appeared first on Washington Monthly.