Opinion | A Cattle Ranch Is Doing What Ivy League Colleges Can’t

David Neidorf has filled just about every role there is at Deep Springs College over his many years at the school: lecturer, professor, dean, vice president of operations, president and interim dean again. He told me that most students come here to live up to some kind of demanding ideal. “They wanted more responsibility than they’re going to get — for their individual lives, for their communal lives — elsewhere,” he said.

The students must choose not only which classes to take but also which ones will be offered to the college at large. They help pick the professors, run the admissions process for incoming students and are involved in ever bigger decisions about the future direction of the college, like whether to hire someone for fund-raising.

Perhaps this is why A.I.-enabled cheating does not seem to be a problem at Deep Springs. At other schools, students can tell themselves that they are, at worst, only cheating themselves. Students at Deep Springs learn to see themselves not as consumers of a degree (an individual good), but as creators of an education (a collective good). It’s important, too, that when second-year Deep Springers, as they’re known, make decisions about admissions and the curriculum, they know they are shaping a school that will exist when they are no longer there.

Deep Springs is unique, but it isn’t singular. Berea College is a selective, four-year liberal arts school in Kentucky, one of 10 federally recognized work colleges in the United States. Founded in 1855 by abolitionists, it was the South’s first interracial, coed college. Today, its 1,500 undergraduates pay no tuition, and like at Deep Springs, they all work a campus job — at least 10 hours a week. At Berea, they receive pay to put toward housing and living expenses.

With a much bigger student population than that of Deep Springs, Berea offers a wider scope of work: Students might handcraft brooms as part of the Student Craft program, or work cattle on the farm, or produce code as a programmer on the student software development team. The labor program at Berea is marketed in large part as pre-professional development, not just as a character-building enterprise. But many of the jobs make campus livable for everyone: landscaping, janitorial duties, staffing the dining hall — each of those tasks gives students a stake in the institution and the opportunity to see their actions reflected in the world around them.