Deep Springs College: a very prestigious private 2-year college that charges no tuition.
Deep Springs College is located in California's High Desert in the the Inyo Mountains, near the Nevada border. It is a working ranch. Only about twenty six students attend each year, all male. (Each year they re-open the question of whether to admit women, but so far they never have.) They spend each morning in academic classes and each afternoon working as ranch hands. The Deep Springs community is self-governing. It is REALLY isolated.
Deep Springs is very competitive to get into. Several hundred people apply each year for 10-15 spots. In general, you need the same academic accomplishments (grades and SAT scores) as you would need to get into the most elite private universities in the country. After two years at Deep Springs, most students transfer to Ivy League universities or institutions with similar stature. Plus, you need to convince the Deep Springs community through your essays and interviews that you will be a valuable citizen on the ranch.
Deep Springs charges nothing for tuition, which saves you about $50K over the two years compared to other private schools.
No other colleges are like Deep Springs. Their web site says:
Deep Springs is unique in the nature and extent of its commitment to the principle of student self-governance, the integrity of labor to the program, and the high quality of academics. However, there are a number of other schools that share the values of high student involvement, experiential learning, a relatively small size, and close student-faculty cooperation. You might want to look at Antioch College in Ohio, Berea College in Kentucky, the College of the Atlantic in Maine, the Evergreen State College in Washington, Prescott College in Arizona, Shimer College in Illinois, Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, and Western Washington University's Fairhaven College.
The colleges listed above are easier to get into than Deep Springs, but none of them are free except Berea.
Here is Deep Springs web site (from which I lifted the images shown here.)
