Why we are

Tuition-Free

Most small colleges and universities consider themselves “tuition-dependent,” and even universities with government funding and/or endowments worth billions of dollars continue to charge tuition, room and board, fees, etc.—to the tune of $30-80k per year. There are at least three problems with this model: 1) students become customers, 2) institutions become wasteful, and 3) students too often graduate with more debt than they can possibly repay in their entire lives.

At St. Isidore’s, we want our students to be colleagues, not customers. The original, medieval universities were either student-universities (i.e., legal corporations with students as the members) or faculty-universities (with professors as the members of the legal corporations). Because we expect students to spend a few years in our community but faculty a few decades, we are like a faculty-university, meaning that our faculty collectively make all of the major decisions affecting the operations of the institution; however, we consider students to be temporary members of our corporate institution with rights and responsibilities not unlike those of faculty members —however temporary.

We expect our faculty members to order their priorities in this way: 1) God and Church, 2) family, 3) faculty colleagues, 4) student colleagues, and 5) St. Isidore’s as a perennial institution. Too many colleges and universities sacrifice the lives and well-being of their faculty members and students for some flimsy imagination of an abstract institution that doesn’t exist—for the college or university itself, if it is anything, is a collection of human beings, faculty and/or students. Colleges and universities that do not have this concrete view consequently charge students as high tuition as possible, pay faculty members a little as possible, and make most of their decisions with both eyes on admissions, erecting buildings and founding programs designed to lure new students to the institution instead of maintaining and developing existing programs and facilities for the good of the current faculty and students.

The aforementioned wasteful spending and student debt stem largely from this obscene focus on recruiting new students. At St. Isidore’s we eschew tuition and fees, so we are not in the least dependent upon them, so we have no need to worry about recruiting certain numbers of students with an eye toward “paying the bills” with their tuition dollars. Of course, if only because we charge no tuition and fees when other colleges and universities charge $100-250k for a bachelor’s degree, we expect there will never be a shortage of students interested in attending St. Isidore’s. We also do not aspire to be a large institution, for we recognize both the value of a close-knit community and the natural limitations of space and resources faced by any institution—especially one as bound to land and agriculture as ours is. Consequently, we do not seek to grow in terms of population, so we can avoid the vicious cycle of investing in facilities to attract students, recruiting students to fill the new facilities, building facilities to accommodate the increased population of students, etc.

Of course, eschewing tuition and fees makes us entirely dependent upon the goodwill of donors and our own productivity. If you would like our tuition-free collegiate farm program, please Support Us.