Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best.<p>The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, administration, etc. -- the day to day necessary jobs that keep an institution running -- at all, or enough to be offsetting the costs of those professionals <i>and</i> paying for salaries of the faculty.  And you wouldn&#x27;t want students to be handling many of the jobs that rely on people to conscientiously do them for years, and have institutional memory in mind.  They&#x27;re there to be <i>students</i>, not workers.  That&#x27;s why most student jobs are of the type similar to dorm cleaners, kitchen staff, library, computer room, etc. -- short term temp work requiring no great specific skills.<p>The article itself acknowledges that much of the income comes from the endowment, grants, donations.  If you wanted to start a school on the premise of student labor paying for it, without these existing sources, there would be no way.   The cost of running a school is simply way too high in developed countries to do this.<p>Having students work is not a bad thing.   But it isn&#x27;t some utopian possibility to solve the problems of the cost of education at nearly any typical school.  To make this possible you&#x27;d have to start something like an educational coop in a developing country.  And I doubt that would be a significant contributor to higher education, until it got larger and more professional, at which point you would start to run into the exact same issues above.