Students attending College of the Ozarks pay no tuition, but work a minimum of fifteen hours a week at a campus work station. Student receive grades for their work performance, in addition to their academics.

 

Located in Point Lookout, Missouri, College of the Ozarks opened in 1906, and has since established itself as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the Midwest, as well as No. 4 on Princeton Review’s 2008 list of the top 10 Stone-Cold Sober schools.

 

Deep Springs is a two-year, all-male liberal arts college located on a cattle ranch and alfalfa farm in the White-Inyo Mountains of California. Every student, ten to fifteen admitted each year, receives free tuition, room, and board, and works a minimum of twenty hours a week on the ranch. Students experience a considerable amount of autonomy, as they have a say in what subjects to study, which professors to hire, and even which applicants to admit.

 

The school was founded by Lucien Lucius Nunn, a pioneer in electrical engineering, who admitted Deep Spring’s first class of twenty young men in 1917. 

 

3.      UC-Irvine School of Law, Class of ‘12

To attract the best and brightest students for its inaugural class, the UC Irvine School of Law, California’s first new public law school in 40 years, is offering a free ride to all 60 students admitted this fall. The estimated $6 million it will cost to put the students through the program will be covered by grants and donations.

 

Berea College in Kentucky offers each admitted student a full-tuition scholarship. Moreover, the school’s mandatory work-study program, which requires students to work a minimum of ten hours a week, can help students pay for room, board, and books—all of which are not covered by the scholarship. Berea offers degrees in 28 fields.

 

Berea was the first interracial and coed college in the South. Classes at the school were fully integrated from its opening in 1855 until 1914, when the Kentucky legislature passed a law that prohibited school integration. When the law was amended in 1950 to allow integrated education above the high school level, Berea was the first college to re-open its doors to African-Americans. 

 

A generous grant from the F.W. Olin Foundation allows Olin College of Engineering, a school of 300 in Needham, Massachusetts, to offer every admitted student four years of free tuition (valued at $130,000). Olin is ranked as one of the top undergraduate engineering programs in the country and places a great emphasis on creativity and philanthropy.

 

Located in Manhattan, Cooper Union offers degree programs in art, architecture, and engineering, and to each of its students, four years of free tuition (valued at $130,000). The admissions rate at Cooper Union is about 8 percent, while class size is a little more than 900.

 

Peter Cooper, who invented the first locomotive in the United States and received the first American patent for powdered gelatin, founded the school in 1858. Cooper believed that education of the highest quality should be “as free as air and water.”

 

The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, considered one of the most prestigious performing arts conservatories in the world, gives every admitted student a full scholarship, and all piano, harpsichord, composition, and conducting majors are lent Steinway grand pianos. The school is named after Cyrus Curtis, founder of Ladies Home Journal.

 

Anthony McGill, the clarinetist in the quartet that played at Barak Obama’s inauguration, and Leonard Bernstein are both Curtis alumni.

 

Located in Pippa Passes, Kentucky, “the elk capital of the East,” Alice Lloyd College requires each of its 550 students to work ten to fifteen hours a week at a campus job in exchange for free tuition. Those who need help paying for room, board, and books can work another 15 hours.

 

Alice Spencer Lloyd, a former publisher and editor of The Cambridge Press, founded the school in 1916.

 

8 Tuition-Free Colleges (by Scott Allen, Mental Floss)