Another is Deep Springs College, about 30 miles from Big Pine, CA.
This is a two-year school, in the remote desert. Enrollment is about 30 students, coeducational since 2018. There is no tuition, but students work ~20 hours/week at jobs including cook, irrigator, butcher, groundskeeper, cowboy, "office cowboy", dairy, and feedman.
The college was created to both train and accustom technical staff for powerplant engineering positions in the highly-rural western and mountain states.
Most students transfer to a 4 year institution to complete their degrees.
I was also going to mention Deep Springs. It's a very interesting school. Faculty do not have tenure and the college is largely run by the students who decide on faculty hiring, curriculum, and admissions. David Hitz, co-founder of NetApp is an alumnus. Students who graduate have been very highly successful in transferring to top schools.
One of my friends from grad school went there. I was very tempted when I got the recruitment brochure as a high school senior (because I lived in Chicago, but wanted to go to California, I had to check the anywhere in the country box on the SAT/ACT results and ended up hearing from about half the colleges in the country—I was a big nerd and crossed them off the list in the back of the SAT booklet).
Generally yes, I think the most common destinations are Chicago, Harvard, Cornell, and Michigan (Cornell and Michigan have Telluride houses which are run by the same organization as the college itself).
I met a couple Deep Springs transfers at the University of Chicago and they were some of the smartest, chillest, most well-rounded kids. Very impressive and it made me wish I had studied somewhere like that.
@dredmorbius's summary is good. Couple additions/nuances:
L.L. Nunn founded Deep Springs to train public servants/leaders. He hoped they would play a larger role in society. (Some do, some don't...). To all incoming students, the school distributes a pamphlet written by Nunn called "The Voice of the Desert", in which he articulates his vision for the school and his appreciation for the mysteries of the wilderness.
Nunn founded at least three schools in his lifetime. The first was intended to train young men to become technical staff at his power plants. (Nunn supplied Tesla with power for some of his early experiments in Telluride, CO.)
The second school was founded back east. Its student body walked out en masse to volunteer for WWI.
The third school, Deep Springs, was founded in 1917, in a location isolated enough to preserve its student body in the face of social pressures. (Worked!)
At least nominally, the student body hires and fires the faculty, determines each semester's curriculum, and conducts the admissions process to replace itself. The extent to which it does that independently varies from one school administration to another. (When I was there, we had T-shirts that said "[[frontside]] In 1917, two radical social utopias were born... [[backside]] "Only one survived.")
It's a feeder school for larger, more prestigious institutions you've heard of.
It's also a really f*cking hard place to live, work and study, because of the sheer immensity of your responsibilities, and the intensity of social interactions.
Labor: I served as the farmer's assistant, the dishwasher, and the dairy boy when I was there. The dairy boy, the feedman and the cowboy are all responsible for the care, feeding and continued survival of livestock; the butcher is responsible for their merciful killing. The farmer's assistant has to grow the alfalfa to feed the cattle (or sell). Labor's no joke, and you can't screw it up without other people suffering. Life at DS is heavily interdependent, and the consequences of mistakes are real. (I've been told this may not be true at most liberal arts colleges...)
Social: If you don't like someone at DS, chances are you will still see them 4-5 times per day, including every meal, for two years. The school has an isolation policy. It is the only human community in a high-mountain desert valley. The near towns (Big Pine and Bishop, CA) are about a 30-40min drive away, IIRC. The students stay in the Valley for the length of each term. The only ones who leave are: 1) "the driver," who picks up groceries and applicants during application season; and 2) folks with a medical appointment. That's it. It also has a "no drugs or alcohol" policy during term, the enforcement of which is variable.
You might say it's free for a reason; you pay in other ways. I made several lifelong friends there, but I'm not sure I would counsel my younger self to do it again.
I saw this in tv. It reminded me City Slickers. It looked fun. When I was burning out in a professional school; I would have jumped at the opportunity to do this program.
(I'm not denigrating it. I've been a landscaper, dishwasher in highschool who was yelled at in Chinese nightly for not doing jobs other than dishwashing--like washing/polishing his car between rushes, General contractor, auto mechanic, and electrician. I know about manual labor, and I never liked it after my 40's. This program looked fun though.)
This is a two-year school, in the remote desert. Enrollment is about 30 students, coeducational since 2018. There is no tuition, but students work ~20 hours/week at jobs including cook, irrigator, butcher, groundskeeper, cowboy, "office cowboy", dairy, and feedman.
The college was created to both train and accustom technical staff for powerplant engineering positions in the highly-rural western and mountain states.
Most students transfer to a 4 year institution to complete their degrees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College
There've been a small handful of HN submissions, though no discussion.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22deep%20springs%22
Several comments as well:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...