Have you heard of Deep Springs College?
On persistence in institutional distinctiveness
When I tell people what I’m studying, a question I sometimes get is whether I can describe the kind of “uncommon colleges” in which I am so interested.
The issue is that I usually define them in the negative: they are not mainstream, not research-oriented, not comprehensive. But what are they?
The truth is that an uncommon college can be lots of things, and depending on which counter-cultural element the institution seizes upon, it can look fundamentally different from other non-traditional colleges.
So, one way to answer this question is just by describing examples. It isn’t easy to define the uncommon college, but I can always discuss some real world examples. If I’m lucky enough that the answer to my question in the title is “No,” then I get to tell a fun story about a college that seems impossible.
I’d like to tell a slice of that story today. Moreover, I’d like to ask what it is about the organization of Deep Springs that has kept it distinct for over a century.
Deep Springs, briefly
Deep Springs College is a two-year college, exclusively awarding associate’s degrees in the liberal arts. It was founded in 1919 by L.L. Nunn (given name “Lucien Lucius”), a hydro-electric energy mogul who did much to electrify the west around the turn of the century. In his later years, he focused more on education, hoping to rethink the way that the American leaders of tomorrow were trained. His answer, like so many before him, was to endow a college.
This college was to bear his personal philosophy and be chartered thusly. Nunn had a few things in mind that distinguished his college from the start.
Isolation: It’s in a desert. As the image above shows, Deep Springs is deeply isolated from civilization, located in eastern California near the Nevada border. Students are prohibited from visiting any other towns, though they would need to travel nearly fifty miles if they wanted to do so.
Labor: This desert outpost is also a working cattle ranch and alfalfa farm. Carefully irrigated by the springs which give the place its name, every student contributes to the shared work of maintaining a working dairy farm, as well as other labor like equipment maintenance, preparing meals, and running the library.
It’s free: Students don’t pay tuition, and they never have. They are expected to contribute to the labor program as well as to the community through participating on committees, but these are not “instead” of tuition. When you charge tuition, the relationship between student and school changes. Nunn did not want his students to pay for a product; he wanted them to engage in an intentional community.
Democracy: From the start, Nunn wanted students to be responsible for self-governance. At first, this only referred to on-campus issues, but its meaning has grown as the value was internalized by successive generations. Now, students are responsible for running admissions for the incoming class, hiring visiting faculty and selecting which courses they teach, and they even have two voting members on the Board of Trustees.
Academic options: There are only two required courses at Deep Springs: first-semester writing (it’s inescapable) and public speaking, which must be repeated by every student every term. This fits with Nunn’s goal that America’s future leaders needed to be confident speakers but should otherwise determine their own academic needs. This means that every year, students determine which courses they want to take based on open applications from prospective faculty.
Faculty: There is no permanent faculty, aside from the president. Most faculty are only on campus for a semester at a time, teaching the specific courses that they were hired to teach by the students. A few are hired for three-year terms, which are renewable once. This means that faculty can’t be at Deep Springs for more than six years. The academic culture is more determined by students than faculty, and frequent turnover keeps it that way.
Scale: Deep Springs has always been small. Across its two classes, there are fewer than thirty students. It accepts fewer than 10% of its applicants per year with no interest in growing. Also, according to its public reporting, the college has ten staff members, though I don’t believe this includes the short-term faculty who are on contract.
Outcomes: Despite the challenge that typically comes with transferring to elite institutions, Deep Springs is an exception. At its founding, many graduates transferred to Cornell due to Nunn having endowed an organization to support them there. The tradition of Ivy+ transfers continues today as the reputation of a Deep Springs student precedes them and opens doors in the highest echelons of higher education. It doesn’t hurt that most Deep Springs students were competitive for elite educations coming out of high school with average SAT scores above 1500.
Change and Continuity
There are other weird things about Deep Springs, but I think those eight elements are probably the most distinctive.
Admittedly, plenty has changed at Deep Springs since its founding. The original curriculum was much more focused on religion, an interest which the community was content to dispense with in the generation after Nunn’s death. Students did not always have the influence over admissions or hiring that they now do. There was resistance to increasing mechanization in farm operations with some alumni feeling that industrialized labor was incapable of teaching students the same moral lessons as working with your hands.
The biggest change, of course, is that for its first hundred years, Deep Springs was a men’s college. Following years of lawsuits over the intent and applicability of Nunn’s founding charter, they became co-educational in 2018.
With that being said, Deep Springs probably looks more like its 1917 self than any other college over the same span. Why is that? What’s keeping them static?
Money
The only reason that Deep Springs was tuition-free at its founding was because of the scale of Nunn’s endowment, something he had to do in order to support the prohibition on tuition. That money did not last forever, and now over 90% of the institution’s income is from philanthropy.
While I can’t see exactly who gave to Deep Springs, individual donations could come from one of two sources: people who attended the college and people who didn’t.
For alumni, donating makes sense. They likely appreciate having gone to college for free and to have done so at such a unique institution. When they donate, they’re hoping to enable more students to have the same experience they did.
You can read more about this in L. Jackson Newell’s history of the institution, but the endowment was taxed nearly to its limit in the 1990’s. They responded by expanding their solicitation to non-alumni. People who have never attended or even visited Deep Springs will donate anyway because they believe the college is doing something unique in education and because they want to keep that education free for its students.
I sometimes wonder how it is that other universities can solicit so many donations while still charging such heavy tuition. I suppose donors will view it as amelioration, that by donating they’re making it more affordable, at least for some attendees. Or perhaps they give targeted donations which provide full scholarships for individual students, even if the average student is unaffected.
But donating to a free college seems to be a much more idealistic proposition. Donors may believe in education as liberation, and they view the debt associated with college to be anathema to that process of liberation. Or perhaps I’m just speculating.
Philanthropy and the Minimization of Stakeholders
Either way, Deep Springs being a wholly philanthropic organization probably has something to do with the permanence of its program.
One way to think of eliminating tuition is as eliminating a stakeholder. If students pay to enroll in a college, then they can justifiably expect certain services in exchange for their contribution. This makes the student more like a customer than anything. If students don’t like the services they receive, they can withhold their money and enroll elsewhere. The college must attend to student interests to keep tuition dollars flowing in.
Without having to worry about tuition, student preference cannot shift institutional structure. Instead, the college’s organizational model is something to which students are recruited. Either they agree to what Deep Springs is about or they don’t apply. In fact, applicants are required to do a multi-day on-site campus visit to ensure that they are willing to accept the lifestyle.
Additionally, because the faculty is purposefully transient, there are very few staff who are around long enough to shift how the campus operates. And since the college is isolated in the desert, it’s not as if they have to worry about town-gown relations. No one is buying football tickets for a game in Deep Springs.
A final stakeholder colleges need to deal with is the government. While Deep Springs is accredited and has a relationship with the California Department of Education to ensure credit transfers, it has as little to with the government as it can. Since students don’t pay tuition, the college does not accept federal financial aid. This means that they are invisible to federal education regulation; if you try to look up their College Navigator report, you won’t find anything.
So, if Deep Springs doesn’t have to worry about much influence from tuition payers, faculty, local residents, or the government, they face much less pressure to change. Much of the pressure to become a co-educational institution came from alumni donors and alumni on the Board of Trustees. In fact, in the year after that change, Deep Springs quadrupled its philanthropic yield.
The donors had spoken.
Sustained Innovation on Multiple Lines
I’ll conclude by asking myself a question. Could Deep Springs remain weird if it weren’t weird in so many ways?
For example, if a college just got rid of tenure and paid its faculty on contract, that probably wouldn’t revolutionize education in itself.
There are other colleges in the desert. Being far from people in a strange environment doesn’t mean you’re doing something new in the classroom.
There are even many colleges with work programs. But having some of your tuition covered by your labor does not, in itself, make your education distinct. It might just feel like any other college student’s part-time job.
Whether by foresight or accident, L.L. Nunn proposed an institution whose overlapping innovations effectively reinforced one another. It made the school uncommon in 1917, and it has kept it uncommon since.
When people do talk about Deep Springs in higher education, they talk about it like it’s a secret. “Have you heard about Deep Springs College?” It’s not always clear to outsiders what the college is doing, but it’s clear they’re doing something different.
Despite Nunn’s dreams, Deep Springs did not revolutionize the higher education landscapte; it has few imitators. But if the college is nothing else, it’s a contrast.
It shows us what higher education isn’t; it’s college in the negative.
-Matt
Trying to imagine which 30 people from my undergrad experience I'd want to live in this isolated, close quarters with for this long and I shudder, lol.