What Is The Value Of A Work College?
Ryleigh Johnson | March 25, 2025
Warren Wilson College (WWC) is a work college, meaning that every student who lives on campus is required to have a job. These jobs help pay students’ tuition and provide essential services like maintenance and dining to the school. WWC’s website lays out a vision of this program and its impact: “[WWC is] a self-sustaining community, where everybody does their part to keep the college running…learning to serve one another creates a sense of community pride that you can’t quite grasp until you see it for yourself.”
But how often do students see this community pride being actively fostered in their crews and classrooms? Do we feel that we and our peers have, as the website also proclaims, “a fierce obligation to serve [our] community?” Or, does it often feel that the work program is exploitative or superfluous, a chore that has to be completed?
Like many young adults before going to college, I worked mainly in food service and babysitting jobs, sometimes making less than five dollars an hour. My jobs were boring, repetitive and physically exhausting—an utterly uninspiring vision of what work can be. It didn’t feel like the work I did was meaningful or that it contributed positively to the people I cared about—it felt like I was making the owners richer, who drove cars that cost more than I made in three years and denied me breaks.
I imagine a lot of people who have had this experience of work (or a similarly low-paying and exploitative one) before coming to Wilson would not be particularly thrilled at the thought of working for nine dollars an hour all over again. But, I think that reducing work to only the labor that you complete for a wage paid by someone who does not care about you ignores the vast majority of work we do throughout our lives.
Work isn’t only confined to capitalistic endeavors—it’s also what builds social movements, forges strong friendships, holds families together and aids in the creation of art. As the philosopher and writer bell hooks’ quote on the back of last year’s service day shirts read: “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” In other words, love itself is work.
Much of the work that constitutes love, whether that be love for your community, your friends, your family or the earth, is as mundane as it is necessary. As the Catholic writer Tony Ginocchio points out:
“The open secret about working to make the world better is that the work that needs to be done is not actually difficult at all, in a technical sense. It’s difficult to make time for it, and it’s difficult to push yourself to do it, but there aren’t really special skills required beyond being a somewhat generous person. People need rides to meetings and protests, even if they’re out of your way, but you know how to drive. Somebody’s gotta order pizza for the group, even though that costs money you could spend on going out yourself, but you know how to put in an order…It’s not even hard to figure out what it is that needs to be done; all you need to do is find someone already doing the work that must always be done - feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick and imprisoned, burying the dead - ask that person what they need to keep working, and then just get those things done for them, even if those things are inconvenient or expensive or annoying.”
Feeling like your work makes a difference matters, and work done to sustain a place or people you love is work motivated by something more than a desire to survive. For all of the flaws of WWC’s work program, it does offer students a unique opportunity to be a part of their community and to contribute to its daily, sometimes dull functioning. Maybe it’s not always fun, maybe it’s not always your dream job, but it does matter. This can be easy to forget in the context of the broader world, where, as Rayne Fisher-Quann points out in her essay “Choosing to walk”:
“It’s hard to find the value in any of our work when we’re so deeply alienated from the fruits of so much of our labour, when we’re trained to optimize for the most efficient path to reward or compensation. But I think it’s worth it, particularly in your private, personal life, to try.”
Working to help run your college makes you invested, or at least, it should. Every work crew contributes something to the college community, whether in admissions, dining, landscaping, or tutoring, and we all get to see and reap the fruits of that labor. We work together to provide resources, food and activities; we make these things for each other, and the work that we do is something to be proud of.
This value of contributing to your community to meet the needs and hopes of those around you is one that the college should actively try to instill. You can read about “our values” on our website, but how does WWC work to educate and inform students about those values? If the only job you’ve ever worked lined the pockets of someone ten times richer than you, why would you assume a job at Warren Wilson would be any different?
WWC could work to instill in students the dignity and value of labor by action and by education. No one will believe that we value labor if student workers are not taken seriously and compensated fairly. The college is making positive steps towards improving material compensation for students: during the fall semester of 2025, students will see an increase in pay from $9.05 to $10 per hour, along with an increase in working hours themselves. This pay increase is a great way for the college to signal that the work students complete is important and valued by the administration, but $10 an hour is still far below a living wage. It may take time for pay to significantly increase, but the college should orient itself towards a principle of fair pay for fair work.
I attended many of the work program restructuring meetings that occurred throughout the fall of 2024 and heard students repeatedly say that they wanted essential crews, like the Heavy Duty Crew, to be reinstated on campus. This points to another deeply important aspect of meaningful labor–for work to feel meaningful, you have to feel like you’re actively contributing to something. If you feel that you never have work to do or the work you’re given is merely busy work, that work isn’t going to be fulfilling. The college needs to listen to students who are asking that their work feel more meaningful and create new positions that feel immediate and necessary.
If Warren Wilson wants students to feel invested in their work as a means through which they can serve their community, the administration needs to commit to investing in making a curriculum that institutionalizes the value of work through education. People of varied work backgrounds and experiences will come to Wilson- it’s up to the college to communicate its values surrounding what work means here and why our work might be different from jobs students have held in the past.
We already have a system through which we attempt to prepare incoming students for college life: the First Year Seminar (FYS), which all first-year students must attend. Why don’t we dedicate some of that class time to speaking about peoples’ ideas about the value of work and expressing our philosophy surrounding the work we do at Wilson enriches our community; that work is something we believe holds great dignity?
Work helps shape our lives. Work provides tangible resources and support to our campus community. Work is important, even when it’s dull and dreary, because work is how change is made and things get done. The work program gives you credentials for your future resume, yes, but it also gives you a crew to bond with, labor to be proud of and work to put your hands to. As the college launches new initiatives and programs that promise great change and improvement, I think that it’s important we don’t lose sight of the values we already have and the values that we should work hard to foster through both action and education.
As poet Marge Piercy writes in her poem, “To be of use,”
“The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.