Last August, I took a leap of faith and four connecting flights to reach Sitka, a verdant, mountainous, remote island town in Southeast Alaska. Needless to say, it was a far cry from the undulating landscape of the Indiana suburbs I call home.
I was a member of the inaugural cohort of the Outer Coast Year, a progressive educational experiment that would ultimately help form the bedrock of a prospective two-year liberal arts college called Outer Coast.
The previous summer, I’d attended the Telluride Association Summer Program, an experience that had offered me an intriguing — if brief — taste of progressive education. With my high school years behind me and all the time of a gap year at my disposal, attending the Outer Coast Year was imbued with a deeper significance, a deviation from the linear high school-to-college trajectory. I was subscribing to an “alternative” form of education, an early participant of Outer Coast’s mission to develop into a microcollege, or an institution of higher education that archetypically comprises small student bodies, seminar-style classes, self-governance, and involves service and manual labor in daily life.
There was just one issue: I hadn’t forgotten that I’d deferred enrollment to Harvard College, quite literally the totem of traditional higher education. Wasn’t Harvard the bête noire of educational experiments like Outer Coast? And, if so, how could I justify my presence at the program?
After concluding my year of progressive education and taking the past several months to reflect on the experience, however, I’ve come to realize that the visions of Outer Coast and other microcollege movements don’t exist in opposition to mainstream education. Rather, progressive, experiential education serves as an antidote; a corrective to the issues that it has diagnosed in traditional educational structures.
Reframing the relationship between mainstream and progressive education is important not only for the benefit of students, but for the longevity of the microcollege movement itself. For one, progressive education can feel alienating and disconnected from reality when branded as the “anti-college,” discouraging prospective applicants — particularly underserved and underrepresented groups — from sampling its singular, frequently transformative programming. Additionally, positing the progressive education movement as the antagonist of mainstream education completely misrepresents its mission, which is often reminiscent of those propagated by traditional colleges.
But beyond that, progressive educational experiments such as Outer Coast represent a critical alternative to the postsecondary education status quo. Though progressive education can sometimes feel hyper-idealistic from the outset, the movement represents a necessary reimagining, revitalization, and reprioritization of postsecondary education.
The Progressive Education Movement
If you’ve heard about Deep Springs College, it’s likely from the scores of articles that prominently feature their cowboy scholars and seemingly anachronistic ways of life on a rural ranch in eastern California, where the nearest town is 40 miles away.
When Lucien Lucius Nunn founded Deep Springs in 2017, he was massively disillusioned with mainstream education. Nunn couldn’t fathom the restraints of a traditional American college, specifically the parochial focus on expanding one’s intellectual powers, and its careerist, degree-awarding obsession. Instead, he believed that education should play an integral role in facilitating character development, inculcating a sense of responsibility in students, and fostering spiritual growth. How could one reap all of this from a traditional education?
Nunn concluded that they couldn’t; not when he believed that seclusion, physical labor, and refraining from alcohol and interactions with women could nurture the spirit. Thus, Deep Springs College — the first and most well-known progressive microcollege — was founded. It was to be an intellectual utopia both exclusively designed and fully-funded for the men that attended. Though Deep Springs may (ironically) sound draconian in its limitations for its students, it’s actually quite the opposite.
Aside from adherence to the rules articulated by Nunn — which students at the institution enforce amongst themselves — all other decisions are deferred to the students. For their two years at the ranch, participants engage in the three pillars of education: an intense liberal arts experience, manual labor that helps run the ranch and generate income for the college, and self-governance of their day-to-day lives. Outer Coast, and many other progressive institutions, have similarly adopted this Nunnian, three-pillar educational framework.
Though some may consider Deep Springs’ approach to student development to be one from a bygone era, the college flourishes to this day. At a paltry 24 to 28 students per class, Deep Springs’ acceptance rate rivals those of Ivy Leagues. After their two years at the institution, most students transfer to some of the most prestigious universities in the world, with a quarter of their class matriculating to Harvard.
Deep Springs has also inspired a bevy of new educational experiments and microcolleges, establishing itself as one of, if not the first pioneer of the progressive microcollege experiment. However, Deep Springs by no means encompassingly defines this germinating movement, which boasts a diverse spectrum of ideas for education. Laura Marcus, co-founder of Tidelines Institute, another progressive institution that abuts Outer Coast geographically, believes that the progressive education movement is “complicated.” In fact, it even comprises “strands in competition with one another.” For instance, while one strain of progressive education focuses on “student-centered learning,” there is yet another that emphasizes “the importance of faculty expertise and research in guiding what is happening in the classroom.”
But there is one thing that unifies these proliferating endeavors within progressive education: they are all attempting to mend the fissures they’ve identified in traditional educational structures and propose alternate methods of education. Methods, they believe, will redefine the true purpose of education — to cultivate students who understand themselves and their passions, assume greater responsibilities to their communities, and understand the world and the intractable issues that face it.
The students who gravitate towards these experiments do so for a variety of reasons. One key motivation, Marcus believes, is the highly individualistic nature of mainstream education, and its “incredible focus on extrinsic markers of achievement” like “building the best resume, or having the best GPA, or having the most extracurriculars with the most leadership positions.”
All of this, she believes, is “in pretty significant conflict with the espoused mission of so many of these educational institutions,” missions that may even overlap with those of progressive education. The mission statements of Harvard and Outer Coast, for instance, both underscore the importance of helping their students understand themselves and how they wish to serve. However, it is through the methods in which they accomplish their stated missions that progressive and traditional education diverge considerably.
Demystifying Progressive Education
For all that the progressive college movement promises its students, these educational experiments are sometimes characterized as exceedingly eccentric and exorbitantly expensive learning experiences, which only further alienates it from the rest of the educational landscape. However, such characteristics are largely unfounded when we examine the genuine efforts made by progressive institutions to make their education more accessible.
Perhaps one of the most ill-received, seemingly madcap aspects of progressive education includes the responsibility placed on the students to shape and curate their educational experiences. After all, no one wants to trust a group of teenagers to look after themselves, much less the whole community. Still, Marcus believes that young people “rise to the occasion and are capable of taking on pretty significant burdens of responsibility and making extremely good decisions if they’re given the opportunity to do so.”
This opportunity is welcomed by the students themselves. Kira Fagerstrom, a rising sophomore at Harvard, has been heavily involved with Outer Coast in numerous capacities — as a student at one of their programs, an intern, and this summer as an assistant program coordinator. Fagerstrom described self-governance as “empowering,” especially the realization that she has “the power as a student to make decisions” and that she “isn’t just a dumb kid.”
Fagerstrom’s experiences mirror my own. I loved the feeling that our community could only flourish if we were all fulfilling our ends of the bargain. As outlandish as permitting students to lead their education may feel, it truly does promote a sense of responsibility to the community in ways that I have yet to experience in traditional educational settings.
Another perceived issue is the lack of extrinsic benefits and markers of success attached to progressive education, which only accentuates its disconnect from reality. Even though progressive institutions resist the growing association of education with degrees, it’s impossible to disregard the necessity of such credentials in joining the workforce. Marcus agreed, adding that “the students who realistically can take that year [for progressive education], pay a whole bunch of money and not have anything extrinsic at the end to show for it either in terms of credits or money, those are going to be predominantly extremely affluent students.”
He added, “If you want to run a program that empowers and invites students from marginalized communities, or low income students, to be part of that program, then you have to be thinking about how this program is going to be meaningful and justifiable over the broader arc of their education.”
For this reason, Tidelines Institute, Outer Coast, and other progressive institutions have ensured that cost is not an inhibiting factor for students, offering full need-based financial aid for the programs they offer. In addition to generous financing, they have established accreditation relationships with the University of Alaska Southeast, so that students may receive college credit for their academic coursework, which they can then transfer to their home institutions. “At the end of the day,” Marcus said, “those students do need to get a college degree, they do need to get a job, they do have to have something to show for this experience that will allow them to take that next step forward.”
Progressive educational institutions are also striving to become more universally inclusive through revolutionizing admissions for its small student cohorts. Because these institutions are being built from the ground up, they aren’t beholden to old models for admissions. Bryden Sweeney-Taylor, co-founder and Executive Director of Outer Coast and a graduate from both Deep Springs College and Harvard, believes that though a place like Harvard has “made great strides in thinking about how to diversify who its students are, and what the college looks like today,” it is still “retrofitting a model that was built for a very different population.”
Instead, from their very inception, progressive educational experiments can radically shape their admissions recruitment outreach models to render progressive education more universally accessible. For instance, part of Outer Coast’s mission statement places a special emphasis on the recruitment of Alaskans, particularly Rural Alaskan and Alaskan Native students who have historically been underrepresented in higher education.
This emphasis on rendering progressive education accessible for all students, but especially underserved communities, reinforces the movement’s commitment to improving—not only upon mainstream education, but also upon predecessors like Deep Springs College. Outer Coast and other Nunnian-inspired institutions do not hold Deep Springs sacrosanct. Indeed, for all of Nunn’s progressive, utopian thinking when it came to education, he was very much a fogey in some of his ideas—especially with regards to women.
One obvious departure from the Deep Springs model is that both Outer Coast and the Tidelines Institute have been co-ed from their very inception (unlike at Deep Springs, which only went co-ed very recently and, even then, with great pushback from members of the community). Another departure that Outer Coast has made from Deep Springs is in necessitating community service and deep engagement with the local Sitkan community. This external, outward component of Outer Coast is quite unlike the monastic lifestyle of the Deep Springers, and one that dramatically shifts and arguably even enhances the student experience.
Beyond college credits accreditation and radically inclusive admissions, Outer Coast also advocates for the “best of both worlds:” the ability to transfer to a larger research university post-Outer Coast and avail the huge breadth of resources it has to offer, as is the case with Deep Springs, which sends its students to a range of prestigious schools. Sweeney-Taylor believes that an Outer Coast education “prepare[s] students to go out into the world without any other education and to be able to have a meaningful impact and create virtuous change in the world
However, Sweeney-Taylor further specified that the mission is “also to prepare students to go to the Harvards of the world, and actually make the most of that experience at Harvard.” She continued, “What we’re trying to do at Outer Coast is to say, ‘how can you build an experience at Outer Coast of taking ownership, agency, of building a community, and then be able to manifest those things in Cambridge, in New Haven, in Palo Alto?’”
In and of itself, this completely discards the seminal notions that progressive education is completely insular or disconnected from traditional colleges. Instead, students are encouraged to venture into other educational settings, and reflect on how their progressive educational experience can inspire them to create virtuous change in both new and traditional contexts.
Progressive Education: Is it Really the “Anti-College?”
Even though progressive education approaches learning through an entirely different framework, it can also work hand-in-hand with traditional colleges, and even borrows what it discerns as the successful elements of traditional college education, such as small, seminar-style classes. Still, as the progressive education movement continues to crystallize, many questions remain: specifically, how much overlap will or will not develop between traditional and progressive education?
After all, progressive education is still just education, and therefore will have to respond to the perennial issues that traditional colleges have responded to. For instance, experimental institutions might have to proactively construct a “brand name” of sorts to attract applicants. The brand name appeal that exists in elite schools is predicated in the school’s ability to ostensibly produce students that will be materially successful in life — a notion that the progressive education movement finds distasteful. Even so, this does beg the question of what “concessions” progressive education will have to make — if any — to heighten its appeal and attract applicants.
On the topic of the future of progressive education, it’s significant that those spearheading the movement primarily comprise graduates from Ivy Leagues and other elite colleges. Outer Coast itself is staffed by more graduates from elite schools than not. Only time will tell, but how will this shape the direction of progressive microcolleges? And, specifically, whether a new progressive institution like Outer Coast will simply morph into a pipeline to traditional elite colleges, as is the case with Deep Springs?
It’s because of these questions, and many more, that I’m still unable to fully reconcile my experiences at Outer Coast with my incoming years at Harvard. Yet, for all my agonizing over uniting these two disparate educational experiences, I’ve come to realize that such reconciliation isn’t possible — and isn’t even necessary. Instead, what is more important is to appreciate the increased necessity for progressive education, and how it catalyzes a bracing reckoning of higher education and the learning experiences it offers.
Now that I’m back home in the Midwest, the arresting mountains and beaches of the Sitka milieu feel like a dream. But my feelings from Outer Coast remain vivid. Even as I flipped pancakes for Sunday brunches, or engaged in rigorous self-governance Student Body meetings, I was constantly overwhelmed by the sense of community, curiosity, and comradery that permeates every aspect of the program. I learned how to prioritize the needs of the community above my own and appreciate the importance of propulsive labor. In the process, my identity became inextricably tied with the community — a phenomenon that I hope to replicate in the Harvard context and beyond.
Image Credit: Reese Jacobs.
