The Saxifrage School, in its current stage, is a grassroots development project working to redesign American Higher Education by creating an innovative new college. The project is an ambitious attempt at social entrepreneurship which hopes to redefine the reasons why we attend college, what we pay for it, and how we benefit from it. The description of The Saxifrage School will be in three sections: Economics, Academics, and Campus Community.

The college will ask students for $7000/year to cover the entire cost of their professors, course supplies, and administration; $5000 for tuition, $1000 for supplies, and $1000 for administrative costs. Many students will be offered jobs with the School which will help pay for their education as well as offer them significant work experience. Many of these jobs are positions of substantial responsibility, offering students the chance to engage in all levels of the School’s operation: finance, admissions, marketing, development, and others.

The cost of room and board will be up to the students as they will be responsible for their own arrangements, with the help of school staff. The estimated cost of a room (in a house shared with other students) will range from $100-$200 per month in our area; the cost for food is roughly the same.

While the primary purpose of The Saxifrage School is to serve its students, we are also very much concerned with addressing the overall societal cost of college in the United States. Although costs have skyrocketed in recent years, college has remained accessible for many people due to the ever-increasing amounts of state, federal, and charitable contributions. Once up and running, The Saxifrage School will be capable of operating without any governmental grants and with minimal support from private donors. As such, The Saxifrage School will not accept federal aid in part to prevent the additional administrative costs that come from federal oversight, as well as to model a program that can exist without taxpayer support. We will, of course, still permit all other outside grants and scholarships students are awarded. Even without federal support, most students (and their families) can afford to attend The Saxifrage School without incurring any debt.

Essentially, we believe that a college should operate with a viable business model, spending money on services only to the point at which customers are able and willing to pay for those services. However, a college should not be run as as business with an eye toward profiting from its customers, from its students. This is the essential dilemma of current for-profit institutions: a for-profit college (especially one that is publicly traded) has an economic incentive to spend as little money on their students as possible. In the for-profit model students are losing value for every dollar they spend that is given to the companies executives or shareholders. Similarly, many non-profit colleges are increasingly spending tuition money on non-instructional purposes. In the The Saxifrage School model, all tuition money is spent directly on the student’s instruction.