Berea College

When I lived in Lexington, Kentucky I sometimes stopped in Berea during weekend trips to hike in the Daniel Boone National Forest.   The college there had a variety of arts and crafts festivities that were worth visiting.  Today, Berea College got a nice writeup on BBC News:

Since its inception, Berea was meant for students who could not afford college - costs were nominal, and students worked on campus to help support themselves.

And, in 1892, it stopped charging tuition entirely.

"What's unusual about Berea is that for, I'll bet 70% to 80% of our students, this is their only shot at a high-quality educational experience," says Berea President Lyle Roelofs.

More than half of Berea's incoming 2018 class had an expected family contribution of $0. The mean family income of a first-year student is less than $30,000 (£23,000). Around 70% of students are from Appalachia, where around one in five people live below the poverty line...

First, there is Berea's endowment which, as of this year, has ballooned to $1.2bn (£930m), a product of nearly 165 years of growth... The endowment is effectively safeguarded by the school's commitment to free tuition. A renovation or campus upgrade will only be approved once every student's tuition is assured.,,

The second unique feature at Berea is the labour programme, which requires each student to work on campus for at least 10 hours every week, similar to a federal work-study programme at other US universities...

And there's an obvious payoff - in 2019, 49% of Berea students graduated with zero debt, even after food, housing and other living expenses. For those that did, they held an average of $6,693 - around one quarter of the national average.

Berea is small, about 1,600 undergraduate students and - for obvious reasons - it doesn't boast many shiny amenities that could be used to sell itself at college fairs. "We don't add those kinds of appealing features that are just there to attract wealthy students to come," Roelofs says. "You know, a lazy river or a climbing wall contributes almost nothing to the educational experience"...

The campus is archetypically collegiate. Student life is narrated by church bells, the grounds punctuated by tree-lined quads. It is ensconced within 9,000 acres of the college's own green space, which drifts into hundreds of miles of forest in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky...

Many of the students mention Berea's academic rigour, a surprise for some who assumed that "tuition-free" is code for cheapened education.  

More at the link, and at Wikipedia:

Founded in 1855 by the abolitionist John Gregg Fee (1816–1901), Berea College admitted both black and white students in a fully integrated curriculum, making it the first non-segregated, coeducational college in the South and one of a handful of institutions of higher learning to admit both male and female students in the mid-19th century.