Hammering a Higher Vision for Higher Education: The College of St. Joseph the Worker

Steubenville, Ohio — In this industrial, Rust Belt city in northeastern Ohio, just across the Ohio River from West Virginia and mere miles from the Pennsylvania border, something special is happening. No, it isn’t the idyllic Nutcracker Village displays that adorn downtown at Christmastime. Nor is it the latest tribute to the town’s most famous native son — the legendary Rat Pack crooner Dean Martin. It isn’t even the excellent Catholic college the city boasts, Franciscan University of Steubenville, home to renowned scholars of the faith such as Scott Hahn and Regis Martin. Though, as with Franciscan, it does relate to higher education.

In this town hit hard by the collapse of the once-thriving steel industry, a revival is taking place, a renaissance in higher education. It’s occurring at a newly established institution called the College of St. Joseph the Worker.

“The Word became Flesh, and Picked Up a Hammer”

The College of St. Joseph the Worker is utterly unique. Students learn carpentry and woodworking, plumbing, electrical work, and the booming field of HVAC — heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. At the same time, they also learn theology. They study Aquinas and Augustine along with air conditioning, plumbing along with Plato, and virtue along with wiring.

As the college puts it, these students learn “the truth, beauty, and goodness of the Catholic intellectual tradition” while also gaining a useful, marketable skill. The nation isn’t lacking for lawyers or baristas, but everyone struggles to find a good plumber. The country also isn’t lacking for philosophers and theologians. But gee, wouldn’t it be cool to have an electrician doubly trained in ethics?

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At the College of St. Joseph the Worker, students earn a Bachelor of Arts in Catholic Studies alongside training in a craft. That aspect of their education — the liberal arts curriculum — is, according to the school, intended “to prepare you for the lay vocation: sanctifying your family, your workplace, and your community.” 

It also prepares students to view work in a moral way, consistent with St. Joseph the Worker and with various Church theologians, philosophers, and even popes like Leo XIII and John Paul II, himself a former laborer who in 1981 issued the Church encyclical Laborem exercens, which inspires the college. The founders of the college want students to view work with dignity and to treat fellow laborers the same way. “In preparing our students for in-demand jobs,” states the school, “we teach them how to work competently, morally, and with dignity.”

The college’s president, Jacob Imam, puts it this way: “No other college in the world shares our model. We offer intellectually advanced and academically promising students an elite education in the humanities and a career path in dignified and meaningful work. America needs to cultivate a virtuous citizen class again.” Imam told The American Spectator: “We need people whose minds are full of wisdom, souls full of virtue, and hands full of skill so they can both physically and spiritually build up their communities.”

Even then, they’re not just building houses and communities. They’re building character. It’s hard to conceive of a place this blue collar and yet just as intellectual.

Of course, this is not the typical trade school. Trade schools don’t have professors and staff with degrees from Oxford University, the University of Notre Dame, St. Louis University, and the Pontifical John Paul II Institute. Nor do they have advisory boards with names like Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, Dr. Scott Hahn, Fr. Donald Calloway, Fr. Jason Charron, Mike Aquilina, and Matt Fradd.

If it seems impossibly odd that a school would combine Catholicism with carpentry, well, you might consider that not only was St. Joseph himself a worker, and specifically a carpenter, but so was his earthly son. Jesus Christ was a carpenter. To that end, the College of St. Joseph the Worker has a very clever slogan: “The Word became flesh, and picked up a hammer.”

Indeed, He did.

Low Tuition and Low to No Debt

Another promotional slogan for the website — less spiritual and more practical — is this: “Earn a degree, learn a trade, and graduate without crippling debt.” Consider the first part of that objective.

The actual program at the College of St. Joseph the Worker is a four-year structure in which students graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree as well as “journeyman status” in their chosen craft. During those four years, they receive broad training across all four trades offered, as well as in-depth training in their specific trade. All four years of training and study are on-site and hands-on in Steubenville. Impressive about that is that the college is simultaneously renovating architecturally attractive old buildings in the downtown area that have been largely abandoned since the decline of the steel industry fifty years ago. Thus, the college is leading a renaissance not only in education but in the city’s historic, once-proud downtown area.

What’s likewise impressive is that students are gainfully employed during their final three years, as they are connected to jobs in their fields. They start work as laborers and apprentices on actual job sites (in a region long economically depressed) as they choose a trade and begin “in-depth training.” All the while, they also continue their classroom instruction.

In short, students get paid to work as part of the curriculum. This allows them to make money while they’re in school with the goal of leaving debt-free. 

The college has hard numbers on this. Tuition is only $15,000 per year, with a pledge of “rent-free housing available for most students.” How is the latter accomplished? Thanks to generous benefactors, the College of St. Joseph the Worker has purchased houses and small apartments in buildings adjacent to campus. These buildings are within walking distance of the campus (as is St. Peter Catholic Church, the heart of the vibrant Catholic community in Steubenville). Students are expected to pay for utilities, renters’ insurance, and a monthly maintenance fee (as part of training students for real-world living). 

Naturally, students pay for books, food, and other expenses. There is an additional cost of $960 per year that covers maintenance in the rent-free lodging plus a student life fee that gives all students access to nearby Franciscan University’s library, fieldhouse, wellness center, and more.

Thus, in all, $15,960 per year.

The numbers provided by the college also include a “projected earnings” estimate for years two, three, and four. Those figures are the salaries each student will earn from paid work during those years. The pay is estimated at $16,720 for year two, $21,000 for year three, and $22,480 for year four. (Year one is strictly schooling and training, with no paid-work provision.) Those earnings are not guaranteed, but are rather an estimate based on averages. Some students will earn more and others less.

In all, the four-year cost of tuition ($60,000) is calculated to be (hopefully) fully offset by the three years of paid-work earnings, ultimately with the goal of making the overall cost debt-free. Again, there’s no guarantee of this, but given the very low tuition cost, plus what young men are being paid in these professions, it’s not unreasonable to assume that a hardworking young man should have little problem offsetting what he paid for college. A primary aim of the college, recall, is to “avoid crippling debt.”

That alone makes the college a beacon in higher education. At other colleges, the goal seems to be the reverse: to saddle the young person with crippling debt.

Certifications and Applications

The College of St. Joseph the Worker also reports numbers showing how much of a hunger there is for a school like this. It officially received its certificate of authorization from the Ohio Department of Higher Education in early December 2023 and immediately began accepting applications for its first class. 

The college is in the process of full accreditation, which cannot be granted until a college has existed for an extended period of time. Accreditation is a multi-year process, as is recognition by other approving bodies. For instance, the Cardinal Newman Society has granted provisional recognition to the college. But in order to receive full Newman recognition, a college must be in operation for four or more years and must have graduated an inaugural class. In addition to receiving the state of Ohio’s authorization to operate, the college is currently working with ApprenticeOhio to certify its trade programs.

The college officially opened its doors in the fall semester of 2024. Total enrollment for the first year was thirty students. Total enrollment now, with two classes, is sixty-three students. Applications poured in immediately, with 130 applicants the first year and 122 the second year. The only bad news: It’s so competitive (a good thing) that a lot of solid young boys (and some girls) will not be able to get in and have no other college like this to apply to anywhere.

Is there a current optimal enrollment number that the college is shooting for?

“It’s difficult to say what optimal is at this point,” says Michael Gugala, vice president of enrollment. “We’re giving ourselves time in this new school year before deciding how many students we’ll take for fall 2026. However, long-term we’ve discussed maturity being around seventy-five to eighty new students per year.” Gugala told The American Spectator that they think applications could rise to as high as 300 applicants per year as more people hear about the program. A concern at the moment is physical space to accommodate students and machines alike, which, concedes Gugala, “is certainly a constraint.” 

The college also wants to ensure that it maintains a steady supply of paid on-the-job training hours for students. “With all of our sophomores, juniors, and seniors needing to get paid on the job,” notes Gugala, “that’s a lot of construction, remodeling, and service work to identify. Our maturity numbers take that into account.”

Big Picture in Higher Education

What’s happening at the College of St. Joseph the Worker speaks of something special for America as a whole, especially American higher education.

“We saw a bleak landscape in higher education filled with universities that stole wallets and perverted minds,” says Imam, the college’s president. “The Church built the original universities to contemplate divine knowledge and to reflect on how to redeem all things — from politics and economics to literature and philosophy — in the Gospel. With such an august past and purpose, we cannot easily give up on the institution.”

American higher education is in crisis, a self-inflicted crisis. Colleges in America have been thoroughly ideologized and undermined by radical secularism, feminism, gender ideology, and an alphabet-soup brew of CRT, DEI, and LGBTQ. Wokeness is the prevailing zeitgeist. Worse, your child is thoroughly indoctrinated at an obscene, debt-crushing price that wipes out the family’s savings as well as the kid’s soul. You pay for the destruction. The list of safe places to send your kid to college is so minuscule that when The American Spectator created a recommended list of colleges two years ago, we could do no better than twenty-four of them out of the nation’s roughly 4,000 institutions of “higher” education. 

Yep, two dozen out of several thousand. Sad. 

Moreover, it’s an especially dismal situation for young men. They’ve fled these colleges that have emasculated them. They have increasingly checked out. As for women, they never needed the Equal Rights Amendment after all. They simply needed liberalism to inject its poison into the university system to chase away male counterparts. The result has been a situation in which women are far surpassing the number of men in colleges.

Perhaps that’s just as well. Boys have long preferred the trades anyway, though many also still prefer something of a liberal arts education, and particularly something faith-based. But where do you find that sort of institution? The answer: hardly anywhere. And that’s especially so for a boy who is traditionally Catholic.

“While not everyone should be going to college today, some ought,” says Imam. “We built the College of St Joseph the Worker for those some. We want to raise up our students with real skills, real wisdom, real virtue, real friends, and real faith — all without any debt.”

Well, for those young folks, St. Joseph the Worker is offering a helping hand. It’s hammering out a higher vision for higher education and a safe space of learning and excellence for the next generation of young people desperately seeking something better.

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