College of the Ozarks thrives in its centennial

Student loans are allowed but strongly discouraged. Instead, students work 15 hours a week and two 40-hour workweeks each semester to pay for tuition. If they work for 12 weeks during summer, their $4,130 dormitory fees are square as well.

Even with its renowned work program – there are 80 workstations on campus ranging from weaving baskets to public relations – grants and donations account for most of the $15,000 it costs to educate a student for a year.

“It takes a lot of money to run Hard Work U.,” said President Jerry C. Davis, referring to the name given to the school in a 1973 Wall Street Journal cover story. “The philosophical part of work is more important than how much money (the students are) earning.”

Dana Baysinger, a freshman elementary education major from Jamestown, works in a campus kitchen. She said she values the work side of school life.

“It really does teach you responsibility for the workplace after you get out of college,” she said.

Of course, the 1,333 students do earn some money for the school. Davis pegged student-generated income at about $3 million a year, with the money coming from a variety of student endeavors including the sale of about 40,000 famed fruitcakes ($18 to $28 apiece), tickets to the eclectic three-story Ralph Foster Museum ($4.50 for an adult) and meals served at the posh The Keeter Center restaurant ($11.95 for Ozarks Pot Roast, for example).

All that still only covers about 10 percent of the school’s $28 million annual operating budget. An endowment of nearly $300 million and annual donations of between $10 million and $20 million account for most of the rest.

From hill folk to American dream

Nearly 100 years after Presbyterian preacher James Forsythe started School of the Ozarks, a work-program high school to teach Missouri hill folk, College of the Ozarks has evolved into a quiet juggernaut of Branson-area higher education.

It became a junior college in 1956 and a four-year college in 1965. It held the name School of the Ozarks until 1990.

“This college … represents the American dream,” Davis said. “That is opportunity met with faith and hard work. That’s who we are.”

Of the students, 90 percent must show financial need, and 65 percent come from the Ozarks. Grades are important but not atop the list of entry requirements.

Davis said only one in 10 applicants are accepted at the school, which offers 34 academic majors and minors.

“In some ways, it is like a military academy,” Davis said. “It’s well-defined, and you better want that or don’t go.”

Davis tells parents, “If you think for one minute that your son or daughter can come in here and dye their hair green (and) stick an earring in their nose and tell us how to run the place, you’ve made a big mistake. You need to take them home today.

“We’re not a tuition-dependent school,” he added. “We can set the standard where we think it should be and hold on to it.”

There are six work colleges in the United States: College of the Ozarks, Alice Lloyd College and Berea College in Kentucky, Blackburn College in Illinois, Sterling College in Vermont and Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.

3,000 acres

College of the Ozarks also is a very sizable landowner in southwest Missouri. In addition to its 1,000-acre campus in Point Lookout with its own post office, it owns about 2,000 more acres, mostly in Taney County.

The school’s land holdings include about 800 acres along Table Rock Lake and Lake Taneycomo, the land that Silver Dollar City sits on (which Herschend Family Entertainment only pays $2,500 for a year under the terms of a 99-year lease signed about 50 years ago), a farm in Iowa and two large tracts in southern California that bring in about $1 million annually in rent income from storage units and condos.

“Somebody told me when I came here (in 1988) that you could stand on any hill in Taney County and look in any direction, and you’d be looking at the school’s property,” joked Davis.

“Well, I think that’s probably a little exaggerated, but I thought that was cute.”

Some land houses the school’s 60-cattle dairy operation. Other tracts remain completely undeveloped and unavailable.

“It’s sitting there. It’s going up in value, and I think it’s a long-term great asset,” he said. “Why would we want to turn that into another golf course? I’m not against development, but I’m not in favor of turning every inch of Taney County into some strip mall either.”

Self-reliance

The school is incredibly self-reliant. In addition to its dairy operation, it also has a hog operation about five miles east of campus and generates much of its electricity by pulling water out of Lake Taneycomo. It even established the first fire station in Taney County and owned Graham Clark Airport until it gave it to the county in July because of high insurance costs.

The school’s efficiency and unique business model have led to high growth in the last five years.

Davis said the school spent about $30 million on restoration and new construction during that period, $20 million alone on the 97,000-square-foot Keeter Center, which opened in September 2004 and took more than five years to build.

The Keeter Center is illustrative of the school’s efficiency.

Because 70 percent of the construction on the center was done by students and only some electrical and HVAC work was contracted, Davis said the dining, lodging and convention facility was built for $10 million less.

The school is currently spending about $4 million to build McKibben Hall for classrooms and $1.5 million to renovate McDonald Clinic.

The renovations to McDonald Clinic will allow the school to start a nursing program, which Davis said is the most significant course addition since agriculture in the 1960s.

Future construction plans involve a new $1 million animal science building at the hog farm and the renovation of the student dining center.

Davis is adamant that the school won’t grow its enrollment past 1,500, even with its structural growth.

Instead of adding graduate programs and football, Davis said he wants to fortify the existing work and academic programs.

Those programs have earned the college a spot on the U.S. News & World Report’s best colleges list yearly since 1989.

“I think the college has been accepted nationwide for the caliber of educational institution that it is,” Davis said.

College of the Ozarks

Founded: November 1906

Founder: Presbyterian preacher James Forsythe

Address: No. 1 Opportunity Ave., Point Lookout, MO 65726

Phone: (417) 334-6411

Fax: (417) 335-2618

Web site: www.cofo.edu

Services/Products: Higher education and real-world work experience

2005 operating budget: $28 million

Employees: 270 (80 faculty, 190 staff)[[In-content Ad]]