Greenway Institute plans no-frills engineering college for $25,000 a year
A startup college in Vermont is stripping away clubs, sports, and dining halls to cut costs. Greenway Institute would charge about $25,000 annually and pair two years of campus learning with two years of paid work.
A new college is betting that the future of higher education lies in subtraction. The Greenway Institute, planning to open in Montpelier, Vermont, in fall 2027, will eliminate clubs, sports teams, dining halls, and gyms in an effort to make college affordable again. The school will focus exclusively on engineering and replace traditional lectures with hands-on projects and paid work experience.
The model responds to a crisis in American higher education. Average federal student loan debt has reached $40,467 per borrower as of 2026, and 152 colleges and universities have closed or merged over the past decade. Greenway aims to charge around $25,000 per year, well below the national average of $38,270, while ensuring students graduate with little to no debt.
Rebecca Holcombe, a co-founder and former Secretary of Education for Vermont, said the school is designed for students whom conventional college is failing. “College is working well for some people. Good for them,” she said. “It really is not working for some others. We are creating a new kind of college organized around what matters most to the young people we hear from: support and mentoring from people with deep experience, a tight community, opportunities to take risks and try again, work-integrated learning, a lean design that means we can be high touch without huge cost.”
Students will spend their first two years living and learning on campus, then move into full-time jobs in real-world workplaces for the final two years while continuing to receive faculty support. Those jobs are expected to pay roughly $50,000 annually, allowing students to offset tuition costs and avoid the punishing schedules many working students face.
“We all know people who worked full time while trying to go to college full time. That is brutal,” Holcombe said. “We are working as hard as we can to strip the program down to the elements that matter most, so that students get good value for every dollar they spend. The fact that they can be paid while they learn for two of the years means they won’t lose ground or have to work round the clock just to stay afloat while they are in school.”
Greenway tested its approach in spring 2025 with four sophomores recruited from other schools. During the prototype semester, students built wind turbines and traffic lights. Participants later told NPR that skipping nonacademic amenities was a nonissue. One said Greenway “goes right to the point,” while another said the absence of gyms and sporting events “really didn’t matter to us.”
Annick Dewald, a founding faculty member, said the stripped-down environment actually strengthened bonds among the pilot students. They cooked meals together, made weekly grocery runs, and organized their own activities. “The students (and we faculty) felt immense pride in their ability to work collaboratively to take care of themselves and each other,” Dewald said. “They also recognized that they developed skills that will be important to them in the future, like time management, budgeting, and meal planning.”
Beyond campus, the students found community in Montpelier through skiing, free performances at the state capital, and volunteering for flood relief. Holcombe said the experience proved that community does not depend on campus amenities. “They were proud to show up in their Greenway shirts and proud to be seen as a positive part of the bigger community,” she said. “Fortunately there are many ways of building community beyond sitting around a cafeteria table, otherwise we would all be out of luck as soon as we leave college.”
