Arguably, the most memorable parts of college have nothing to do with education. Participating in clubs, rooting for your team at athletic events, and making friends over food at the dining hall are likely among the fondest memories for alumni of any four-year institution—certainly outranking the hours spent sitting in lecture halls, at the very least.
But those anecdotes don’t hold up against one simple truth: higher education in America is in crisis. Ballooning tuition costs leave students in staggering debt after graduating, with the average federal student loan debt reaching $40,467 per borrower as of 2026. That’s turned prospective students off from higher education, with 152 colleges and universities in the United States having closed or merged in the past decade.
Enter the Greenway Institute, a new kind of college that aims to strip away the extraneous aspects of higher education. That means no extracurricular activities, on-campus eateries, or amenities like gyms. Paring down the college experience means paring down the cost for students—and according to Greenway’s team, the trade-off is more than worth it.
How Greenway operates
Greenway is currently planning to open its first campus in Montpelier, Vermont, in fall of 2027. The school will focus on only one subject—engineering—and prioritize giving students hands-on experience, rather than teaching them through conventional classes and lectures.
Rebecca Holcombe, one of Greenway’s co-founders and a former Secretary of Education for Vermont, tells Fast Company over email why she and her team believe higher education needs a makeover.
“College is working well for some people. Good for them,” she wrote. “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.”
After two years of on-campus living and learning, Greenway students will spend two years in real-world workplaces while continuing to receive support from faculty. For all four years of study, they’ll be responsible for providing their own meals and finding their own off-campus activities.
Greenway’s stripped-down model means it would likely only charge students around $25,000 per year, a significant drop from the average annual cost of college in the U.S., which is $38,270. Greenway’s model also builds in a way for students to make back the money they’re spending on tuition: In their third and fourth years, students’ full-time jobs would earn them an estimated $50,000 annually, meaning they’d graduate from Greenway with little to no student debt.
“We all know people who worked full time while trying to go to college full time. That is brutal,” Holcombe wrote. “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. Our goal is that they can just work hard, learn a lot, and still be healthy and have human relationships.”
Greenway’s experiment in action
To test if its model would be effective for actual students, Greenway recruited four sophomores from other schools to participate in a prototype semester in the spring of 2025. During their time at Greenway, the students completed projects like constructing wind turbines and traffic lights.
The participating students recently recalled their time at Greenway to NPR. One said that Greenway “goes right to the point” by skipping out on nonacademic amenities, while another said that the absence of features like gyms or sporting events “really didn’t matter to us.”
Annick Dewald, a founding faculty member at Greenway, tells Fast Company over email that the absence of on-campus dining and extracurriculars actually helped the pilot students bond, as they prepped their meals together, made weekly trips to the grocery store, 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 writes. “They also recognized that they developed skills that will be important to them in the future, like time management, budgeting, and meal planning.”
Holcombe adds that the students found plenty of ways to engage with the local community in Montpelier, from skiing to attending free performances at the state capital, and even volunteering to assist with flood relief.
“They were proud to show up in their Greenway shirts and proud to be seen as a positive part of the bigger community. They showed us the biggest limit is their imagination,” she writes. “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!”
