ST. CHARLES, Mo. - The gorgeous new dining hall at Lindenwood University serves pizzas hot from a wood-fired oven, turkey breast carved to order by a chef, and freshly baked cookies and pies.
But it's the pork chops that keep junior Benton Haines in school. It's not that he particularly likes them, but they are paying his tuition.
In a program that holds out thought for food, Lindenwood University now takes payment in pigs.
As the stumbling economy drags down the small farm towns surrounding the college - towns that for decades proudly sent their top students to Lindenwood - university President Dennis Spellmann has reached out with an offer to barter. He will trade a liberal arts education at his small private college - worth $11,200 a year - for any commodity the dining hall can use.
Six families so far have swapped their swine for scholarships, trading hogs that are worth little on the open market for classes in business or education on Lindenwood's tree-lined campus just northwest of St. Louis. They have filled the cafeteria's freezers with fresh-off-the-farm sausage and bacon - even whole pigs, which are smoked on an outdoor barbecue spit before home football games.
"I often wondered if that was dad's pig up there," says Sally Miller, 24, a kindergarten teacher whose family paid in hogs for her last two years at Lindenwood.
Now Spellmann is on a mission to expand the 3-year-old program. Hoping to attract 50 barter students a year to Lindenwood, he is promoting the deal to superintendents of rural school systems and to agricultural trade groups. He is even advertising in Farm Journal. ("Pork: The Other Tuition Payment.")
The offer is well-timed, and not just because farmers are struggling. In the past two decades, college tuition has soared. Even adjusting for inflation, the average tuition more than doubled at public and private universities from 1981 to last year, according to the College Board. Median family income rose just 25 percent.
Scholarships cannot fill the gap. Take the Pell Grant, a federal program for needy students. The average award covered 98 percent of tuition in 1986 but less than 60 percent in 1999, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, based in San Jose, Calif.
The typical graduate leaves college carrying $18,000 in debt.
To help parents shaken by such numbers, college administrators have begun to get creative.
"You're seeing a pattern of ingenuity," says David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.
Defiance College in Defiance, Ohio, will cut tuition for top students who pledge to spend several hours a week doing volunteer work. Students who cheer on the college's sports teams get a hefty discount at William Woods University in Fulton, Mo. And Clark University in Worcester, Mass., offers a free fifth year of education to pursue a master's degree to all who maintain a B+ average or higher as undergraduates.
Dozens of colleges will freeze tuition when a freshman enrolls, shielding families from annual increases. A few accept payments in monthly installments or let parents finance four years of tuition over a decade. A handful offer employment guarantees; College Misericordia in Dallas, Pa., will put graduates in paid internships if they have not found good jobs within six months.
Then there's barter - an age-old practice that, to Spellmann, seems ripe for revival.
Lindenwood appears to be the only school engaging in direct swaps with parents. But a dozen other small private colleges have signed on with trading networks, also known as barter banks.
Members of such networks provide free labor and merchandise to one another. A central administrator keeps track of how much each member "deposits" in the barter bank (in the form of work he does for others) and how much he "withdraws" (in the form of services).
As a member of the Green Apple Barter Service, La Roche College in Pittsburgh can trade scholarships for catered meals, construction work, advertising, or any number of other services. It doesn't have to be direct barter, either. A parent who owns a ski shop could acquire a scholarship, "paying" for it by giving long underwear to a dentist, who might in turn fill cavities for a carpenter, who might then build bleachers without charge for the college.
Frame-store owner Al Houston paid for his son's degree in chemistry that way, bartering $75,000 worth of his services to other members of the network.
"It was a godsend," he says.
In the farm town of Silex, about a half-hour's drive northwest of Lindenwood, Elaine Bruns echoes those words.
When hog prices plummeted in 1998, she and her husband, Kurt, found themselves losing money on every animal they sold. They didn't know how they could afford to keep their daughter, Sally Miller, studying for her degree in education.
That's when Spellmann - who was raised on a farm - stepped in with the barter offer.
He figured out how much the meat from one pig would cost the college on the wholesale market. He then discounted Sally's tuition that much for every hog the Brunses delivered to a local slaughterhouse. The pigs were processed there, and the packaged meat was sent to the school's cafeteria.
Elaine Bruns figures that her daughter's junior and senior years cost the family about 50 hogs. Those animals would have brought in less than $4,500 at auction. To have them cover $22,000 in college tuition is almost more than she can believe.
"It was such a relief," she says.
"The program makes good sense for everyone," says Rex Haines, who paid a third of his son Benton's tuition with pork chops and pork steaks this year.
A formal protest by animal-rights activists has not gained much traction on campus. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wrote Spellmann this fall, asking him to stop accepting "tortured pig carcasses" as tuition. He brushed off the plea.
The rest of his mail has been overwhelmingly positive. Strangers have called him "heroic." He has been bombarded with queries from would-be applicants: How many 4-H steers would pay for a year at Lindenwood? Could the dining hall use fresh lamb chops?
Spellmann talks about barter as a way to help struggling families. But he is also bluntly honest about how the system can help colleges like his own.
The number of students boarding at Lindenwood has tripled in the past decade, to 2,400. More than 9,000 others commute to the campus. The school has gained a name in Missouri for its teacher-training programs.
Yet when the economy slumps, undergraduates go to Spellmann's office, telling him that they're going to have to quit school. Because the college's fixed costs are so high - professors' salaries, building maintenance and so on - each loss of a student hurts.
"We treat every empty seat in a class, every empty bed in a dorm as an expense," Spellmann says. "It's almost like the economics of an airline. It costs the same amount to fly the plane whether it's full or empty."
If he can fly Lindenwood full, he wants to do it. If he can get fresh pork in the process, so much the better.
Stephanie Simon is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.