STEUBENVILLE — The College of St. Joseph the Worker, a new Catholic institution in Steubenville, Ohio, welcomed its first cohort of 62 students in the fall of 2024. The school combines a liberal arts degree in Catholic studies with a trade certificate, and 60 of the enrolled students are men.

Students take classes on the New Testament, advanced geometry, and rhetoric, while specializing in one of four trades: carpentry, HVAC, electrical work, or plumbing. The college requires students to work as apprentices fixing up buildings and to use their wages to pay tuition and living expenses, with the goal that graduates leave debt-free. The campus is located in downtown Steubenville around Fourth Street, and the school is named for Joseph, Mary's husband and the patron saint of laborers.

"We're totally trying to call the bluff on the great divorce between the head and the hands," said Jacob Imam, founder of the college. "We've told people that the blue-collar trades are no longer dignified, forgetting that Christ himself—God himself!—spent most of the years of his life at a workbench."

Imam said of how the college reaches prospective students: "We find them on the internet. We bring them here. And we say, 'How about a life in reality instead?'" The college aims to instill in students a sense of purpose, restore their feeling of competence, and teach them virtue, and also aims to help revitalize the city.

Among the first cohort is Brendan LaFave, a student who said he was drawn to the school's model. After getting an iPhone in middle school, LaFave spent several years heavily using Snapchat and Instagram. "It just did a number on me," he said. "It caused a subtle depression." When COVID arrived during his freshman year of high school, his classes moved online. "It was just horrid," he said. "I'd be on my computer for eight hours a day." LaFave said he was also motivated by finances: "I was very averse to the idea of college debt." He added, "I had these ideas floating around about the spiritual life and pursuing the life of the intellect, and then working with my hands."

Steubenville, a small city in eastern Ohio near the West Virginia border, was once a booming steel town. Between 1940 and 2020, its population dropped by half as mills closed, and many houses and businesses fell into disrepair. Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, compared Steubenville to a bombed-out German city after World War II.

Franciscan University, a small school on a hill above downtown, became a center for charismatic Catholicism in the 1970s. The area has a large homeschooling population, and churches in and around Steubenville hold Masses in various forms, including the ordinary form and the Byzantine Rite. About fifteen miles from downtown, a Catholic organization operates a property called Catholic Familyland, which combines a summer camp and a retreat center.