Higher education is in crisis–Night School Bar offers a way forward.

Since 2020, Night School Bar has been committed to making arts and humanities education accessible to curious adults across the US and around the world. We are asking you to help fund our scholarship program in 2024.

Over the last four years, we’ve witnessed unprecedented inflation, the failure of student debt relief, and the decimation of humanities departments nationwide. We’ve also cheered on students as they’ve clamored for a new university: one that supports student workers, divests from unethical business practices, and invests in diversity and justice. Throughout all this, our commitment to meaningful, debt-free education has been unwavering. As a community, we need Night School Bar more than ever. And Night School Bar needs you. 

Each year, we offer more than 80 classes, teach-ins, workshops, and seminars, both online and in-person. In the last twelve months, we also opened a physical space in Durham, NC: a bar with a classroom, where we study together, make new friends with shared interests, and deepen our community connections. We’ve expanded our offerings to include film screening series, songwriting and visual art, as well as new classes in creative writing, literature, anthropology, political economy, environmental and medical humanities, feminist and anti-racist philosophy, and interdisciplinary studies. All of these classes have been offered on a sliding-scale basis. Our scholarship fund plays a critical role in accessibility, supplementing tuition for over 75% of students at Night School Bar, and enabling us to offer living-wage employment to our instructors.

Night School Bar’s scholarship model is unique, supporting an incredibly diverse student body. We recognize that scholarship programs that require individuals to document and meet specific metrics of need often miss a fuller picture of their economic reality, and thus act as barriers to entry. At Night School, every student self-determines their own financial need; no gate-keeping, no questions asked. This creates adult classrooms that are diverse across age, race, gender, ethnicity, and class. Importantly, our classes are designed with a wide array of lived experiences in mind–and they are aimed at helping us make critical sense of our world, creating meaningful connections, and inspiring creativity. We are not a certificate- or degree-granting program, by choice. Instead, we believe that learning is a lifelong endeavor. This means that everyone who studies with Night School Bar is here because they want to generate new pathways to enrichment and fulfillment, find friends and expand their social worlds, and commit to a better collective future. 

Night School Bar does all this without an endowment. We receive about half of the funds we need for our educational program through direct student tuition. Last year, we also raised an additional 12.5% through crowdfunding. This combined funding covers only a portion of our programming. Although we offer all instructors a living wage, many choose to donate courses and time so that we can offer more classes to meet student interests and needs. In the face of rampant inflation, where costs far out-pace wages for both students and instructors, we desperately need to stabilize our funding structure. This is why we’re seeking Back-to-School scholarship funds!

In addition to this month-long fundraiser, we are also looking for long-term donor-partners. Please email us at nightschoolbar@gmail.com to discuss!