Students learn experientially from and with this place. Located at the globally revered Mount Shasta and headwaters, we learn how to listen to Earth and to live in a good way. These waters also flow out through the San Francisco Bay, where they enable the creation of technologies that many say will change everything about our lives. Thus, we are preparing ourselves to meet this moment, where human creativity is called to be recontextualized within the web of life.

The sequence of core courses in Year One focuses on foundational themes, from unlearning individualism and materialism, to sacred water and Indigenous science, to fire and emerging technologies, to creativity and intuition, and money and gift economies. While the Jubilee faculty, advisors and administrators, come from a broad diversity of ethnic and spiritual backgrounds, we share an approach to “how we know what we think we know” that aligns most with Indigenous, African Indigenous, and/or traditional Eastern epistemologies, all of which are based on a world view of interconnectedness. We also draw on the heart-wisdom teachings of the world’s religious traditions.

Year Two shifts toward electives, self-directed study, and increasing student agency. At its center is the Heart Project, each student's ambitious, multidisciplinary Capstone that begins with deep listening and formal applied research into a field or social issue of personal significance. Students pursue what they are most deeply passionate about, often creating new academic or entrepreneurial initiatives with support from seasoned mentors. Many will continue to develop these initiatives after graduation. This work culminates in a rigorous thesis-level presentation to students and faculty in May. It is the fullest expression of what two years at Jubilee makes possible and the natural threshold between what students have learned and what they are ready to do.

Work is placed on an equal footing with study at Jubilee, to give students a way to put their insights into practice, and to drop from the world of ideas into the practicalities of learning by doing. Students spend several hours each day in physical work that grounds them in relationship to each other and our place, and reminds us of the wisdom of the body.

Tasks rotate so that each person touches every part of what it takes to maintain our community, and sees that whatever they are doing, others are depending upon them. In this way, work is a practice in being less self-referential and in seeing that we are all in this together. We do repetitive work with intentionality to observe our minds and where we get “caught,” and through Council we learn how to get ourselves unstuck. Over time we come to see that everything we do changes the world… that how we treat our spaces and each other, changes us.

Then there are the practices of inner development, which are placed on an equal footing with study and work. This has many pathways for Jubilee students, from daily periods of silence; the care-taking of a particular place on the land; movement, studio arts and music; pilgrimage to the water and the mountain; the practices of service, gift and reciprocity; journaling on abiding questions; encouragement to trust in one's inner experience, with gratitude; and regular "council" circles to explore deep listening, witnessing, and being witnessed.

A powerful element of the Jubilee experience is the collective field generated by the student peer group: all that is expressed in the tight-knit cohort over the two-year period that allows each student to see and to bring into being their innate gifts, and to participate in the emergent wisdom of the collective.

The student cohort explores several core questions on behalf of all human beings: - How can I be at peace within myself? - How can we love each other more? - How can we be in a truly co-creative relationship with the Earth?

Together these all support students' capacities to meet our changing world with greater kindness, peace, and creativity.

What students carry across the graduation threshold is something we have thought carefully about. We have made a deliberate decision not to pursue accreditation, and the College does not confer a degree. Accreditation, in our view, implies a promise we don't want to make: that students will be better positioned to compete for scarce opportunities within a system that is already showing its limits. Jubilee's purpose is not to help students navigate that system more skillfully but to nourish their capacity to imagine and create what comes next. What students leave with at graduation is a rigorous, individualized record of learning outcomes, and a portfolio of real-life experience and creative applied work, developed in collaboration with faculty and advisors starting in the opening weeks of their first year, as well as direct entry into one of the most distinctive post-graduation pathways in American education.

That pathway is Jubilee's apprenticeship program. For most students, it is the primary path forward after their two years at Jubilee. Rather than leaving graduates to navigate their next steps alone, Jubilee matches each student with mentors and master practitioners who are top leaders in their fields through a unique placement program customized to each student's gifts, drawn from the college's extraordinary community of founders, advisors, visiting faculty, and partners. These are people already deeply invested in Jubilee's mission and in the potential of its graduates. The apprenticeship is, for many students, where the work that began at Jubilee finds its first full expression in the world.