Shakespeare with power tools: how a humble trade school became the best community college in America.

• Author: Carlyle, Erin
• Position: St. Paul College - Organization overview

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Hector Caballero Jr., husband and father of two, spent a decade working at Walgreens before he was finally ready for college. In 2007, he enrolled at a local four year university near his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, to study business. But things didn't go so well. The classes were too easy. The teachers didn't seem that knowledgeable. Hector became frustrated and began asking around for help. A cousin recommended another local school.

This college was different. Hector's business classes were supplemented with challenging courses in writing, science, and speech. His composition instructors taught him to use multiple sources and how to evaluate their credibility. Hector had never done that before. "I was naive," he says.

Hector even started changing the way he consumed the news, applying a newfound level of critical thinking to the broadcasts of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and sparring viewpoints on the Internet. "I started comparing how things are presented," he says.

Inculcating such habits of skeptical citizenship is a classic mission of the liberal arts. But it's not the kind of thing most people expect from a little-known two-year trade school like Saint Paul College, where Hector is a student. Saint Paul--which puts to shame the idea that trade schools are for people who are good with their hands, not their heads--beat out hundreds of other schools nationwide to top this year's Washington Monthly list of America's best community colleges. The educators there know that whether you're an auto mechanic or a sociologist, you need to learn how to think and how to learn, because most of your future jobs probably haven't been invented yet. Saint Paul also shows that technical education has a lot to teach the liberal arts. The collaborative, interactive teaching methods that the best technical schools employ every day turn out to be, in many cases, just what the liberal arts have been missing.

Saint Paul College was founded one hundred years ago by the Saint Paul Builders Exchange as a vocational high school. Builders sat on the school's board and made sure the curriculum matched the school's early motto: "It always pays to learn a trade."

In 1990, Donovan Schwichtenberg became president of Saint Paul Technical and Vocational Institute. He was hired to set the school's finances straight, and there was fear that he might clean house and replace veteran staffers with his own people. But Schwichtenberg had always found that kind of leadership arrogant. An earnest and affable career educator, he's active in his local Rotary Club and keeps bees at a family farm. "I believe you come into a situation and you value what is there and you look for the good things and you build on that," he says.

Schwichtenberg built on the school's strengths, expanding the facilities and the curriculum. He created a new facility on campus to help veterans attending college and received an award from the Defense Department for supporting employees who participate in the National Guard and Army Reserve.

Then, about five years after settling into the presidency, Schwichtenberg stumbled across a statistic that set his brain on overdrive. "There were 20,000 households in the St. Paul area that did not have access to an automobile,"...