FORGET the cheese brick and salami round that Dad picks up on alumni weekends. Today’s college farm cultivates exotic fruits, expensive Asian greens and grass-fed beef. Students are developing product lines for high-end tastes, and honing not just basic husbandry skills but also marketing savvy in the interest of turning their acreage into profit centers.

“Most small farms lose money,” says Sean Clark, the farm manager at Berea College and an editor of “Fields of Learning: The Student Farm Movement in North America,” published last year. “The whole idea is to show students how to make money on a small amount of acreage,” he says.

At California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, whose popular Farm Store has become a financial buoy in a sea of state budget cuts, profits are being funneled back into a cash-strained agricultural school. At other campuses, the money goes to repair tractors or update solar-powered greenhouses.

These college farms are steeped in the grow-local sustainability practices that appeal to the green-minded consumers around college towns. Warren Wilson College raises grass-fed cattle and free-roaming pigs. That has attracted the attention of foodies in Asheville, N.C., a progressive enclave eight miles away. “People in Asheville are really educated about good food,” says Lily Walton, an environmental studies major with a concentration in sustainable agriculture, who runs the meat sales operations. Ms. Walton works 15 hours a week on the farm to defray the cost of tuition. This past fall, the school made a whopping $80,000 on its sale of beef quarters, pork loins and charcuterie.