Nestled in a poor Dallas neighborhood, Paul Quinn College aims to be a national model for overcoming poverty
BY Paul Quinn College in Dallas is attempting to ease its students out of poverty by becoming the nation’s first urban work college. Nov. 11, 2019. Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
(This story has been edited for length.)
DALLAS — On a recent Sunday night, Paul Quinn College president Michael Sorrell kicked off an hourlong, unstructured group discussion during his problem-solving course with a question.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked the class composed of the school’s top 18 students.
Sophomore LaMontria Edwards promptly asked a question about Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” the ancient and seminal Chinese text about war and strategy assigned to the class. She inadvertently launched a meandering discussion that touched on everything from ancient Greek historians to reparations for American slavery and inequality in the modern criminal justice system.
Students then dove into a discussion about Rodney Reed, the Texas prisoner largely believed to be innocent of the murder that landed him on death row and who, at the time, was days away from an execution that has since been halted. Sorrell turned their analysis of the case, catapulted into the national consciousness thanks in part to celebrities’ posts on social platforms, into an impromptu lecture on media literacy.
And from there, he steered the conversation back to the assigned reading and told his students that while Sun Tzu wrote about war, there were other arenas in which to apply the book’s teachings on strategy.
“Take a step back and think about knowledge and experiences,” Sorrell said. “People from under-resourced communities, they have a lived set of experiences but they haven’t yet figured out how to lift themselves out of their [circumstances].”
Paul Quinn College President Michael Sorrell addresses students during his problem-solving class. Students are challenged to find a problem on campus, solve it and present their thinking to him and the rest of the class. Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
A belief that education can jumpstart the socio-economic mobility of people who grow up in long-neglected neighborhoods influences Sorrell’s teaching — and is what brought him to this historically black college in a poor southern Dallas community in the first place.
Before Sorrell’s arrival in 2007, Paul Quinn College was plagued by mismanaged finances, plummeting enrollment and a looming loss of accreditation — all of which portended the school’s potential closure.
Sorrell showed up as a seasoned attorney, education scholar and, as he described himself, “an activist” at his core. As Paul Quinn’s new president, his plans to turn the institution around were largely underpinned by the idea of making it a work college, a federally recognized school where students are required to hold down jobs and have their professional performance incorporated into their academic studies.
The work college model’s purpose is to be an affordable and flexible alternative to traditional universities. At the time, all work colleges but Paul Quinn were located in rural areas. The school’s location in America’s ninth most populous city made it the nation’s first urban work college and, in many ways, Sorrell’s plan an untested one.
And in 2009, two years into Sorrell’s tenure, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools voted to strip Paul Quinn of its accreditation, threatening its access to federal and state funding and how its graduates’ diplomas were professionally valued. The vote was a rough blow for the centerpiece of Highland Hills, the southern Dallas neighborhood ravaged by the city’s history of segregation and inequity.
Creating a path forward
Black residents make up 80 percent of Highland Hills, compared to 24 percent for the city as a whole. In addition to being a food desert, nearly 40 percent of Highland Hills residents live below the poverty line, as opposed to 18 percent for the city of Dallas.
Paul Quinn’s student body is 80% black and just under 20% Hispanic. Eighty percent of students receive Pell Grants, a form of financial aid for students the federal government says “display exceptional financial need.”
And Sorrell considers a fight against poverty to be integral to Paul Quinn’s mission. After arriving, Sorrell had abandoned buildings torn down and admission requirements heightened.
Yet the most fundamental change was transitioning the school to an urban work college. Every student is required to have a job in addition to their course load. In their first year, students typically work a job on campus. They are expected to work a professional internship by their junior and senior years.
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