A long read but interesting. Breh revitalized the campus, cut tuition costs, lowered student loan debt and actually got students professional experience before graduating/leaving college.
Paul Quinn College president Michael Sorrell thinks his work college model can thrive in cities across the country. But can it work without him?
by Matt Connolly
MAGAZINE
Courtesy of Dear World
The man, the brand: Michael Sorrell is the face—and the heart—of Paul Quinn College.
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You can find the rest of the 2016 College Guide here and our full rankings here.
Twelve hours before Paul Quinn College’s biggest day of the summer, president Michael Sorrell is meeting with his staff. There’s a lot to discuss. A fund-raiser for the school’s on-campus farm is scheduled for tomorrow, and after that, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra is playing a free outdoor concert on the lawn outside the chapel. These are two of the most high-profile events of the year for this 450-student historically black institution located off Interstate 45 in a working-class African American neighborhood of South Dallas. But Sorrell isn’t talking about any of that right now. He’s focused on how Vincent is doing at J. C. Penney.
Vincent Owoseni, a junior finance major from Brooklyn, is interning at the Texas-based department store chain as part of Paul Quinn’s work program, in which all students hold jobs on or off campus to help defray the cost of their education. But, Sorrell tells the room, Owoseni was having some trouble adjusting to the position—he was placed in the shipping department, which he wasn’t prepared for. Sorrell seems conflicted about the news. On the one hand, he tells his staff that Vincent needs to understand that unexpected assignments are part of any career and that he’ll learn just as much from the logistics side of J. C. Penney as from the customer-facing side. On the other hand, he treats the news as a possible warning sign. “He’s one of the best students we’ve got here,” Sorrell says. “If he’s having trouble, how is everyone else doing?” He assigns staffers to check in on other students who might be in similar situations.
When I later catch up with Owoseni, he expresses no surprise that his name came up in the meeting. Sorrell, he says, has been in touch throughout the internship. Indeed, he’d been reaching out to him since high school. Owoseni was valedictorian at City Polytechnic High School, and Sorrell flew out to meet him. “He was very inspiring,” Owoseni says. “He asked what I wanted to do. Then he told me, ‘You can do better than that.’”
“Better than that” is a fair description of Sorrell’s own aspirational leadership philosophy, and of the school’s trajectory since he took over as president in 2007. He arrived to find a college that was on the verge of closing its doors, buried under a mountain of debt with more than a dozen abandoned buildings and a four-year graduation rate of 1 percent. It seemed less “fixer-upper” than “lost cause.”
Sorrell went to work right away. He axed the expensive football program and turned the playing field into a farm, where students can work and from which food gets donated to the surrounding neighborhood. He traveled the country, visiting other colleges to learn from their presidents, and building up recruiting relationships with high schools. He nearly doubled the size of the student body, and raised millions from donors and corporate partners, enough to put (and keep) the school in the black.
It’s not uncommon for Sorrell and his staff to be on a first-name basis with students who are still in high school.
The stunning turnaround of Paul Quinn has made Sorrell into a mini-celebrity. He’s been interviewed on HBO, spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and participated in countless higher education panels. But what he is increasingly getting attention for is the work program, which he first rolled out in 2015. All students are required to work at least eight hours a week, first on campus for the college, then off campus for participating employers. Twenty-four hundred dollars of students’ wages per year go to offsetting their tuition, the rest goes into their pockets. This has allowed Paul Quinn to slash its total cost of attendance from $23,800 to $14,275 a year. Sorrell’s goal is to get students into the job market with less than $10,000 in debt; the average student takes on only $2,300 in loans a year after Pell Grants and other subsidies along with work tuition credits.
The idea that students of modest means can contribute some of their labor in exchange for lower tuition is not new. Some Catholic high schools and a few rural liberal arts colleges have long operated that way. But Sorrell is the first to apply the model in an urban college setting. He is also the first to extend the concept beyond low-skill on-campus jobs to off-campus positions with private-sector employers, where students can garner skills and connections that might give them a leg up in the post-college job market.
This “New Urban College Model,” as Sorrell calls it, addresses some of the most pressing problems in higher education: how to substantially reduce tuition for lower-income, and especially minority, students in a way that colleges can afford; how to do so for students who need the high-touch support of a liberal arts college and who might otherwise get lost in a larger public university; and how to better integrate a liberal arts education with the job market. (Sorrell thinks his model can achieve even more—that reinventing the urban campus can also bring back depressed urban neighborhoods.)
It’s no wonder that Sorrell’s innovations are a hot topic in higher ed reform circles. The question is whether those interventions are, in wonk-speak, “replicable.” In other words, can other schools achieve what Paul Quinn College has without a one-in-a-million leader like Michael Sorrell?
Like a lot of colleges these days, Paul Quinn offers a “summer bridge” program, in which incoming students spend six weeks getting acclimated to college life in general and to Paul Quinn in particular by living in dorms and taking a few introductory classes. Unlike at other colleges, the president of Paul Quinn teaches one. “What’s on your mind?” asks Sorrell at the beginning of one such class this past summer. Only two weeks into their pre-college experience, the assembled students aren’t afraid to share. They end up discussing the then-recent nightclub shooting in Orlando, touching on religion, gun control, and gay rights over the course of twenty minutes, leading into Sorrell’s actual lesson plan about what makes a community. The conversation isn’t purely free-form; when a student is called on, she must first stand up and announce her name loudly to the class. Any drops in volume, grammatical errors, or uses of the dreaded filler word “like” will get called out by Sorrell. “He’s intense and kinda tortures students when he’s teaching them,” says junior Elexis Evans, one of his TAs, before quickly adding, “But he’s a great professor.”
Sorrell is six foot four, with an athlete’s physique, and he holds court with the confidence of someone who doesn’t mind reminding you that he was a star basketball player at Oberlin College. But even in his toughness he exudes empathy, recognizing which students he can needle and poke fun at and which ones need more positive reinforcement to get their confidence up. When the community lesson turns to crime and punishment—specifically marijuana legalization—he poses a question: “Hypothetically, how many of you have been in the vicinity of something illegal, like getting high?” About two dozen hands go up—which is about two dozen more than you’d expect from a bunch of soon-to-be college freshmen facing down the president of their Christian school. He laughs and gestures at those with their hands down. “Now, I know some of you are lying.”
Sorrell says he pushes students over the summer to prepare them for college, but offers enough support that they understand it’s constructive. “You can’t allow them to not be educated, but you have to create a safe space,” he says. “I spend a lot of time affirming my students. You’re safe, I love you, I’m here with you for the long haul.”
And that safe space can mean the occasional questioning of the professor. When he chides a student for starting her sentence with “I feel like,” classmates protest in her defense, arguing that it’s proper usage and not a filler. Sorrell argues that it’s not incorrect but rather “substandard,” in an attempt to quell the semantic mutiny as students break out their phones to check dictionary apps and weigh in. They’re eager to prove themselves; in many cases, it’s why they were recruited to Paul Quinn in the first place. About eight in ten students are getting Pell Grants, and more than 70 percent will get no money from their families to help pay for tuition. Two-thirds of them hail from outside Texas, with high numbers coming from cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Some have faced massive roadblocks in their path to college—extreme poverty, broken homes, multiple deaths in the family—and nearly all will have to work harder than they ever have before to succeed.
That includes little things like basic time management and academic skills, especially in preparation for the jobs to come. Many have never paid attention for an entire multi-hour lecture before, have never really written a paper, have nothing but anxiety at the prospect of tests that can make or break a grade. To foster a sense of professionalism, Sorrell enforces a business-casual dress code in classes. For those who don’t have the clothes, the school keeps a closet full of donated businesswear that students can borrow from. Those who struggle despite the staff’s hands-on approach can be put on the “Carrington plan”—they live together on the one dormitory’s third floor and maintain a schedule of distraction-free study hall sessions. The program is named after former undergraduate Ryan Carrington, a promising student whom Sorrell ordered to work at a desk in his own office after a massive drop in grades following a fraternity pledge. Sorrell took Carrington’s keys and cell phone and had him introduce himself to every visitor who came in. “He had never sat still long enough to learn,” Sorrell says. Sure enough, the grades went back up.
Sorrell (and the high school administrators who like to send him names) makes a point to find students like Carrington who can blossom with that extra push that Paul Quinn can provide, who have been dealt a difficult hand but have the potential to thrive in a college that’s meant to feel like a family. “There is this entrepreneurial spirit,” Evans says. “A lot of us didn’t realize we came here with that, but we had it brought out of us.” They may use “like” incorrectly at first, but they’re willing to fight for themselves when they get it right.
As Sorrell gets the class back on track following the great “like” debate, Trezuer Butler smirks at the scene. Butler came to the summer bridge program as an incoming freshman last year, taking her first-ever flight out of her native San Francisco. Now she’s a TA at the same bridge program, her work helping offset her tuition. Like many Paul Quinn students, the urban work college model wasn’t totally new to her—she came from a work high school, Immaculate Conception Academy, where the administrators have a relationship with Sorrell. She knew she wanted to go to a historically black school, and ended up getting in everywhere she wanted to go. She picked Paul Quinn after receiving a full scholarship, and Sorrell surprised her with a call after she accepted and convinced her to come to Dallas early for the summer program. Afterward, he stopped in San Francisco for Sunday dinner with her family, who were nervous about sending her off to Texas for good. “He got permission to watch me, punish me, motivate me,” Butler said. “I didn’t have a relationship with my dad, so he really stepped in and stepped up.”
What’s remarkable about these calls and visits is how unremarkable they seem as part of his larger recruitment strategy. It’s not uncommon for Sorrell and his staff to be on a first-name basis with students who are still in high school. The school estimates that only 10 percent of incoming freshmen aren’t recruited in some way by Paul Quinn. That closeness doesn’t end when they get to campus. “I firmly believe that you meet students where they are, and you love them, and you lift them,” Sorrell says. “I believe in authentic relationships.”
Courtesy of Paul Quinn College
Starting fresh: When Sorrell took over as president, the campus had fifteen abandoned buildings. Thanks to a million-dollar donation, he was able to have them all torn down.
Sorrell says he needs to put extra work into building trust with students because his background isn’t the same as many of theirs. He grew up upper middle class in Chicago, where his father owned a barbecue restaurant and his mother ran a social work agency, and he attended St. Ignatius College Prep, one of the best schools in the city. He got an offer to play basketball at Oberlin, but took a recruiting visit and hated it. “It really was an uncomfortable place,” he says. “People protest everything, they question everything. I wasn’t a social outlier, so I became the outlier.”
Continue with article below
This man has a plan to revolutionize inner city college
Paul Quinn College president Michael Sorrell thinks his work college model can thrive in cities across the country. But can it work without him?
by Matt Connolly
MAGAZINE
The man, the brand: Michael Sorrell is the face—and the heart—of Paul Quinn College.
Share
Tweet
You can find the rest of the 2016 College Guide here and our full rankings here.
Twelve hours before Paul Quinn College’s biggest day of the summer, president Michael Sorrell is meeting with his staff. There’s a lot to discuss. A fund-raiser for the school’s on-campus farm is scheduled for tomorrow, and after that, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra is playing a free outdoor concert on the lawn outside the chapel. These are two of the most high-profile events of the year for this 450-student historically black institution located off Interstate 45 in a working-class African American neighborhood of South Dallas. But Sorrell isn’t talking about any of that right now. He’s focused on how Vincent is doing at J. C. Penney.
Vincent Owoseni, a junior finance major from Brooklyn, is interning at the Texas-based department store chain as part of Paul Quinn’s work program, in which all students hold jobs on or off campus to help defray the cost of their education. But, Sorrell tells the room, Owoseni was having some trouble adjusting to the position—he was placed in the shipping department, which he wasn’t prepared for. Sorrell seems conflicted about the news. On the one hand, he tells his staff that Vincent needs to understand that unexpected assignments are part of any career and that he’ll learn just as much from the logistics side of J. C. Penney as from the customer-facing side. On the other hand, he treats the news as a possible warning sign. “He’s one of the best students we’ve got here,” Sorrell says. “If he’s having trouble, how is everyone else doing?” He assigns staffers to check in on other students who might be in similar situations.
When I later catch up with Owoseni, he expresses no surprise that his name came up in the meeting. Sorrell, he says, has been in touch throughout the internship. Indeed, he’d been reaching out to him since high school. Owoseni was valedictorian at City Polytechnic High School, and Sorrell flew out to meet him. “He was very inspiring,” Owoseni says. “He asked what I wanted to do. Then he told me, ‘You can do better than that.’”
“Better than that” is a fair description of Sorrell’s own aspirational leadership philosophy, and of the school’s trajectory since he took over as president in 2007. He arrived to find a college that was on the verge of closing its doors, buried under a mountain of debt with more than a dozen abandoned buildings and a four-year graduation rate of 1 percent. It seemed less “fixer-upper” than “lost cause.”
Sorrell went to work right away. He axed the expensive football program and turned the playing field into a farm, where students can work and from which food gets donated to the surrounding neighborhood. He traveled the country, visiting other colleges to learn from their presidents, and building up recruiting relationships with high schools. He nearly doubled the size of the student body, and raised millions from donors and corporate partners, enough to put (and keep) the school in the black.
It’s not uncommon for Sorrell and his staff to be on a first-name basis with students who are still in high school.
The stunning turnaround of Paul Quinn has made Sorrell into a mini-celebrity. He’s been interviewed on HBO, spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and participated in countless higher education panels. But what he is increasingly getting attention for is the work program, which he first rolled out in 2015. All students are required to work at least eight hours a week, first on campus for the college, then off campus for participating employers. Twenty-four hundred dollars of students’ wages per year go to offsetting their tuition, the rest goes into their pockets. This has allowed Paul Quinn to slash its total cost of attendance from $23,800 to $14,275 a year. Sorrell’s goal is to get students into the job market with less than $10,000 in debt; the average student takes on only $2,300 in loans a year after Pell Grants and other subsidies along with work tuition credits.
The idea that students of modest means can contribute some of their labor in exchange for lower tuition is not new. Some Catholic high schools and a few rural liberal arts colleges have long operated that way. But Sorrell is the first to apply the model in an urban college setting. He is also the first to extend the concept beyond low-skill on-campus jobs to off-campus positions with private-sector employers, where students can garner skills and connections that might give them a leg up in the post-college job market.
This “New Urban College Model,” as Sorrell calls it, addresses some of the most pressing problems in higher education: how to substantially reduce tuition for lower-income, and especially minority, students in a way that colleges can afford; how to do so for students who need the high-touch support of a liberal arts college and who might otherwise get lost in a larger public university; and how to better integrate a liberal arts education with the job market. (Sorrell thinks his model can achieve even more—that reinventing the urban campus can also bring back depressed urban neighborhoods.)
It’s no wonder that Sorrell’s innovations are a hot topic in higher ed reform circles. The question is whether those interventions are, in wonk-speak, “replicable.” In other words, can other schools achieve what Paul Quinn College has without a one-in-a-million leader like Michael Sorrell?
Like a lot of colleges these days, Paul Quinn offers a “summer bridge” program, in which incoming students spend six weeks getting acclimated to college life in general and to Paul Quinn in particular by living in dorms and taking a few introductory classes. Unlike at other colleges, the president of Paul Quinn teaches one. “What’s on your mind?” asks Sorrell at the beginning of one such class this past summer. Only two weeks into their pre-college experience, the assembled students aren’t afraid to share. They end up discussing the then-recent nightclub shooting in Orlando, touching on religion, gun control, and gay rights over the course of twenty minutes, leading into Sorrell’s actual lesson plan about what makes a community. The conversation isn’t purely free-form; when a student is called on, she must first stand up and announce her name loudly to the class. Any drops in volume, grammatical errors, or uses of the dreaded filler word “like” will get called out by Sorrell. “He’s intense and kinda tortures students when he’s teaching them,” says junior Elexis Evans, one of his TAs, before quickly adding, “But he’s a great professor.”
Sorrell is six foot four, with an athlete’s physique, and he holds court with the confidence of someone who doesn’t mind reminding you that he was a star basketball player at Oberlin College. But even in his toughness he exudes empathy, recognizing which students he can needle and poke fun at and which ones need more positive reinforcement to get their confidence up. When the community lesson turns to crime and punishment—specifically marijuana legalization—he poses a question: “Hypothetically, how many of you have been in the vicinity of something illegal, like getting high?” About two dozen hands go up—which is about two dozen more than you’d expect from a bunch of soon-to-be college freshmen facing down the president of their Christian school. He laughs and gestures at those with their hands down. “Now, I know some of you are lying.”
Sorrell says he pushes students over the summer to prepare them for college, but offers enough support that they understand it’s constructive. “You can’t allow them to not be educated, but you have to create a safe space,” he says. “I spend a lot of time affirming my students. You’re safe, I love you, I’m here with you for the long haul.”
And that safe space can mean the occasional questioning of the professor. When he chides a student for starting her sentence with “I feel like,” classmates protest in her defense, arguing that it’s proper usage and not a filler. Sorrell argues that it’s not incorrect but rather “substandard,” in an attempt to quell the semantic mutiny as students break out their phones to check dictionary apps and weigh in. They’re eager to prove themselves; in many cases, it’s why they were recruited to Paul Quinn in the first place. About eight in ten students are getting Pell Grants, and more than 70 percent will get no money from their families to help pay for tuition. Two-thirds of them hail from outside Texas, with high numbers coming from cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Some have faced massive roadblocks in their path to college—extreme poverty, broken homes, multiple deaths in the family—and nearly all will have to work harder than they ever have before to succeed.
That includes little things like basic time management and academic skills, especially in preparation for the jobs to come. Many have never paid attention for an entire multi-hour lecture before, have never really written a paper, have nothing but anxiety at the prospect of tests that can make or break a grade. To foster a sense of professionalism, Sorrell enforces a business-casual dress code in classes. For those who don’t have the clothes, the school keeps a closet full of donated businesswear that students can borrow from. Those who struggle despite the staff’s hands-on approach can be put on the “Carrington plan”—they live together on the one dormitory’s third floor and maintain a schedule of distraction-free study hall sessions. The program is named after former undergraduate Ryan Carrington, a promising student whom Sorrell ordered to work at a desk in his own office after a massive drop in grades following a fraternity pledge. Sorrell took Carrington’s keys and cell phone and had him introduce himself to every visitor who came in. “He had never sat still long enough to learn,” Sorrell says. Sure enough, the grades went back up.
Sorrell (and the high school administrators who like to send him names) makes a point to find students like Carrington who can blossom with that extra push that Paul Quinn can provide, who have been dealt a difficult hand but have the potential to thrive in a college that’s meant to feel like a family. “There is this entrepreneurial spirit,” Evans says. “A lot of us didn’t realize we came here with that, but we had it brought out of us.” They may use “like” incorrectly at first, but they’re willing to fight for themselves when they get it right.
As Sorrell gets the class back on track following the great “like” debate, Trezuer Butler smirks at the scene. Butler came to the summer bridge program as an incoming freshman last year, taking her first-ever flight out of her native San Francisco. Now she’s a TA at the same bridge program, her work helping offset her tuition. Like many Paul Quinn students, the urban work college model wasn’t totally new to her—she came from a work high school, Immaculate Conception Academy, where the administrators have a relationship with Sorrell. She knew she wanted to go to a historically black school, and ended up getting in everywhere she wanted to go. She picked Paul Quinn after receiving a full scholarship, and Sorrell surprised her with a call after she accepted and convinced her to come to Dallas early for the summer program. Afterward, he stopped in San Francisco for Sunday dinner with her family, who were nervous about sending her off to Texas for good. “He got permission to watch me, punish me, motivate me,” Butler said. “I didn’t have a relationship with my dad, so he really stepped in and stepped up.”
What’s remarkable about these calls and visits is how unremarkable they seem as part of his larger recruitment strategy. It’s not uncommon for Sorrell and his staff to be on a first-name basis with students who are still in high school. The school estimates that only 10 percent of incoming freshmen aren’t recruited in some way by Paul Quinn. That closeness doesn’t end when they get to campus. “I firmly believe that you meet students where they are, and you love them, and you lift them,” Sorrell says. “I believe in authentic relationships.”
Starting fresh: When Sorrell took over as president, the campus had fifteen abandoned buildings. Thanks to a million-dollar donation, he was able to have them all torn down.
Sorrell says he needs to put extra work into building trust with students because his background isn’t the same as many of theirs. He grew up upper middle class in Chicago, where his father owned a barbecue restaurant and his mother ran a social work agency, and he attended St. Ignatius College Prep, one of the best schools in the city. He got an offer to play basketball at Oberlin, but took a recruiting visit and hated it. “It really was an uncomfortable place,” he says. “People protest everything, they question everything. I wasn’t a social outlier, so I became the outlier.”
Continue with article below
This man has a plan to revolutionize inner city college