When congressmen last fall considered cures for what ails the American university (repeal large college endowments’ tax exemption to lower tuition costs, they said), a hero emerged in one witness from Kentucky’s Berea College, where students labor to learn. Maybe, the unspoken prospect hung in the air after his testimony, a “work college” model is really the best way forward. There were seven of them then: work colleges, like Berea, that charge minimal tuition and require every student to work. Soon, there will be eight.
The first ever city school to join the official work college consortium, historically black Paul Quinn College in Dallas began refashioning itself in the model of Berea and Alice Lloyd College, both in rural Kentucky, two years ago.
Paul Quinn’s president Michael Sorrell brought the college—the first HBCU west of the Mississippi—back from disrepair. The school lost its accreditation and saw enrollment dwindle to just 445 students in the first years of his presidency, so Sorrell took it in a new direction. He implemented a dress code, added the requirement that every student take a job on or off campus, lowered tuition to $14,500 (even less for those who live off-campus), and turned the football field into a farm. On Monday, Sorrell learned from the Department of Education that Paul Quinn College had been approved for work college designation.
Its 120 yards of crops notwithstanding, Paul Quinn stands out from the other seven. Beyond Kentucky’s two, they are southern Illinois’s student-built Blackburn College; the College of the Ozarks and Ecclesia College, both of them Ozarkian and Christian; Sterling College in Vermont, with an environmental stewardship focus; and Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina—technically also Appalachian but reputedly more of a “hippie school” than its neighbors.
Paul Quinn’s addition to this group proves the model can adapt. And its timely answers to student debt and work readiness crises suggest now is as good a time as ever for the way of the work college to catch on. Diverse Issues in Higher Education reported—
The country’s work colleges are hardly homogenous, but they do all have to meet the eligibility standards for two years in order to join the consortium. President Trump’s proposed skinny budget may not leave much room for the Education Department’s work study program—funding that supports these schools in their mission.
But the federal benefits are far from the highest purpose of Paul Quinn’s “work college” recognition, President Sorrell said:
Paul Quinn College’s pending entry into the consortium might have been on the minds of administrators back when THE WEEKLY STANDARD was getting acquainted with Kentucky’s work colleges last year. The adaptability of the work college model to the challenges of our times came up at Berea, a school that since its 19th-century founding has faced outward from its hilltop home with good news on offer.
Paul Quinn College, in other words, could be the first of many.
