Paul Quinn College

In the southern sector of Dallas, on a campus that was once Bishop College, sits one of the most unusual and consequential small colleges in America, Paul Quinn College, the oldest historically Black college west of the Mississippi River and the nation's first urban work college.

Paul Quinn was founded on April fourth, eighteen seventy-two, in Austin, Texas, by a small group of African Methodist Episcopal Church ministers whose purpose was immediate and urgent: to educate the formerly enslaved and their children in the years just after the Civil War. The school was named for William Paul Quinn, the fourth bishop of the AME Church. It moved to Waco in eighteen seventy-seven, received its state charter in eighteen eighty-one, and relocated again to Dallas in nineteen ninety, acquiring the former campus of Bishop College from a local businessman.

What the college did next is what sets it apart. When Paul Quinn faced potential closure in the two thousands, its leadership didn't look for a donor to save the old model. It reinvented itself.

The football program was eliminated in two thousand seven, the first college in modern history to do so voluntarily, and the football field was converted into a two-acre urban farm. The WE Over Me Farm, as it's called, has grown tens of thousands of pounds of produce over the years, supplying the college's dining hall and selling to local restaurants and groceries. The move was not just agricultural, it addressed the food desert that surrounds the campus in southern Dallas, a neighborhood with limited access to fresh produce.

Every residential student works. The work-college model, modeled after Berea College in Kentucky, ties academic coursework to professional placements, dramatically reducing student debt. More than eighty percent of Paul Quinn graduates leave with jobs already in hand.

It is a small college that keeps making large bets on its community and keeps winning.