SALZBURG, Austria — When Michael J. Sorrell took over as president of Paul Quinn College in March of 2007, he had his fair share of skeptics.
Earlier that year, the Boston Consulting Group had given the school some grim news. They predicted that unless drastic measures were taken to address declining student enrollment, low campus morale and a lack of financial resources, the small Dallas-based, Black liberal arts college, would likely be forced to close it doors for good.
Sorrell, 48, a lawyer who worked for years in corporate America before transitioning into academia, immediately went to work, slowly transforming the institution, founded in 1872 by a group of African Methodist Episcopal ministers, into a thriving college well on its way to recovery.
Today, the school’s enrollment is up 30 percent from the spring 2014 semester, and the retention rate from last spring to this fall is also up about 74 percent. In the process, he’s graduated a group of top-tier students like Jessika Lara who completed her studies in three and a half years, and helped others to secure jobs at major corporations like General Electric.
“From Day One, we believe everything matters and everyone matters,” says Sorrell, who was a panelist at the “Students at the Margins and the Institutions that Serve Them: A Global Perspective,” a five-day international seminar designed to strategize and share best practices with other institutions across the world who work with large numbers of marginalized and disadvantaged students.
Though PQC is considered to be a minority-serving institution, Sorrell doesn’t much care for the term.
