College: enrol with us and your family and friends can come, too

A US university is allowing students to enrol family and friends in classes alongside them in a bid to give undergraduates more support.

Paul Quinn College, a private historically black institution in Dallas, will allow each undergraduate to designate one or two people who will be able to study alongside them for the coming semester.

The university’s president, Michael Sorrell, said the idea grew from his determination to find better ways of helping his college’s predominantly low-income minority population manage the heavy challenges in their lives.

“I just thought, maybe we bring their families with them, so that they have a support mechanism,” Dr Sorrell told Times Higher Education. “It’s also just simple math – three people focused on a goal creates a different amount of resources in one place.”

Paul Quinn is affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It enrols only about 450 students, though Dr Sorrell has worked to give it a larger-than-life reputation for an innovative determination to serve a community perpetually hampered by societal racism.

One of his better-known moves since becoming president in 2007 was his decision to plough over the college’s former football field to create a farm to help feed students and the surrounding urban community.

Experts said Dr Sorrell’s idea of family and friend enrolment appeared to be another novel attempt to address important challenges in the post-secondary arena. One of those needs, said Roopika Risam, an associate professor of secondary and higher education and English at Salem State University, was the challenge of attracting more adults back to the classroom.

“These potential students are difficult to locate,” Professor Risam said. “They may be precisely the adult learners who would be attracted to a model like Paul Quinn’s.” The solution, she said, likely would require an institution to offer a flexible degree model to accommodate past credits.

Paul Quinn, however, is imposing no minimum academic requirements for people who are admitted as companion students. Even people with poor high school records could join a certificate programme such as Microsoft Office training and boost their job prospects within a few months, Dr Sorrell said.

More academically qualified companions, Dr Sorrell said, could take online courses that largely mirror those of the admitted student. Either way, he said, the idea is to give students someone from their lives who can share the experience, as a pathway towards reducing the expectation and perpetuation of poverty.

Paul Quinn is known as a “work college” that integrates community jobs into its educational experience. It typically charges less than $18,000 (£13,000) a year for tuition, fees, room and board. Its student body is almost entirely black or Hispanic, and four-fifths are eligible for the Pell grant, the main federal subsidy for low-income students.

Dr Sorrell said he was trying “to apply common sense” to the realities of his students.

“We don’t have any other socio-economic demographic where we expect the students to be the saviours of their entire communities,” he said. “Rich kids don’t come to school thinking: ‘Oh, I have to do well so that my family can be better.’ Middle-class kids don’t think that. But somehow we ask students from the lowest socio-economic strata, who have the greatest amount of hurdles, to climb all those hurdles, while also being the heroes of their family. And that just doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com