Education Game Changer

Dallas' Paul Quinn reinvents urban college model with some help from Mark Cuban

Recently Paul Quinn College announced it will be adopting a new financial structure designed to reduce student debt while increasing real-world work experience. This “new urban college model” has several components, including lower tuition, use of free open source textbooks and Paul Quinn’s becoming the first urban work college in the country.

Paul Quinn wants students to graduate in four years with less than $10,000 in student loan debt by moving to tuition and fees of $14,275 for on-campus students and $9,775 for off-campus students. A work college requires students to spend part of their week working at the college, typically in a field related to the student’s studies.

Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is consulting with Paul Quinn on its move to open source textbooks and helping to create a course on entrepreneurship.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who has expressed concern over the rising costs of higher education, is consulting with Paul Quinn on its move to open source textbooks. He is also helping to create a course on entrepreneurship.

“I’m excited to be working with PQC and president [Michael] Sorrell to help remake the economics of the university experience,” Cuban said in a statement. “Our partnership will also include creating a unique approach to teaching entrepreneurship, with any and all materials available under an open source license for other institutions to use.”

The changes will go into effect beginning with the fall 2015 semester, and they will also include the opening of Trinity Environmental Academy, a charter school on Paul Quinn’s campus for kindergartners and first- and sixth-graders.

College officials said that the move to the new model came after examining student feedback.

“The new urban college model is the product of our board of trustees and this staff listening to our students and deciding that we could do more to address both their needs and the needs of our community,” Sorrell said in a statement. “We decided that it was no longer acceptable to pretend that higher education’s math equation added up.

“We think that our students deserve to receive two great academic experiences for the reasonable price of one. This is nation building.”

Paul Quinn College will be enacting its "new urban college model" beginning fall 2015.

Courtesy photo

Paul Quinn College will be enacting its "new urban college model" beginning fall 2015.

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Jobs report

Texas ranks among 10 best states to find a job, says new report

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

You have a better chance of landing a job in Texas than in most other states.

If you’re hunting for a job in Texas amid a tough employment market, you stand a better chance of landing it here than you might in other states.

A new ranking by personal finance website WalletHub of the best states for jobs puts Texas at No. 7. The Lone Star State lands at No. 2 in the economic environment category and No. 18 in the job market category.

Massachusetts tops the list, and West Virginia appears at the bottom.

To determine the most attractive states for employment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 34 key indicators of economic health and job market strength. Ranking factors included employment growth, median annual income, and average commute time.

“Living in one of the best states for jobs can provide stable conditions for the long term, helping you ride out the fluctuations that the economy will experience in the future,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo says.

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas led the U.S. in job creation with the addition of 195,600 jobs over the past 12 months.

While Abbott proclaimed Texas is “America’s jobs leader,” the state’s level of job creation has recently slowed. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted that the state’s year-to-date job growth rate had dipped to 1.8 percent, and that even slower job growth was expected in the second half of this year.

The August unemployment rate in Texas stood at 4.1 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Throughout 2025, the monthly rate in Texas has been either four percent or 4.1 percent.

By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2025, the monthly rate for the U.S. has ranged from 4 percent to 4.3 percent.

Here’s a rundown of the August unemployment rates in Texas’ four biggest metro areas:

Austin — 3.9 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth — 4.4 percent
San Antonio — 4.4 percent
Houston — 5 percent

Unemployment rates have remained steady this year despite layoffs and hiring freezes driven by economic uncertainty. However, the number of U.S. workers who’ve been without a job for at least 27 weeks has risen by 385,000 this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. That month, long-term unemployed workers accounted for about one-fourth of all unemployed workers.

An August survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed a record-low 44.9 percent of Americans were confident about finding a job if they lost their current one.

This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

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