MIAMI – Eduardo J. Padron sat in his high school counselor's office, ready to discuss his future and fulfill the promise he had made his mother before boarding a plane and leaving Cuba.
But the counselor told Padron he wasn't college material. You should apply to a trade school, she said.
“When she said that, the voice of my mother in the back of my head was telling me, ‘No, you're going to college and you can do much better,’” Padron recalls.
Rejecting the counselor's advice, he applied to many schools. He was accepted at just one: Miami's community college.
“If I'm passionate about this place,” Padron says from behind his desk at Miami Dade College, where today he is the school's president, “it's because of my understanding of how this institution changed my life.”
Padron – a man with a gentle demeanor, steely determination and the look of a polished, stately professor – is one of the greatest proponents of the nation's more than 1,000 community colleges.
His enthusiasm is shared by Barack Obama, who wants the U.S. to lead the world in college degrees by 2020 – in part, by graduating another 5 million Americans from community colleges. Congress approved an additional $2 billion for job training at the colleges, as part of the education legislation passed with the health care reform law.
As educators and officials look to reconfigure higher education, they'll be looking to Miami Dade College and Padron, who has transformed the urban school into one of the largest colleges in the United States, graduating more Black and Hispanic students than any other public institution.
“What Eduardo has accomplished is a marvelous demonstration that open access and high quality can live together successfully in American higher education,” said Dr. Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education.
In the last year, as Padron fostered a close relationship with the White House, regularly conferring with top education officials on policy recommendations, Time magazine named him one of the 10 best college presidents in the United States – the only community college leader on the list.
