When President Obama delivered the commencement address at Miami Dade College in April, it was yet another coup for the high-profile institution—but not a first. Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also were graduation speakers, as the community college continues to be a magnet for national and international dignitaries.
MDC has earned its place in the limelight for achievements ranging from its chart-topping enrollment of 174,000 students on eight campuses to its growing number of baccalaureate programs, making it a model for the advancement of community college education.
Leading both its growth and transformation is MDC’s ubiquitous president, Dr. Eduardo Padrón, who was recently named chairman of the White House Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. The administration’s higher education initiatives and efforts to promote community colleges by Dr. Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, have brought increased attention to the community college movement.
In October, Jill Biden, a professor at Northern Virginia Community College, convened a White House Summit on Community Colleges where Padrón was among the invited participants. Within a few months, he was appointed chairman of the advisory commission. Combined with his position as chairman of the American Council on Education board of directors, Padrón has ready access to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and to the White House. He is poised to raise the national profile of community colleges and to fight for their growth and development.
“I have the good fortune of interacting with college and university presidents and other education officials on a regular basis,” says Padrón, who arrived in the United States at age 15 as a Cuban refugee and later earned a Ph.D. from the University of Florida. “Community colleges, as President Obama and Secretary Duncan have both stated, can and should play a significant role in revitalizing the American economy.”
One of Padrón’s colleagues on the ACE board, Dr. Antoine Garibaldi, president of the University of Detroit Mercy, praised his “outstanding reputation in higher education” and called him “a trailblazer whose work has propelled lots of other community colleges to become even more important.”
MDC has launched eight bachelor’s degree programs in disciplines including education and nursing, leading a trend among community colleges nationally. More than a dozen Florida community colleges offer bachelor’s degrees, and community colleges in approximately 20 other states have followed suit or are in the process of doing so. Just as MDC did in 2003, some of these institutions are dropping the word “community” from their names.
