Thank you, David. Our guest today is Madeline Pumariega, president of Miami Dade College. For those of you who don't know Miami Dade, it's an innovation powerhouse. It enrolls 25, 000 plus students, creating new pathways for first gen and low SES students, and the average age of their student is about 45 years old.
In her current role as president, Madeline has prioritized working with business partners to identify the skills needed by key industries and tailoring higher education programs to match those needs. This intentional forming of strategic alliances and job pathways between companies and MDC students accelerates each graduate's ability to enter the workforce immediately.
Driving her relentless pursuit is the passion to develop leaders and build thriving communities She herself is a first gen student and she joins us today to talk about how MDC is embracing the three pillars of higher education for today's age academic skills and knowledge employability skills including internships and apprenticeships And digital skills such as AI. Madeline, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here with you.
Thank you. I'm looking forward to our conversation. You guys at Miami Dade College are doing some amazing things with preparing students for the future and aligning your curriculum to industry needs. Before we get into that, tell us a little bit about you and how you got to this position with such a great knowledge of this particular area.
I was born and raised in Hialeah, Florida, which is a predominantly Hispanic community in Miami Dade County, and my parents had come from Cuba and at that time, many settling in that area. And so fast forward, I end up, coming to Miami Dade Community College, then as a student athlete to play women's basketball. I signed a scholarship. And then, went on and came back to the college.
Spent about 20 years at the college from Dean to a campus President, and then left Miami Dade College after 20 years for two statewide roles. One of them was with a nonprofit organization called Take Stock in Children, that helps kids across the state of Florida break the cycle of poverty through education, through a college education. And then I was appointed as the first Hispanic and female chancellor of the Florida college system.
And so Miami Dade college is part of Florida's college system, that really is the workforce engine. Across the state, there are colleges that work with their community partners in making sure that each of the communities have the talent they need, and had an opportunity to lead that system and make Florida number one in higher education. And then the opportunity to come lead Miami Dade College as the first female president, presented itself in 2020.
I was then selected and it's been an honor and a privilege to get to come back home and lead an organization that's had such an impact in my life, but most importantly, such an impact in our entire community.
Well, that's really an amazing story. Does your family still live in the Hialeah, Miami Dade College area?
They sure do.
It must be amazing. And I'm getting a little off track here, but I, I don't care. This is interesting for me. It must be amazing for your parents who were immigrants coming over from Cuba to see their daughter have such a great career and in helping other folks to break the cycles of poverty.
Absolutely. When you grow up with immigrant parents, there's one thing that they instill in you, and that is hard work and respect and dedication, but most importantly, the education. Because when you leave your country and they take everything from you, the only thing they don't take is what you've learned. And so that was the motto, right? They can take everything, but they can't take your education.
So my mom, came to this country and then became a teacher and was a teacher for 35 years in the local public schools. And my dad, a banker in community banking in Miami Dade County. So our entire family stayed here and, my uncle's own businesses and really it is the path to the American dream, and opportunity to be here, to serve our community, to be a role model for our students, is really an honor. And, to be able to, show what can happen with hard work and persistence and perseverance.
It reminds me a lot of a guest that I've had on the show who I like to call a good friend, Russell Lowry Hart. He just recently, Oh, you know, Russell. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
A great friend.
He's amazing. And, just having transferred from Amarillo College over to take over the Austin Community College District. To me, he's just a role model on what a college President should be.
We've sat on a couple of panels together. We're on the board of the American Association of Community Colleges together. And Russell is a beacon. He just, his care for the students and the community and what he's done there is really remarkable. So, privileged to call him a friend and to be really a champion and to work with him.
Mm hmm. The story that I love the most of, actually, there's a couple of stories, which we won't go into, but one was COVID and him taking the temperature of the students masked up. And then also at one point he had 99 students go homeless during one term and only one of them dropped out. That's just amazing to be able to provide those resources, which are critical for low socio income demographics and first gen students.
Without a doubt, when we think about that culture of care and thinking about how do we help students, not just in the classroom, one thing is to get them there and you put, the best faculty in front of them and nothing replaces a caring adult in a student's life that really wants them to learn and sets high expectations in a great learning environment.
But second to none is the support services that you wrap them around with whether it's emergency aid, getting their federal financial aid on time, academic support and tutoring, then being engaged on campus. That is really the recipe and the secret sauce of helping especially first gen students get to the finish line, is for them to have the sense of belonging and believing and that they can get there. And graduation is my favorite day, it's around the corner. Late April and early May.
And, we have an exercise during our commencement ceremony, which we ask if you're the first in your family to walk across the stage, please stand. If you were working while you were studying, please stand. If you served our military, if you were a parent. And you can see all the students just begin to stand, right? And so when they walk across the stage, you know their story, you know the hard work and what it's taken for them to walk across the stage. And it's just a very special day.
Oh, yeah, I can. I can just feel that, in my body right now. Just that caring about it. I remember first accreditation visit. I ever did. The principal at the school said what makes us different is we all believe in the same mantra, "kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care" and that's what it's all about.
And that's what it's all about. Exactly.
So to be able to get to where you are right now in Miami Dade, and you're doing some amazing things, you've had to come up against the negative perceptions of higher ed right now, there's a large population out there. 52% say higher ed is not good for you. It's the first time I think ever, that people have in modern history that they've said it's not for everyone and I don't buy that
Yeah, I don't either. Nothing, nothing points in a knowledge economy to just a high school diploma. The high school diploma was your ticket to the middle class for many years, but today you need something beyond the high school diploma. And it can be a college credit certificate, it can be an industry certification, it can be an apprentice program, it can be an associate's program. So I think we have to rephrase that.
Maybe a private four year university pathway is not for everyone, but absolutely a path that lets you upskill and get the skills that you need to be competitive in the workplace is absolutely for everyone, because that's how we create the path to prosperity. That's not only how we create that path for our students, but it's how we meet the talent needs of our community. And it's unfortunate that at some level, that's the narrative.
And for people who are sending their kids to college, they're ignoring that. But who does listen to that is someone who may not think college is for them. And they might think that you have to get into debt, and not that there's financial aid available to them. They might think that college is super expensive. Not that there's a community college in their community, that's very accessible and affordable. And that there are scholarship programs to help.
And so I think we have to continue to make sure that we prove the value of education and how important having a talented workforce is for the country and for the respective communities throughout our entire country.
And it's like you said before, it's education. They can't take that away from you They can take everything else, but they can't take that knowledge and that education and the other piece with that is I go back to the AACNU, the American Association of Colleges and Universities. They do studies every couple of years on what employers want in graduates and the top skills; teamwork, critical thinking, the ability to analyze data and draw conclusions.
How do you get that without a college education, whether it be a two or a four year.
Correct. I mean that, I really believe that students need to graduate from Miami Dade College. It's our goal is that they can demonstrate the academic skills and those clear academic skills of computation and understanding history and, writing and communication. But there's employability skills that they need to know. I call them future proof. Because it doesn't matter where the future goes.
If you know teamwork, problem solving, if you're dependable, if you have those great interpersonal skills, you're going to be future ready. And then the third set of skills, just as we see the future of work evolving and particularly around technology and AI and cyber security, the digital skills. Understanding and applying digital skills to the workplace and to your everyday life.
So we're really trying to focus on making sure that students acquire those distinctive skills because we believe then it makes one, the college education really meaningful and valuable. And I think that's another aspect. You see some studies out there of how many students who maybe went to a four year degree or institution and they're underemployed. Well, that's not the fault of their degree. That's a little bit of the employability skills and the digital skills.
Did you have the next set of skills to be competitive in the workplace. It may not just be a degree. It may be all the other things that you do in the process of gaining that degree, working part time while you're studying, being in leadership opportunities, volunteering, getting an internship, being part of an apprenticeship program.
So lots of other value that we have to make sure that students know about and that we partner with our industry leaders to give those opportunities to students so they can see the high value of coming to college and getting that education.
It's interesting you bring up the apprenticeships and the internships. I just read something this week that there's a big delta between students and employability with or without internships and apprenticeships.
Yes, it's the work based learning. So a lot of employers would like to hire students who graduate and have the work based learning skills and how you acquire those are internships. And what I mean by work based, is that you really get to apply what you're learning. You're in the work environment, you understand the cadence of meetings and other things. And so that happens when you're in an internship program for six to eight weeks in the summer, you get those skillsets.
And if you're path to a degree is through an apprenticeship or your certification is through an apprenticeship, you get it because it's really that on the job training while you're learning as well.
I want to cycle back to those three skills that you talked about just a bit ago, the academic skills, the employability skills, and the digital skills. These skills, I think that is a great way to break down what graduates need to have. You need to have knowledge, which you get from the academic skills. You have to have the employability. How do you work with people, etc. The digital skills in today's day and age is, that's a given.
Those three things pretty much sum up what you need, and then there's the experience, or the employability, that comes from your internships. That to me, you've captured that very nicely.
Thank you. And I think that's what we have to do in the higher education ecosystem to change the 52 percent confidence rate, if we want to get back to really seeing the value of education, we have to be able to do that and deliver on that with a level of confidence, to get consumer confidence in higher education once again.
And one of the things that really impressed me when we spoke last week was how Miami Dade has embraced AI. With a lot of other institutions, it's like, stay away, this is academic plagiarism, et cetera, et cetera. You've embraced it.
We have. When I became President in January of 2021, that fall, we had 500 of our faculty go through artificial intelligence workshops and learn what artificial intelligence was about, how it was evolving. So think about this is 2021. In 2022, we set aside some funds to have our faculty write grants on how they could use AI to enhance student success and learning outcomes. And so we awarded faculty who wrote those grants, ways to be creative and use AI.
So by the time November of '22 came out, where chat GPT and people were calling for the banning of Chat GPT. In that January, we were having just conversations about, we were already on the path to, to building academic programs. And we launched in 2023, our first college credit Certificate in Artificial Intelligence. We launched an Associates in Science in Artificial Intelligence, and we launched the first, Bachelors in Artificial Intelligence approved in the state of Florida.
And so we've embraced it as an opportunity, for us to really enhance learning and the student experience. And we've now made it part of our quality enhancement plan. Our QEP, when you go through accreditation is the digital skills, the acquisition of digital skills and AI awareness among our students.
And when you go back to those three skills needed for the workplace, the academic skills, employability, and digital skills, you're aligning your curriculum to what's students currently need, or graduates currently need, and what they're going to need in the future. AI is going to be, it already is, but it's even going to be bigger, in the next 5 to 10 years.
Right. We didn't start AI as a major. We really started AI with faculty training because we believed it was going to be interdisciplinary. AI is changing the way that we work, the way that we learn, travel, healthcare, everything. So we wanted our nursing faculty to know about artificial intelligence platforms, improving patient outcomes, so that way they could, inform their students. And now nursing students have access to AI, not just our technology students.
And then our education majors and our education teachers being able to know that there's artificial intelligence platforms that are helping enhance K 12. Conamigo is an AI tool that helps students gain those skills, those academic skills that they need. So we really treated it as an interdisciplinary approach, knowing that it aligned to the future of work versus just saying it's a major and only a group of students are going to have that if that's their major.
We really wanted it to be across the disciplines and throughout the college.
So there's not only the student learning aspect. You started with the faculty. Did it require any faculty buy in?
You know, it, not a lot. I think everyone was curious. They bought in into, we weren't going to make you do this exorbitant amount of homework. You're just going to these artificial intelligence workshops, right? And you're learning about AI. And then we were able to get a grant, for All, and then the Good Jobs grant from the federal level. And that just helped, also faculty get excited.
When we got the AI for All and the IBM partnership, now we had IBM helping support our curriculum and different AI programs. And then the Good Jobs grant that came out of the federal government then was really creating a tech coalition, the Miami tech coalition, which is a group of industry and academic leaders really conspiring to have a good impact and making sure that Miami Dade County is ready for the future of work and has the tech talent that it needs.
So there's been so many good validating points along the way of what we were doing was in the right direction. We got some of the private and public funding to be able to scale our work and to be able to go across the college and not just vertically in one academic area.
So, you're doing the AI training, you've got grants for faculty training, you're teaching students how to use it, but one of the things that I think you're doing that other people aren't really thinking about is you're teaching critical thinking and ethics integrity around AI. Tell me a little bit about that.
So when we launched AI, we thought maybe we'll have a hundred students. We've over 400 students, average age 44, in the
Get out of here. 44
44. And the first course that they take is AI and ethics. So we have the conversation about the ethics of AI and how do you use it for the good? How do you use it to advance knowledge? You can choose to be a cut and paste generation, or you can choose to use it and think critically about it and even learn more about something. I think understanding the difference between generative AI, which is going to be very hard to regulate. It's the internet.
It's trying to put that genie back in the bottle is not going to happen. But I think on AI platforms, there's opportunities for us to think about the ethics of it, the data privacy about it. And so I think, those are good conversations and just having the understanding of generative AI and a Chat GPT platform, and other platforms that use AI, to personalize your experience with them.
Yeah, we've also leveraged public private partnerships with this. You mentioned IBM, state federal grants, but you're also working with the Mark Cuban Foundation. Are you not?
Yes, we are. The college has an idea center, which is our center for entrepreneurship. The college supports entrepreneurs and small businesses in our community. 80 percent of businesses in Miami Dade County are considered small businesses, which mean they employ 50 people or less. And so we have a couple of partnerships there through our business and idea center.
One is the Goldman Sachs small business partnership and we've put now almost 800 small businesses through a rigorous program that helps them grow and sustain their small businesses. We have a program called Scale Up, and scale up, which the idea center and in support with the Mark Cuban foundation, helping small businesses do exactly that.
And then work with our students that are entrepreneurs, that have ideas, be able to go to the idea center and develop those ideas and partner with faculty and other industry leaders. And then we were able to also expand the Idea Center to other areas of the community out in Homestead, and our West Campus, which is out in Doral through a partnership with Blackstone.
I'm just blown away. How many students do you have all total at Miami Dade?
About 125, 000.
Oh, okay. So, you're just kind of small.
We're little,
100
We are, I will say we have eight campuses. And so if you go to the Hialeah campus, you're going to get Cafecito at 3:05, and everyone's going to know your name. And if you go over to the West campus, it's almost like you arrived at a little boutique hotel and all of student services and everybody's in one area and our southern most campus is out in Homestead and that also has that small feeling as well as our campus in Little Havana.
And then we have our three larger campuses, if you go to the Kendal and the North campus, it feels, green grass area and that traditional college campus. And then the Wolfson campus is at the heart of downtown, and it sits in the urban core of Miami. And so if you love the hustle and bustle of downtown, you love the Wolfson campus, right? And I think, because we're in every part of the community we need to be students never feel that they're part of this massive institution.
Instead, they feel like they're part of this community and have access to all the different programs that are at any one of our eight campuses, because we have a campus which is just medical programs and that's in the health district and that campus focuses on nursing and health science programs.
I'm blown away. This is this. I've heard so many good things about Miami Dade. But speaking with you on this, I really am. I am blown away by everything that you're doing. We've talked a lot about AI and how you've embraced that. What are some of the other programs that you're doing to generate employment ready graduates? Certificates, micro credentials, things along those lines.
Yes. So we, for example, in cloud computing, we partnered with Amazon Web Services and we created a college credit certificate that leads right into the associates and then a bachelor's into data analytics. One of the things that we're doing is partnering with the superintendent to make sure that we've got enough teachers. And so we've created the educators prep Institute, which allows second career changers to come through a rapid training program and get them ready.
We've also created a residency program with the superintendent. If you're in the last semester of your teacher prep program, you get hired by the school district and you do your final internship hours there, instead of as a volunteer, you actually are in the school district, you're being paid, you have access to professional development mentors as well. And then we're launching an apprenticeship program for teaching so that you can start into an apprenticeship program.
And those are ways that we're partnering there. In the healthcare field, we've partnered with our hospitals. We have expanded our certified nursing assistant program, grew our licensed practical nurse program, and then have grown our RN program by almost 30 percent working with the hospitals, and then launched a surgical tech certificate program as well.
And so I think in all of the different areas, we're really working to meet the employers where they are, whether it's in banking and finance through an apprenticeship program, or whether it's the construction trades Institute. We just got an EDA grant and the state invested in a job growth grant where we'll be able to really do MDC builds. And have students, in those important trade pathways as well as in robotics and semiconductors.
And so doing that stuff around the workforce, but I think the other part that's really important to us and will remain important is the number of students that earn their associates of arts. And then head to one of Florida's best universities, whether it's FIU in their backyard, or UF, or FSU, or UCF, or off to MIT, Harvard, Princeton. We've got a couple of our students that are at MIT, all computer science and engineering students.
And so I think that remains still really important to our mission.
So, not only are you providing a pathway for jobs through, whether it be, short term, long term, etc. You're also providing an excellent pathway to a four year degree to something else.
Correct. Our two plus two articulation agreement in Florida is really the national model where if you take an English 1101 here, it's the same English 1101 as the University of Florida. We have the common numbering system, which ensures that students don't have a loss of credit in that transfer pathway. We're working, knowing that so many of our students want to access the two plus two.
It's affordable, they get to stay home for two years, our tuition is very affordable and with high quality faculty members preparing them for the universities. And then they get to finish those final two years. And we expose our students to undergraduate research so that when they arrive to the universities, they're not at a loss that the freshman or sophomore might've had a research opportunity, but here working through our school of science and others doing undergrad research as well.
Wow, we could spend another hour and a half talking about all this stuff.
Yeah. Look, our motto is BMDC. I love everything that we're doing at the college and really the world class faculty and staff and leadership team that is along with the ride, they're innovating, coming up with new ideas and it's great to be able to say, "Yeah, let's do it. Let's try. Why not? Let's build this program."
we launched a scholarship program for local students, we not only had the honors college scholarship, but we launched the presidential scholars and rising scholars, which provide high achieving high school students a path to Miami Dade college tuition free. And we just launched with the County mayor, a program called future ready.
And it's going to also allow every high school resident that graduates in Miami Dade County, the opportunity to earn their associate's tuition free regardless of what their GPA, it's a great, last dollar program because it's really intended to help the working class and middle class families that might think that college is out of reach for their child.
And we want to say it's within reach and we've got great dual enrollment programs with our high schools to get those students ready and prepared and hit the ground running when they come to Miami Dade College.
Yeah, that's fabulous. Programs of helping the high school students get ready reminds me Madeline Atkins from Mary Cavendish College, which is part of the University of Cambridge, has the same kind of program, and you think about Oxford, you think about Cambridge and you think, elite prep schools, et cetera. No. Mary Cavendish admits 90 percent of its enrollment from public high schools.
That's fantastic.
It is. And that's, it's not unlike what you're doing there at Miami Dade. Well, this has been a fabulous conversation. I really appreciate your, your taking the time with us. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you, are especially proud of
Miami Dade College is democracy's college and because it's about hope and opportunity and we serve as our community's workforce engine and our cultural engine too, because we have programs like the film festival and book fair that are also critically important to our community.
That's great. To wrap up our closing questions, as we always do, three takeaways for your fellow Presidents and Boards.
I think, number one is, the importance of working with industry partners and helping align those workforce programs to what they need. Opening the doors to them to make sure that they know that they're partners in the work with us, because they'll serve as our champions.
Mm hmm.
I think the other, is to me one that's really important, setting out your strategic priorities and then making sure that your budget aligns to those values. And so if you're really thinking about reimagining student success, how are you going to do it? And is your budget aligned to that as well as academic excellence, and everything else. And I think the third, so critical and important is that, the human capital, our human capital, our employees leading with a culture of care.
I really believe that if we want our institutions to be transformative, if we're transforming our students, we have to make sure that our folks on the ground every day feel the appreciation and the care so that they can do the great work ahead of us.
Yep. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
That's right. 100%.
Great. Well, thank you so much. What's next for you and MDC? You've got so many different things going, we could probably devote another half, three quarters of an hour to just talk about this.
We'll continue to do the great work we're doing. We'll build out, I'm sure, more workforce programs, as the community needs it. We're hyperly focused on really reimagining that student experience, that students have that type of Amazon experience.
experience when they come to the college, easy for them to get their classes, get everything transformed, and we believe focused on academic excellence and innovation, we're going to continue to increase our success rates among our students and make sure that they've got the credentials that they need for the future.
Well, Madeline, thank you so much for being on the show. I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to having you back on the show another year or so to tell us about what other new things you've done beyond AI.
Anytime. Thank you so much.
Take care. Thanks for listening and a special thank you to our guest Madeline Pumariega and for her sharing with us what Miami Dade College is doing to ensure its graduates are workforce ready and how it's embraced AI instead of what most colleges have done, push it away.
Join us next week for our 200th episode of Changing Higher Ed when we welcome Amrit Aluwalia, former imagining editor of Evolution, and we'll examine what's going on in higher ed today, how we got here, and what we need to do to remain relevant in the public's mind. Thanks for listening. See you next week.