Eduardo J. Padrón
President
Office of the President
300 N.E. Second Avenue
Miami, Florida 33132-2297
305-237-3316
epadron@mdc.edu
Message From the President
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Welcome to a New Year at Miami Dade College
Happy New Year and welcome back to Miami Dade College. I hope you enjoyed your winter break and are refreshed and ready for the exciting time ahead of us.
As I mentioned in the fall, one of the College’s top priorities for the 2011-2012 academic year is increasing student success and completion rates. MDC has several projects in place to support this goal, including MDC³ — a groundbreaking effort to design and implement model pathways to college completion.
Last semester, we kicked off our MDC³ initiative and our implementation team began collecting and analyzing student data, and identifying barriers to college completion. As we move into a new semester and new year, more of you will be involved in discussions about how we can develop pathways to help more students achieve their college completion goals, whether these take the form of a certificate, degree or fulfillment of a defined career goal.
You can be sure to hear more about these efforts at various campus meetings and forums throughout the semester. Through MDC³ and related completion projects supported by major grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, among others, all of you will play a role in shaping the educational landscape of our college, our community and our country.
The work that we’ve done so far in student success and college completion has been recognized universally, but we must strive toward continuous improvement. Doing what is best for our students has been part of MDC’s character since the beginning. Our greatest challenge this year will be to rethink the way we look at student success and to reinvent ourselves to become even better at helping students achieve their academic endeavors. I am confident that we can work together as a team to make this year a benchmark for success.
Thank you.
Eduardo