Whom will the president-elect pick for the top higher education position?
Whom President-elect Joe Biden will pick to put his aspirations for education in place is speculation, right now. But in interviews some of those seen by education policy experts as potential candidates to be the nation’s next education secretary and the Biden administration’s point person on higher education spoke of the need to help students, particularly those with low incomes, who are struggling during the recession to stay in or go to college, and avoid sticking them with massive student debt.
“The main thing we need to do is make colleges and universities promoters of economic mobility,” said former Miami Dade College president Eduardo Padrón, one of those whose names were brought up in conversations with education advocates and lobbyists as a potential candidate for education secretary. “The way I think Biden understands things is the need for colleges to be equalizers in society instead of engines of inequality,” Padrón said.
Education advocates, however, said they had no inside information on who is being considered. Padrón declined to comment on the speculation. But referring to Biden and the nation’s next first lady, Jill Biden, he acknowledged, “I’ve known them for many years.”