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Opportunity Changes Everything: Brodhead Addresses Miami Dade Commencement

Miami Dade College President Eduardo J. Padrón sits with President Richard Brodhead at the college's commencement Saturday.
Miami Dade College President Eduardo J. Padrón sits with President Richard Brodhead at the college's commencement Saturday.

President Padron, President Oroza, members of the state board of education and the state legislature, trustees and members of the faculty, happy families whose sacrifices have paid off at last, and graduates from the Kendall Campus whose dreams come true today:  good evening!  I can't think of a prouder occasion. Danielle Rose, I congratulate you on your outstanding accomplishments and thank you for your kind words.  I also want to acknowledge Pascale Charlot, the new Dean of the Honors College here at Miami Dade, a graduate of my own university.

Colleges are a wonderful invention because colleges are in the human potential business. Colleges exist to help you become the person you have it in you to be, so that you can deliver the full measure of your promise to your world. By the evidence before me today, in the shining eyes of graduates who have overcome every challenge and are ready to take on the world, this college is entitled to say, Mission accomplished. Graduates, you did it! Waiting world, look out!

Now, I'm a sucker for graduations and I've seen a lot of them, but it's especially inspiring to experience this moment at Miami Dade College. Every person who has been president of the United States for the past 20 years has come to speak at a Commencement here.  To the best of my knowledge, that record is unmatched at any other institution of higher education in the country, with the understandable exception of the service academies. So why is Miami Dade the place to go? When Miami Dade calls, why does no one refuse? It's partly due to the respect President Eduardo Padron commands across the nation: I can tell you, this is not a man you want to say no to. But he enjoys such prestige because of the institution you all have created, which is unique in this land.

From the day this school first opened its doors, it was designed to create opportunity where opportunities were hard to come by. This year we're celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the law that made it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of race, sex, religion, or national origin in hiring, housing, education, and public transportation. That law rolled back the hateful legacy that maintained a separate and unequal racial regime a hundred years after the Civil War had ended. This is the law that introduced the language of equal opportunity into American life.

But Miami Dade did not wait for Congress to act; in the early 1960s, you stepped out in front. While some groups were still striving to maintain racially segregated schools in the South, your founders opened the doors of educational opportunity to African-American students, creating the first integrated junior college in the state of Florida. The Miami of that time also hosted another population that lived on the margins of American success: the thousands of refugees who fled here in the wake of the Cuban revolution. Immigrant children too found welcome here and a place to launch American careers.

From this remarkable origin grew a school with highly distinctive characteristics. Already by 1967, Miami Dade was the largest institution of higher education in the state of Florida. Today, Miami Dade College has the largest undergraduate enrollment of any US college or university -- 175,000 of you, enough to fill a fair-sized city. Immigrant-friendly and international from the first, this college's students represent 185 countries and speak 94 languages: the parade of flags at the Olympics was poor stuff compared to the signs of national origin displayed here today. More than half of Miami Dade students are the first in their family to attend college.  Two-thirds are low income. Miami Dade confers more associate degrees than any other college in the country and ranks first in degrees awarded to black and Hispanic students.

If you want to see democracy in action, people of every origin lifting themselves by their own hard work, you could not do better than to witness a Miami Dade commencement. That's why President Bill Clinton came here to speak. That's why President George W. Bush came in 2007. That's why President Barack Obama came in 2011. And that's why President Richard Brodhead came in 2014. I am honored that I too am about to receive a Miami Dade degree. A person who believes in democracy could boast of no higher distinction.

Given the history I've just traced, it is not surprising that the motto of my new school is "Opportunity Changes Everything." That's a great saying, and Lord knows, it is true. A major paradox of our time is that fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the creation of the Equal Opportunity Commission, we are living at a time of deepening inequality: the law made a difference, but it didn't make all the difference. Throughout the history of the United States, education has always been the main vehicle for people to rise higher than their circumstances of birth would dictate. A hundred years ago, high school was still a novelty, and a person with a year or two of high school had dramatically improved employment prospects. In the decades after World War II, college enrollment rose steeply in the US, and attending some college became a way to get a better job. Today, high school skills don't get you very far in the American labor market -- if you stopped there, the doors of advancement are closed pretty tight; and college training is needed for jobs that never had that prerequisite even a short while back. Complex manufacturing needs smart workers, the brains as well as brawn; jobs with a technology component need workers who can manage the technology; service careers need advanced communications skills; employers everywhere want people who are creative problem-solvers, who can see how to reinvent the job and do the work in better ways.

If there had been no college for you to enroll in, there would be no open door, no ladder to help you rise. Instead, Opportunity Changed Everything. But let's remember the funny nature of opportunity. The dictionary tells me an opportunity is "a favorable juncture of circumstances," "a good chance for advancement and progress." True, but that's only half of the story. For the whole truth is that opportunity makes absolutely nothing happen by the sheer fact of its existence. An opportunity creates a possibility; but a possibility only turns into a reality when some man or woman seizes the opportunity, capitalizes on the favorable circumstance, drives the progress to make it happen.

 In short, opportunity requires a shrewd and timely action from someone who might instead have held back. Mark Twain once said, "I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one." And what we celebrate as you complete your degrees isn't just the existence of Miami Dade College: it's that when the possibility of college was afforded to you, you seized the opportunity and saw it through.

Let me tell you a little story from where I come from. About two years ago, I was at a meeting discussing opportunities for professional training that we have for our staff at Duke. It was all very informative but a little abstract until someone gave it a human face. An employee in our library named Jameca Dupree told us her story. She had been a single mother of a six month old baby, with no college training, holding down two part-time jobs, one of them clearing trays in our hospital cafeteria. A person who would have had every excuse to go home every night downhearted and too tired for any further effort instead found her way to Duke's Professional Development Institute, where she began to learn about financial and record-keeping systems, business writing and other administrative skills. From there, she took advantage of Duke's employee tuition benefit, in which Duke reimburses its employees for tuition expenses if they choose to deepen their skills and improve their qualifications. While continuing to work a full time job, Jameca finished a four-year degree in business administration at a local college in two and a half years. Armed with her new degree, she is now a financial analyst in our library system, married, the mother of two sons and a daughter, and she and her husband have purchased their own home. Jameca ended her story on a note of obvious pride: "I am an example to my children." And I thought, no -- you are an example to us all.

Now, Jameca is, I admit, a bit of an overachiever, but I learn something important about you from remembering her tale. Here is the point: Opportunity Changes Everything, If You Actively Seize Opportunities. If Jameca Dupree had not had access to a professional development program or to the tuition benefit, her advancement may not have happened -- though knowing her, I'm betting she would have found a way. But the mere fact that those programs existed didn't guarantee that anything would change for her: she must have had dozens of co-workers who had the same opportunities around them who didn't make those uses of them. So what did Jameca have, what's the specific content of this word I keep using, "to seize"? Well, she had the drive, the desire, the sheer ambition to be something more for herself and her children; she had the strength to keep that dream alive on the many days when it must have seemed just too hard; she had the discipline to manage her life's complex obligations each day so as to leave room to keep advancing toward this goal; she had a commitment to a better future and the grit and determination to make it happen.

My friends at Miami Dade College, you and your families know it far better than I: those are the virtues it took for you to be here today. Your diploma does far more than certify the programs you've passed and the subjects you've mastered, important though those are. Your diploma is an announcement to the world of the character, discipline, persistence, and commitment that you have shown in completing this course of study. College didn't just teach you subjects: it was a trial through which you have built new strengths for yourself. And that whole character, not just the little bits of specialized knowledge, is what you can offer the world now.

Are you following me? It's getting complicated! So let's review. (1) Opportunity Changes Everything. But more accurately, (2) Opportunity Changes Nothing If You Don't Seize It, But Everything If You Do. Then further: (3) Seizing Opportunities Changes Everything, and Especially, Changes You. And now that you've become a more capable person through your work acquiring an education, what else can you change? Well, I hope, your personal circumstances -- your job, your ability to contribute to your family, the example you set to your children and family and community. I wish you this success in ample and abundant measure. But that's not all a capable person can do.

What if the Opportunity of education changed Everything? Could it really change Everything? Well, the world is changing every day, changing for better and changing for worse, and it doesn't change by some fated process -- it changes through the steps humans take and the choices humans make together day by day. Ask yourself about anything that's important to you in our society. You know it could be about to break in a bad direction or, possibly, in a good one. We'll come to better outcomes to the extent that people believe in their power to shape the outcome and pitch in to make the better alternative win out.

Think with me. Recent studies have shown that children with early exposure to a rich learning environment start school far ahead of those who lack such an environment, that they acquire full literacy more easily and progress faster in school, and that they enjoy better health and experience fewer bad health outcomes for the whole course of their life. It's a profound inequality rooted in the earliest years of life. So is it just fated that children will be born to radically different life chances, and that's the end of that? Or could citizens use every power we have, first in our own families, neighborhoods and communities, then in our state and national lives as voters, to promote better and fairer starts in life for all of our children?

At the other end of the age spectrum -- and I know this is especially relevant in Florida -- I'm thinking of our senior citizens. You probably know that the social safety net erected in this country in the last century has begun to have the effect of shifting public resources more and more into the support of older people, with less and less available to invest in creating future opportunities for younger Americans. If nothing is done to change the current system, this disparity will grow more gravely serious with each passing decade, and none of us will escape its consequences. This is a wicked hard political problem -- but it's made harder by the assumption that there's nothing anyone can do about it. We'll all be gainers if concerned citizens come together to find the thoughtful balance point between the needs of the older and the needs of the younger generation. Leave it to someone else and you're unlikely to enjoy the results. You're an educated person: what if you take responsibility to create the world we'll inhabit together, and not just passively inhabit it? You'll never know the extent of what you can change until you try.

My theme today is opportunity, and my point is that opportunity isn't a historical constant. At this moment there are many open questions in our society. The way we answer these questions will help determine what kind of opportunity exists in future and how widely that opportunity will be shared. I look before me at the inspiring spectacle of representatives of all the world's people, through your hard work and belief in your promise, stepping forward to claim your place as full members of American society. But please remember -- education is not only good for opening the door to personal success. It equips you to be a shaper of our shared world, so take that power seriously. Graduates of this college that's been such an agent of opportunity, I congratulate you on the opportunities you have seized and the new ones that await you now.  I wish you wonderful lives. Que Dios los bendiga. Now go help create opportunities for others.