Our Man in Washington

June 8, 2009 -  "Half of the students who begin college never finish," said President Obama in his address to Congress in February. "This is a prescription for economic decline, because we know the countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow."

Obama went on to announce an ambitious goal for the country: to once again lead the world in our proportion of college graduates.

Helping to attain that challenge will be Glenn Cummings, a student in Penn GSE's Executive Doctorate in Higher Education program and newly appointed assistant deputy secretary at the Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education.

Cummings, former Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives and an early Obama supporter, acknowledges, "The task will be tough, but it's absolutely the right goal."

For his part in the task, Cummings will be focusing on career and technical education — with an emphasis on "getting adults back into higher education and forging effective alliances to encourage people toward higher completion rates."

Getting adults to return to college is a complicated business, Cummings explains, with a particular set of needs — things like flexible scheduling to accommodate work and financial aid to help students with families to support.

In the Maine legislature, Cummings posted an impressive performance on education issues. He was instrumental in leading a bi-partisan drive to increase higher education appropriations and advocated for the statewide policy requiring all graduating high school seniors to fill out a college application.

"When I was chair of the education committee in my second term," he adds, "we pushed to develop the community college system — something Maine had never had before. Since then, community colleges have exploded in the state."

Cummings's record resonates with those of his new boss, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Duncan has called community colleges "an undervalued resource" in the efforts to improve America's college completion rates.

Cummings started his career as a high school social studies teacher; directed a non-profit foundation that provides support for Portland's public schools; and served as dean of advancement at Southern Maine Community College.

In 2008, he enrolled in Penn GSE's Exec Doc program with an eye to one day becoming a college president. While acknowledging that the workload will be tough, he doesn't intend to let his new job keep him from completing his degree.

In fact, he sees the GSE program as a real resource for him in D.C. "We're putting together a paper right now on the public agenda for higher education," he explains, "We're looking at how you get adults back into college, what you do to be effective there. It's almost as though I'm writing a white paper!"

What's more, his dissertation focuses on a signature issue for Obama — green jobs. In it, Cummings will examine the role of higher education in the development of a green workforce.

"Those are nice tie-ins, very concrete connections," Cummings says, "But more broadly, this program really talks about how you make higher education institutions effective, how you set the right goals, and how you manage them.

"Education is a vital issue at a vital time," he continues. "We can use the recession. It can give people incentives to get more education — and we can help give them the opportunity to go back, and America really needs that."