News & Updates
Gregory A. Haile, J.D., recently joined Achieving the Dream as a senior fellow. Haile has dedicated his career to improving the social and economic mobility of racially minoritized and economically marginalized students, families, and communities. Recently, he has been exploring how to make artificial intelligence (AI) serve all students and communities and what full employment looks like for those who work but still struggle to get by without their basic needs met. Haile sat down with ATD to talk about his own educational journey, his vision for the future, and his new role at ATD.
Q: How did your own personal educational experience inform your focus as a college leader?
I grew up in South Jamaica, Queens, New York, in the 1980s and early 90s. It was at the height of the crack epidemic. I did not live in the best neighborhood. There were bars on every window of my home. I lost friends, and I didn’t have family members who had gone to college. Beginning in third grade, my mother would lie about my address so that I could attend school in a better neighborhood. I had to go through the projects, take a 45-minute bus ride, and walk for another 15 minutes before I arrived at my very nice public elementary school.
When I finished sixth grade in 1989, I said to a friend, who came from this more affluent neighborhood, “Isn’t this amazing? We’re going to be the last class of the decade.” Without hesitation, he said, “No, we’re going to be the last class of the millennium because we’re going to graduate from college in 1999.”
That was the first time I had ever heard the word “college.”
This experience has always reminded me of the chasm that exists between talent and opportunity. I ended up going to the high school in my own neighborhood. I graduated with a 2.7 grade point average and was in the top 15% of my class. I was lucky enough to go to college at Arizona State University but needed remedial education. I did not know how financial aid worked, so my mother took out a parent loan before I later realized that I was Pell eligible and took on several work study jobs. Eventually, I graduated from Columbia University law school, but, just as importantly, my education helped me understand the gaps that exist among students based on background, family wealth, and exposure to postsecondary education.
Q: How did you find yourself working at a community college in South Florida?
I got married in South Florida and became involved in the community. After seven years as a corporate litigator, I’d already taken on leadership roles in nonprofit service organizations and tried to think of a new direction where I could focus my energy. I knew that the most powerful impact on my life outside of my mother was my educational experience. So, when a friend suggested that I apply to become Broward College’s first in-house general counsel and vice president for public policy and governmental affairs, I applied. One month into that work, I knew it would be the type of work that I wanted to spend my life engaged in. Seven years later, I had the privilege to become president of the college.
Q: What were some of the first things that you tried to accomplish?
I knew that we needed a new approach for serving students with the greatest challenges. We need to help them become proximate to postsecondary opportunity.
I want every student to have the kind of experience my own daughters have had, not what I went through. I want them to know from the beginning that college is an option for them. My children know this because I’ve been talking about it since the day they were born.
Now what I am suggesting is not easy. We can’t be at the dinner table of every family in low SES neighborhoods. What we can do is stop asking those with the greatest challenges to come to us, to learn about us. We consistently ask those that have no transportation and no access to technology, with many jobs and responsibilities and little free time, to come to where we are.
So, we began Broward UP, which was created to address this challenge: What does consistent engagement look like if we are the ones who go where these students are? What would it look like, for example, if people could look out of their bedroom windows and see where they will go to class, if they could walk just 200 paces and find the class or transition program that leads them to a certificate and degree?
We identified the zip codes of neighborhoods with the highest unemployment rates and lowest postsecondary attainment rates. And we went further, identifying which of our employees lived in those zip codes. We thought they could say with confidence: “Look, this is where I’m from. I went to college, and I know firsthand the power of education and the fact that we have the capacity to help more students attend and complete college.” But there isn’t one way of providing the capacity. It requires a careful assessment of the community to understand the resources and tools available to ensure opportunity for everyone.
Q: What do you see as the potential of artificial intelligence to expand opportunity for students and communities?
We need to start by leveraging the past to understand how AI will affect our students and institutions. It took about 40 years after the first light bulbs were demonstrated before the majority of the population benefited from them. There was opportunity for some and a significant lag for others. The same thing has been true with the desktop computer, the internet and digital fluency.
We need to view AI as both a positive and negative factor and find out how it can help increase social and economic mobility and how it will further perpetuate the stratification of wealth and opportunity. I think ATD can be an important player in addressing how we can create scalable and unifying AI policies and practices that demonstrate what is effective and what is ineffective. Ultimately, we’ll need to show what success can look like when we all have opportunity and what it looks like for our individual students, our institutions, and our communities.
Q: Can you tell us about some of the recent roles you have played with the Federal Reserve of Atlanta, the Secretary of Commerce’s Talent for Growth Task Force, and as a senior fellow at Harvard and how that relates to your work with ATD and community colleges in general?
Currently I serve as deputy chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which is federally mandated to preserve price stability and full employment — crucial issues for higher education leaders and ATD. We need to understand what it means to have full employment and what the disaggregated data tell us about who is being employed and how.
I have also been a member of the Talent for Growth Taskforce, a collaboration of education, business, and labor leaders from the U.S. and the European Union. The taskforce has looked at how technology can accelerate innovative skill development among marginalized and low-income communities to ensure global competitiveness. That work has reinforced my sense that the United States is a strong innovator but needs to start earlier and act more often when it comes to postsecondary engagement and opportunity. We also need to be more aggressive in serving marginalized communities. Here again, I think this connects with ATD’s work, particularly around the need for stronger partnerships from K–12 through higher education and into employment.
Finally, my research at Harvard focuses on the reality that many individuals and families continue to lack economic mobility and that addressing this challenge is becoming harder to achieve, in part due to continued acceleration of inaccessible technologies such as AI. I have been exploring what policies may be effective to address these challenges.
Q: How do you view the expanding role of short-term credentialling within the context of full employment and engaging talent?
First, institutions need to be focused on the personal circumstances of the individuals they serve and identify programs and modes for delivery that speak to the circumstances a given individual may face. In my view, for many, short-term certification is the only way to begin to engage in postsecondary opportunity. And if that’s true, it is a place that we have to be willing to engage.
At the same time, we need to ensure that people see short-term credentials for what they are: not an end point but a step toward long-term compensation and a family-sustaining career. Often people have a hard time thinking about whether they’re going to have a paycheck in a given week — let alone what’s going to happen down the road. But, in fact, that credential can bring learners a long way toward achieving sustainability and success. So, I am less caught up in the mechanism than the results.
Q: What do these issues of work, earning, and learning mean for community college leaders?
Too often we think about lobbing solutions into communities without authentically engaging and understanding the perspective of those who live in those communities. Our design must help lift individuals and communities by engaging others in what the design should look like. When we examine our role, it comes down to one question: “Are we optimizing our service to our students in our community?” That requires using data to drive that understanding to discover not what feels or looks good but what the data tell us. Then it is incumbent upon us to act boldly to move our institutions in new directions.
Q: What are your thoughts on ATD and the opportunity you have to join the organization?
Broward College was an ATD college before I became its president, and we significantly increased our institutional success by leveraging ATD resources after I took the helm. I have had the chance to serve on the Board of ATD, and now I am excited about being able to serve ATD in this new capacity.
I really could not be more honored to play a material role in this courageous organization. ATD embraces the challenges that are my driving issues — issues that come with serving those who need us most. In its 20-year history, ATD has changed the arc of how community colleges serve those who face the greatest challenge and is an incredible inspiration.