The life story of Dr. Pam Eddinger, president of Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, tracks the upward path of a striving immigrant. Her parents brought their three children to the United States for better educational opportunities than were available in Hong Kong.
Eddinger’s father worked as a waiter in Chinese restaurants in Florida. Her mother did piecework, stitching clothing on an industrial sewing machine at home so she could tend to the children after school. She didn’t have to learn English for her job—and never did.
Eddinger performed well enough in school to get into elite schools: Barnard College as an undergraduate and then Columbia University for a master’s and a Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature. Along the way, she benefited from what she calls “accidental mentors.”
“I came when I was 11. My English was not great, and I was a little immigrant girl in Miami,” Eddinger says. “If someone had not seen the potential, I’d be making widgets somewhere.”
At Bunker Hill, the largest community college in Massachusetts, Eddinger sees her mission as trying to ensure its 14,000 students benefit from mentoring by design, not by accident. About two-thirds of the students are of color and about the same proportion receive Pell Grants, an indicator of low income, and about 90 percent have needed developmental coursework, according to fall 2014 data. More than 800 students from 105 countries speak 75 different languages.
“I see our work in the community college as a restoration of privilege—what our students didn’t get in a middle- or upper-middle- class family, where college-going culture is just a given,” Eddinger says. “I don’t want that potential to be wasted.”
In April, Eddinger accepted an award on Bunker Hill’s behalf for one program that advances that goal, Learn and Earn, which the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) recognized as the Outstanding College/Corporate Partnership.
