Miami Gardens partners with local colleges to help city residents earn degrees

A new Miami Gardens partnership with colleges and universities seeks to help city residents who may have difficulty obtaining a degree due to their work schedule.

The partnership would allow residents to take free courses from three institutions — Florida Memorial University, Miami-Dade College-North Campus and St. Thomas University — at the Betty T. Ferguson Recreational Complex. The courses will be free for Miami Gardens residents through scholarships provided by the city, Councilman Robert Stephens III said.

Classes begin in September and residents can find out about the course offerings at an information session scheduled for July 17 at 6 p.m. at the recreational complex, Stephens told the Miami Herald. More information will also be available on the city’s website.

“Being a single parent, tending to your children, and then trying to get to a college campus can be difficult and challenging,” said Stephens, who is spearheading the partnership. “But to now be able to go up the street or walk up the street in the same environment where there’s after school programming, that’s the accessible piece of education that we look to create.”

Stephens described Miami Gardens as a working-class community and said the partnership would make higher education more accessible to residents. According to the 2021 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census, 87% of Miami Gardens residents age 25 or older have a high school diploma or higher, and 20.2% of that same group have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

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Stephens said the first two years of the program are free and that classes will be held in the evenings, with professors going to teach at the recreational center in Miami Gardens, where a computer lab and another space will be used as classrooms. In the first year, he said, residents will be able to take courses toward an associate degree from Miami-Dade College, North Campus or earn a vocational certificate from Florida Memorial.

After students receive an associate degree from Miami-Dade College, they can then enroll at Florida Memorial or St. Thomas University to earn a bachelor’s degree.

St. Thomas University Provost Michelle Johnson-Garcia said the school is not participating in the first year, but is reviewing their course offerings for residents.

“We’re committed to doing this,” Johnson-Garcia said, adding she’s hoping their offerings will tailor more to what students want rather than providing a select list of courses from which students choose. “We’ve left it kind of open ended for whatever courses we have that a student may want and we can accommodate them.”

While the partnership caters to adults who were unable to follow the traditional path to a college degree, Stephens said the program is open to recent high school graduates as well. Residents will still have to apply and get accepted into the schools to take the classes.

Florida Memorial University President Jaffus Hardrick said he’s working with the school’s interim provost to offer residents the construction trade program and a new drone program they’re planning to launch. Hardrick said he hopes the construction program can prepare residents for jobs in the construction market. The city has a few projects underway in Miami Gardens, including Miami Gardens City Center, which spans 35 acres and will bring housing, hotels and a Formula One museum to the area.

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“I am a believer that educational institutions have a fundamental responsibility to drive economic change, prosperity and innovation in our communities,” he said.

Hardrick said the certificate-based classes aren’t limited to traditional students or an adult learner, and emphasized those with or without a high school diploma can take them. He also said holding the classes in the evening is key to being accessible to residents. “We have got to be able to relate to those individuals who will be taking advantage of those classes,” he said.

Miami-Dade College, North Campus President Fermin Vazquez said the college’s initial course offerings will be an English class, a career exploration class and a computer technology class in the fall to kick off the program.

Vazquez said the partnership with Miami Gardens could be an example for other communities. “This could be a best practice model,” he said. “We could replicate this with every single community that we serve, the power and the impact that that could have. There’s a lot of good opportunity for us in the future here that we could look at and see what we could come up with.”