Dr. Pam Eddinger, President of Bunker Hill Community College: Blurring Traditional Education Boundaries

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, an ongoing conversation with leaders and innovators offering insights into creating a future-ready workforce.

Today, I’m honored to welcome Dr. Pam Edinger, the president of Bunker Hill Community College, to the podcast to discuss how these critically important gateways to higher education must evolve to better serve students in the coming years.

She is actually co-editor of a new book that examines this question called Beyond the College Walls: Partnerships and the Future of Community College Reform, which is due out from Harvard Education Press in September of 2026 — and I should note that I’m delighted to have contributed a chapter.

Pam’s 30-year career in the community college space includes senior posts in academics, student affairs, communications, policy, and executive leadership. Amongst other significant changes, she has led Bunker Hill through a transition to becoming tuition free, a great example of her focus on equity centered higher education.

Thanks very much for joining us today, Pam.

Dr. Pam Eddinger

It is my pleasure to see you.

Van

Well, why don’t we start with getting an understanding of Bunker Hill Community College and the students that you serve?

Dr. Eddinger

Okay, so Bunker Hill Community College is located in Boston. We’re located in Charlestown and with a branch campus in a neighboring gateway city, Chelsea. We have a number of external sites like many community colleges do. We go to where the students are. So we are in the environment.

We have about 18,000 students, credit and non-degree and we are as diverse as they come. One-quarter white, quarter black, quarter Latinx, 15 % Asian, and 10 % a mixture of everything else that’s beautiful. I would say probably three-quarters of our students are adults, and the average age is 27. So we’re in that space where we can look at workforce but also look at the pipeline that comes into the workforce, and we’ve been doing a lot of work in that area.

Van

Now for listeners that are less well-versed on higher education, one of the things that is talked about is the demographic cliff, which is a very “education-ese” term. Talk to us about that and its implications on higher education writ large.

Dr. Eddinger

Right, I think it has an implication in higher education, but I think the demographic cliff also has a deep effect on who our next generation workforce is. So if you imagine 18 years ago, nobody wanted to have babies, so now we have 25 % less graduates coming out of high school, which then translates to 25 % less learners going into college. And in addition to that, because of some of the residual effects of COVID, the college going percentage going from high school to college has dropped from about 70 % to about 50 or 55%.

So you can see that if there’s a big chunk of human beings missing in this pipeline to college, we’re gonna struggle to fulfill the workforce pipeline. We have, I think, in the past thought about the ability to sort of backstop this loss of human talent by looking at our adult populations in the gateway cities, because these are immigrant cities. But with the different changes going on now, we’re increasingly worried that that source of human talent is going to be less available. So the demographic cliff is a thing. We’re beginning to see it everywhere.

Van

And could you also explain dual enrollment and how many more community colleges are participating in pulling students from the high schools?

Dr. Eddinger

Right, because I think that’s part of the strategy as well, right? To get students to finish and complete high school and get some credits under their belt before they go to college. So Bunker Hill alone right now has a little bit over 1,000 dual enrollment and early college students. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we are probably pushing around 11,000, and it is the hope of the governor and the secretary of education that we get up to 100,000 hopefully by the end of the decade.

So it is a source, I think, not only of higher education promotion, but we’re looking at early college also as part of the workforce pipeline. So not just dual enrollment on a scattershot basis, right? We’re looking at the ability to shape the programming at the high schools so students have a taste of what it feels like to be in healthcare or to be in IT or to be in business. So that is a new development, I think, in the field in the last couple of years.

Van

Yes, certainly newer from a public policy because there was reticence to allow for what was in the past considered sort of double counting, right?  So, if you were an alien just dropping in, you’d see like a blurring of the line between high school as a level versus community college versus the four years.

Dr. Eddinger

Yes.

Van

And so I wonder if you could just read the tea leaves and tell us, you know, are these artificial lines now that are being taken down? And is it less, more blurring for the students between the segments to move through these segments?

Dr. Eddinger

That is such a brilliant question because it anticipates so much of what we’ve all been doing, right? I think blurring of the boundaries is exactly right. I mean, that’s what early college and dual enrollment does, right? To ensure that not only do they finish high school, but they enter college. And frankly, sometimes they don’t necessarily enter the community college when they do so well, they get an associate degree while they get their high school diploma.

And they go on to the four year. But there are also, I think, signs that there are lot other kinds of blurring going on. For example, we have joint admissions agreements with our senior universities. So if you can come to Bunker Hill, and I’ll say to you, well, you can be jointly admitted at Bunker Hill and UMass Boston. So you don’t have to do that transfer thing in year two and a half or year three. So you can focus on the identity of being a student and focus on the work.

We do this with two or three public institutions as well as private institutions. So it prevents the loss of credits and there is something to being able to form that early professional identity, right, as well as the student identity. The other kind of blurring that I see, well, and we also have, for example, our neighboring college, Roxbury Community College, has an associate degree to master’s degree tract. So you don’t even have the get off the train after you finish your bachelor’s degree. I mean I can see it in my head, right?

So we have something called No Wrong Door. It’s a concept that we’ve sort of subscribed to at Bunker Hill that no matter where you come in — you can come in as an ESL student, you can come in as a regular high school graduate, you can come in as an adult, you can come in non-credit, you can come in credit — wherever you come in, we’re going to set a path and a plan for you. Because ultimately, unless we have students going through from non-credit training to their certificates to their degrees and to higher degrees, their salaries and their take home is not going to move, right? At least not dramatic enough. So when we focus on economic mobility, the blurring of boundaries that you’re talking about really makes a lot of sense.

The other elements that are blurring the boundary right now are micro-credentials and work experience. So the micro-credentials usually is a piece of a credentialing pulled out of a larger bucket. Like I can do a micro-credentialing in cybersecurity or do a micro and pull it out of an associate degree in IT. Or I can pull out an EMT portion from a paramedic associate degree. It allows folks to have an immediate identification with the industry so that they can get a job immediately. You can get a job tomorrow if you have a CompTIA credential or Cisco credential.

So we’re getting smarter because we understand that if you are a post-traditional student, your life is not just school. Your life is all of these different things that you’re doing for family for children for parents. So the easier those chunks of education are to be discreet about, the easier it is for students to come in and pick them up and spring forward. Right now, they all have to be stackable, as you well know in the work that you do at Futuro Health. So a CNA can stack to an LPN, can stack to sometimes an EMT, sometimes to a paramedic, sometimes to nursing.

And then the associate degree nursing stacks to bachelors and they stack to masters, and then we get the masters nurses back so they can teach for us. So I think there’s a really healthy ecosystem that’s developing and I think it is not just the colleges that are getting that, right? There are nonprofits and organizations like yours that understand that the life cycle is very different now. And you go where the life cycle is instead of forcing students to come back and do this two year, four year, you know, masters, doctorate.

You really opened the door to a lot of answers, Van. That was a wonderful question. If you allow me, I’ll also talk to the experiential learning piece.

Van

I would love that because it sounds easy enough to, for example, have micro-credentials recognized as part of an associate’s degree, but the mechanics of actually getting that done is way harder if you come from inside these institutions. So I would love to hear more.

Dr. Eddinger

Yes, and you know, sometimes we’re actually forced into providing those micro-credentials because we realize as we’re starting to prepare students for their internships or for their interviews or for their next jobs that it is really hard to lay a CV or a resume in front of an employer and have the employer recognize within a minute or two minutes — because that’s all the time they have — to see what the potential of the student is on two sides, right?

So there is, in our minds, a perfect employee or almost perfect or perfectible employee has two sets of skills: they have the skills that’s related to their discipline — whether they’re LPNs or nursing or if they are in IT, if they have help desk credentials or have CompTIA credentials — but there’s a second set of credentials that are durable skills….things like communications, how to work in a team, all the things that the liberal arts folks say you need to have.

So we’re looking at these two sets of credentials and we’re thinking my goodness, an employer will have to decipher all of that from a CV. So what we started doing is we started badging. We’re developing a set of five to seven badges that are employer validated. We have an advisory committee and what we do is we pull the competencies out of the courses that the students are taking.

For example, if you took a course in English or in journalism or anything that’s writing oriented, you have that writing skill, so we can pull that particular competency out and say, you have a piece of this badge. Now, if you’re also taking a speech course, we can pull that competency out, and they have presentation skills. Or if they’re serving as a tutor or a mentor, they have negotiation skills. What we ask the students to do is to use these badges in their CV, in their resume, so it’s immediately recognizable for the employer.

Now for the hard skills pieces, it’s the same. If you have a Cisco validation or Microsoft credential, put them on your resume in such a way that they’re immediately recognizable. Is it hard to do? I think it might be easier to do in things that have industry credentials that are already established like CompTIA or as I said, Microsoft and so on. It is harder, I think, in the health field because it is not a field that is used to badging. It’s used to saying, show me all your clinical hours, so I think it’s going to take us just a little bit more time to do it there.

But think about all the other things that we need. Competency in AI can be badged, that can be a micro credential. Anything that the industry has a set of industry standards that they have defined, we can do. Is it going to be a nightmare for my dean to assemble all of this back once you’ve got all these pieces on the side? Yes, but that’s always been the work of community colleges — how to repackage and unpackage. And I think we need to take a lesson from folks like Futuro Health or other organizations that have recognized that it’s as much about the jobs as it is about the relationship and the backbone organizations that brings the relationship together.

We are learning how to do that. We’re learning how to do that at the community college. We’re learning how to do it in apprenticeships and “learn and earn” internships and how to make those systems less discreet and allow us to do things that we commonly do in a university environment, but also do those.

For example, we’re doing degree apprenticeships. Not only do we have registered apprenticeships, which is wonderful because the students are learning and earning, and they’re in the workplace and they’re promised an occupation, a job. In degree apprenticeships, you get all that. You get the employer who has agreed to teach a student on site, we have a set of didactic classes, but we’re also counting all of those credits so by the time the apprenticeship is done, they also get an associate degree.

So if they, for example, were trying to do one in nursing, it’s gonna take a bit. Because the field is very, very dependent on just sort of decades worth of what it means to first do the didactic in the classroom and then come into the clinical. We’re saying, no, do them together. So it’s going to take a little bit of time.

But if I have a student who gets an associate degree and passed their NCLEX and can practice at the end of their first two years, an apprenticeship will not allow them to go on as a BSN. But with an associate degree, they can. So the goal is to get the best of all worlds… to get them a license, to get them an associate degree, get them working in the workplace and get paid for it and still have the opportunity to go on for their bachelor’s.

Van

My goodness, Pam, if you could crack the code on getting those structures in place, I hope you can work beyond your local footprint.

Dr. Eddinger

Well, I think there are some colleges who have moved in that direction. We’re trying to do that with surgical technology. That’s our starting place, and then we’re talking with our large hospital partners. The magic about being in Boston is that we are a medical center. So all of the folks who are doing pipeline talent development are also our colleagues. We go to the same workforce development committees together. We do capital labor planning together. So we are very fortunate to be in that place. So, we’re going to try. If we can help the rest of the field get there, it would be great.

Van

Well, I know Futuro Health would definitely be interested in feeding more talent from the local communities into your sequences if you’re able to put that up. By the way, I have one clarification question for you. You had talked about an AA directly to an MS. Is that an example of a sequence where you’re skipping the bachelor’s step?

Dr. Eddinger

No, no, I don’t think so. So Roxbury Community College is four stops down on the transit from us. They’re a wonderful sister college. They have partnered together with a four-year university…it’s kind of like joint admissions all the way into the master’s program. I don’t think they skip their the bachelor’s degree and the program is with I believe Northeastern University, and Northeastern is literally 15 minutes away from us so we’ve been experimenting within the system with programming that is either joint admissions or articulated admissions. Anything to keep the student from having to stop, right?  If you close off all of the leakage from the pipeline, it’s more likely that the students will continue to go.

Our Board of Higher Education also passed legislation this last week to allow for innovations, particularly in reduced credit bachelor’s degrees and applied bachelor’s degrees. So I will expect to see that that will come along and it will, I think do a great deal for workforce.

Van

So I have a question for you in terms of financing. This afternoon I’m heading over to Stanford and we’re looking at this question about creating a learning society when you have a 20 to 50 work span. It’s so different from the schooling model that was set up where basically you consume your education early on.

Dr. Eddinger

Right.

Van

What are your thoughts? You were an advocate for and were able to put in place the tuition-free program at Bunker Hill. As you think about who pays for all of us to come to consume our education and training the first time, and then all the subsequent doses of upskilling that we’re going to need. I wonder if you have any thoughts in terms of what’s the blend of private sector, public sector, and personal out of pocket funding?

Dr. Eddinger

I think we have right now in Massachusetts all of those iterations, right? Let’s talk about free community college for a minute. For many years, in California and other parts of the United States, community college funding has dropped for the last decade or decade and a half. But we had the good fortune of the convergence of a couple of things. One is that we have Maura Healy as our governor and Karen Spilka as our Senate president and both women recognize the need for workforce with the population cliff and all these students out there. We have 770,000 “some college, no degree” adults in our commonwealth. So they see all of that as a way to lift the economy and get the next generation workforce going.

And the two of them pushed free community college through the legislature. How do we fund it? We fund it by a special tax. It’s called the millionaire’s tax. So anybody in Massachusetts making over a million dollars, anything that’s overage of what they earn, it’s an additional 4 % tax. So we were able to have a pocket of revenue that is dedicated to transportation because our trains were falling apart and also to education. So the free community college dollars are legislatively earmarked from that pot of money.

Now, I think there’s 38 or 40 out of the 50 states that have something like this for free community college. But the free community college piece is not tied to age. It is actually tied to stages of accomplishment. You can come as long as you qualify for Pell, which is pretty easy. You can come to community college regardless of age if you don’t already have an associate degree, which I think covers a good portion of the folks who have some college no degree.

And just very recently, we found out that there is also a boosting of the regular financial aid that comes from the state that’s also not age limited and it will take you up to your bachelor’s degree. So there’s this articulated financial aid system that would allow you to do that. We actually don’t do a good enough job, I think, in our non-credit workforce training because we’re not funded. We’re not like, let’s say, North Carolina, which does a wonderful job in funding their non-credit and therefore they attract the employer sector in coming in because they’re already paying for the training. They will come in and give them facilities and meet all kinds of other supply needs so that they can do the training. I think that is a really terrific model. I’m hoping that Workforce Pell will play a part of that role in funding noncredit.

Now, we’re in our early days and depending on what the states will do in terms of turning out regulations, that’s a possibility. So when you look at that lifespan that you’re talking about, it is not so much age that worries me. It is, do you have two associate degrees and you want a third one? Is it justified? Maybe, because I’ve seen lots of folks with bachelor’s degrees in, let’s say the liberal arts and in the sciences, now coming back for nursing. So how much do we invest in one individual and their opportunity to come back over and over again? I don’t think we do enough.

I don’t think we have enough policies and investments in place for more advanced kind of professional reeducation. We need to have a whole pocket of funding and policy, either state policy or federal policy, to learn how to deal with AI. I get an entire population here who’s actually not coming to school here but working for me, right? Who needs that training? Maybe it’s an eight week workshop to have AI to be relevant to the work that they’re doing. There needs to be professional development and we’ve never thought about our populations in that way.

But I think we’ve got some structures that are possible. You know, if we can carve out Workforce Pell, maybe we can carve out professional development for established professionals. We can do tax credits, or we can do cost share with companies. I mean, think about the ability for companies to retain senior talent and all of the things that we need. You can always get someone who’s young and energetic, full of today’s knowledge to do computers, but you’re gonna need more seasoned folks to come in and teach you durable skills, how to work on a team, how to foster the kind of culture that we need to have the workplace flourish. So I really think that it’s about tax policies. It is about a different imagination into how long can we work, right?

Van

Well, Pam, this is a good segue. I want to hear more about your new book that is coming out. It’s Beyond the College Walls, Partnerships and the Future of Community College Reform. How would you describe the book and why our listeners would want to read it?

Dr. Eddinger

I think community colleges have always been the underdog. We’ve always sort of innovate out of everybody’s sight because we are scrappy. The kind of things that we do in the community college world will send everybody else in a tailspin. So for the last 30 years, we’ve been doing community college reform because we know that we have low retention, low graduation rate, all of that. I remember the completion agenda and President Obama and his preference to get everybody a degree, get everybody into college.

But we realized when COVID came along, how much our students in the community colleges were struggling because things were falling apart. Social safety nets were falling apart, and no matter what we do, doing reform in academics just in the colleges is not going to cut it. We can’t do this work alone. It’s too huge of a piece of reform to do.

So our supposition is that we’re going to need partners. We’re going to need partners in the community. We’re going to need employers. We’re going to need policy writers and researchers. And we have to sort of breach the boundaries. We talked about these boundaries going away between K-12 and college and so on, but the boundaries in the ecosystem that’s higher education, those boundaries need to soften.

More and more we’re hearing people saying things like, we’re going to have a P3, a public-private partnership and we have folks doing that everywhere and examples are in this book. You can go beyond that simple exchange of, “can you give me an internship for three students” to “can you help me build a facility that’s gonna forward my business and then be a learning ground for your students for decades to come?” Those are really larger scale.

I mean, I’m looking at what you do, right? In Futuro, you did exactly an example of that. That’s why we wanted your piece in the book, which is how do you get real direct in connecting students to the future? And when you have meetings, I’m sure you have all these different people at the table. For leaders, it takes a different kind of skill set. It’s not being in curriculum committee and hammering out what the assessments are going to be. It is sitting in community, in committee, in associations, and really being a part of what makes the economic world work by providing the talent pieces.

So the first half of the book lays out the history of what we’ve been doing in the last 30 years. It talks about the population cliff and how we need a relatively large number of non-traditional workforce people because we don’t have the traditional folks all with us anymore, and the effects of COVID. The second half of the book then talks about the different kinds of partnerships and the different ways of looking at how to form them and what are more effective and what are least effective.

It is not a recipe book. You can’t go in and use it for cooking. So what we’ve been saying is that this book is really a thought companion…that you have history, but you also have really terrific examples of what a bunch of folks have done and you all are so different in those examples. But as a college leader, you can take lessons from all of that and you really need to craft your own because every community is different.

So I think that one of the reasons why this book came about was I was teaching a summer course a couple of years ago and I couldn’t find a textbook that has these new concepts in it. And I’m like, well, if I can’t find it, I’ve got to go find some people to write it, and that’s what we did. So we’re really looking forward to generating some conversations, and hopefully that will be a lot of fun and it will get us moving forward.

Van

Before we close, I would love to invite you to tell us about any exemplars you wanted to mention?

Dr. Eddinger

Well, certainly there are colleges that stand out in everything from the effective way of culture to how to build something with Amazon. On one end you have folks like Russell Lowery Hart, who is now the Chancellor of Austin Community College, and he was at Amarillo College in Texas. He talks about how you really have to love our students into success. You have to know them so well in order to shape programming around them and connect them to college.

College Unbound, I think, is absolutely out of this world, out of the box. There is no campus per se. It’s competency-based, and it’s one bachelor’s degree in organizational management and it’s all adults. They have a faculty that is untraditional. So every student gets exactly what they need. It is magical.

And then you have a very, very large college like Northern Virginia Community College with Dr. Anne Kress at its head. She has turned an entire portion of the college into this economic engine, working with Amazon, working with just everybody in the community. So I think folks will enjoy the stories in the book. It’s varied. It’s cutting edge.

Van

Well, thank you so much for letting me contribute to the content. I can’t wait for it to come out and I definitely need a signed copy there, Pam.

Dr. Eddinger

We will all sign it, right? I have never had this many authors in a book. We have like 14 or 15 of you, but each one is different and each one is unique, so you can just pick one and say, I’m gonna sort of sort of mimic this one, but I’m going to do it my own way. So it is very exciting and I think this is where the next iteration of community college must be. We have to break out of the walls. We can’t just stay in a classroom. It doesn’t work that way.

Van

Well, Pam, let’s close with a question for you, which is what makes you most optimistic about the future of learning?

Dr. Eddinger

This book made me optimistic because we were locked into sort of a reform trend that just keeps iterating and iterating and iterating. The fact that I have this many colleagues who can break the walls and get out so philosophically there is a bright future that’s very different. The community colleges know how to reform because we’ve been doing it for so long, so that makes me optimistic.

And also I look at my students, 18,000 of them…I mean, the kind of hoops that they jump through just to come through the door touches me every day. There’s no reason not to be optimistic. We’re inventive people.

Van

Well, thank you very much, Pam, for being with us today. We learned a lot.

Dr. Eddinger

Well, I’ve had so much fun and Van, you do such amazing work. You’ve been one of the exemplars that I know of for the last 30 years. I followed you from the Chancellor’s Office at the community colleges in California to what you’re doing now. You have done the field a huge amount of service and thank you for that.

Van

Well, Pam, you and I are still at it.

Dr. Eddinger

And we’re still at it, absolutely.

Van

Absolutely. I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in America.