Community Colleges

Judy Miner will speak on the Community College System and its importance for education in California.   Judy Miner was recently named Chancellor of the Foothill DeAnza Community College District.  A San Francisco native, Judy Miner grew up in a family of five children and was the first in her family to attend college. Her father, a boilermaker, was born on Guam and her mother, who worked in the I. Magnin shipping department in downtown San Francisco, was born in Guadalajara, Mexico.  Miner entered college originally because she wanted to teach French at her high school. Since then she has studied five languages, become a voracious consumer of audio books and indulged her passion as a lifelong opera buff.

She has worked in the community college arena for 35 years.  She has experience  including administration of both instructional and student services programs as a provost and dean at De Anza.  Prior to De Anza, she worked for several years in the California Community Colleges statewide office in the areas of transfer and student services, giving her deep knowledge of the state's complex community college system. Early in her career she worked in student admissions and records at public and private colleges and universities. She began her higher education career as a registration assistant at her alma mater, Lone Mountain College, which later merged with the University of San Francisco.

Miner has increasingly taken on leadership roles at the state and national level. She currently serves on the boards of the American Council on Education and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. Under the direction of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, she served on a working group that produced a report in 2012 for President Barack Obama on ways to increase the number college graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).