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Most people know her as Jill Biden. But to some she is Dr. B, the compassionate and challenging educator who went the extra mile.

Mikaela Stack knew her English professor as the “petite, blond lady” who “dressed up to the T.” The professor was a strict, but fair, grader. She assigned an essay every week and shared stories about her trips through Africa.

Stack had left Sweden in 2014 to pursue a degree in political science, and she had been living in D.C. for only a few months when she started taking English at the Alexandria campus of Northern Virginia Community College, or NOVA.

One night, her roommates — two Capitol Hill staffers — turned on the TV to watch President Barack Obama deliver the State of the Union address.

“They show the balcony [and] Michelle Obama,” said Stack, now a stay-at-home mother. “And I thought, ‘Why . . . is my English professor sitting next to Michelle Obama?’ ”

Stack said she ran to find her English Composition 111 syllabus.

“My English teacher is the second lady of the United States!”

Jill Biden has largely avoided talking with students about her life in politics, dodging questions about her husband and, sometimes, referring vaguely to him as a relative, she told NPR in 2013 . When students sign up for her class, it is listed as being taught by “staff,” rather than “Dr. Biden,” she wrote in her 2019 memoir, “Where the Light Enters.”

Biden had two major roles during her eight years as second lady. One was being the vice president’s wife, performed, for instance, on diplomatic trips abroad. The other was teaching English. And she’ll do it all again as first lady. When she returns to NOVA this spring, she will become the first woman in the position to continue her professional career.

Biden’s spokesman, Michael LaRosa, said that “out of respect for the privacy of her students and to preserve the integrity of her classroom,” she will continue to keep her teaching separate from her other role, as first lady, juggling the demands of two challenging jobs.

Biden’s former students recall a compassionate educator who emphasized her work with them to the point that many didn’t know — or forgot — that she was married to the vice president.

“She never really addressed the whole thing about being Jill Biden,” said Juliette Rosso, who had Biden as an English professor in 2017. “She was genuine, and she was humble.”

Stack said about Biden: “She cares deeply. She’s incredibly engaging and challenging and kind.”

'She won us over'

Before the soon-to-be first lady graded papers on Air Force Two, she spent 15 years as a professor at Delaware Technical Community College. Before that, she was a high school teacher.

In the 1980s, she taught English at the now-shuttered Claymont High School outside Wilmington as it was being integrated. Many of the students came from under-resourced schools. They “were behind on basic skills, and my job was to help them catch up with their peers in reading,” Biden wrote in “Where the Light Enters.”

Yolanda McCoy, now a Wilmington City Council member, found herself in Biden’s classroom in 1988. She was a transplant from Chester, Pa., whose mother had moved her to Delaware because she thought the schools there were better.

McCoy said she wasn’t particularly excited about school, at least not at first. Her attendance was spotty, she said, and English wasn’t exactly her favorite subject. But Biden was different from her other teachers, McCoy said. She was patient.

“She won us over,” McCoy said. “By the end of the year, we were engaging more.”

Biden applied the same approach at NOVA, former students said. She arrived at the now-14,000-student campus in Alexandria soon after her husband took office in 2009.

“As a lifelong educator, I couldn’t leave that behind,” Biden said when she delivered the commencement address for NOVA in 2016. “I couldn’t just move to Washington and only live Joe’s life.”

Jim McClellan, NOVA’s liberal arts dean, recalled to The Washington Post that Biden once asked if she could leave school 10 minutes early to go on a diplomatic trip through South America.

“I said, ‘Well, since the jet is revving up and using gas sitting on the runway, go ahead,’ ” McClellan said. Biden left with a stack of papers to grade and had them done when she returned from the trip.

In 2010, Biden attended a Winter Olympics skating competition three time zones away in Vancouver, B.C., said Brittany Spivey, a former NOVA student who introduced Biden as the school’s graduation speaker in 2016.

“Hours later, she was back in her classroom teaching,” Spivey told the audience.

'She didn't have to do that'

Biden — also known on campus as Dr. B — made it a point to understand her students beyond their writing styles, said Kaleel Weatherly, an associate editor at American City Business Journals who took Biden’s English class in 2012.

Weatherly said he told Biden that he wanted to be a sports reporter and that she was encouraging. “She made me feel confident in my writing,” he said.

Biden assigned books about humanitarianism and encouraged students to consider — and share — how they could make the world a better place.

Stack said that while settling into American life she caught bronchitis and coughed endlessly though her classes.

“I didn’t have insurance. I didn’t even know where to go to the doctor,” Stack said. “[Biden] was trying to help me and figure out how to get that care. She didn’t have to do that. No one else did it.”

And the compassion was returned. Biden, in her memoir, recounted the time her sister underwent a stem cell transplant. The professor told her class at NOVA that she would miss their next session so she could care for her sister.

“I quickly faced the whiteboard so the students wouldn’t see the tears filling my eyes,” Biden wrote. “When I turned back around, every single student was standing. They made a line and came up to hug me, one by one. At that moment, I knew just how much I needed them.”

More than 50 NOVA students, on a site for anonymous reviews of teachers, Rate My Professors, described Biden as a “respected” educator who “gives good feedback.” They also called her a tough grader who assigned a lot of homework, and they delivered an average rating of four out of five stars.

“Her approach helps students to become excellent writers and develop organizational skills,” one user wrote in May 2017. “Dr. Biden gives a lot of homework, but motivated and well-organized students can cope with homework easily.”

Some students disagreed.

“Very tough grader. Does not have a rubric at all,” one wrote in December 2018. “She grades everything based on her gut feeling. I worked so much, and nothing seemed to be good enough for her. I tried to communicate with her on how I could improve my grade, but she did not help much.”

Twenty-two people who said they took English with Biden at Delaware Tech gave her a slightly lower rating, 3.6 out of 5 .

“I didn’t really like her at first, but I grew to respect her, and I realized that all she wanted to do was to help us,” one of Biden’s Delaware Tech students wrote in August 2008. “If you do the work you will pass her class.”

A role model

Biden took a special interest in the women on campus. She mentored mothers who had returned to school to get their degrees and, in 2009, helped launch a program at the NOVA women’s center to help female students stay enrolled.

Nazila Jamshidi, who left her home in Afghanistan to attend NOVA in 2016, said she worked with Biden in the women’s center. She noticed that other Afghan women were having trouble integrating and adapting to cultural differences at the school, and she pitched a solution to Biden and other women’s center leaders.

“Many of them would come to college to get their education, then stop pursuing,” said Jamshidi, who received an associate degree in liberal arts from NOVA and is working toward a master’s degree from Georgetown University.

Jamshidi wrote a proposal that outlined a plan to help immigrant women get acclimated to life in the U.S., and she asked Biden to review it.

“She would listen to you, and she would go through your proposal — part by part, piece by piece,” Jamshidi said. “And eventually, we would make it happen.”

Jamshidi’s proposal led to a women’s summit attended by more than 100 people and the creation of an Afghan American Student Council at NOVA.

Biden’s title, alone, made her a role model to female students, Jamshidi said. Then, that title was called into question when a Wall Street Journal op-ed article suggested that Biden drop the “Dr.” before her name.

The backlash to the op-ed was swift, and it prompted other women with doctorates to defend their titles and share their experiences with sexism. Former first lady Michelle Obama came to Biden’s defense in an Instagram post . Biden’s former students rallied around her, as well.

“I was so enraged by the whole thing,” said Rosso, who didn’t finish her degree at NOVA and is pursuing a career in nursing. “This is someone who is genuinely passionate about education.”

Biden said the controversy took her by surprise.

“It was really the tone of it,” she told CBS’s “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert. “You know, he called me ‘kiddo,’ and one of the things I’m most proud of is my doctorate. I mean, I worked so hard for it.”

Jamshidi called Biden an inspiration.

“As a person who believes that education is people’s universal human right . . . I truly found Dr. Biden really inspiring,” Jamshidi said. “At NOVA, you will find a student who has two jobs and then is pursuing a full-time education. Dr. Biden met those people and worked with those people.”

Community colleges, once considered second-class institutions, are the “backbone of America’s postsecondary education and training system” and “one of the keys to a more prosperous economic future,” Biden said in 2016. Those colleges educated one-third of undergraduate students during the 2018-2019 school year — more than 8 million students — according to the most recent federal education data .

Still, the needs of those students are overlooked, Biden has said. “They often need extra help and attention,” she wrote in her memoir.

Many community college students work two or three jobs. They come to school hungry. They have to choose between paying the utility bill or buying a textbook.

Biden’s classrooms at Delaware Tech were filled with recent high school graduates and students who had GEDs, and men and women who had lost their jobs to downsizing and students looking to learn new skills, she wrote in her doctoral dissertation at the University of Delaware.

Most of the students were women, many with children, and almost every student received some sort of financial aid, she said.

Biden’s dissertation focused on her students’ needs, and she recommended that community colleges provide better academic counseling and mandatory skills courses to prepare students for college-level work. She has also been an advocate of free community college and told Colbert that she will continue to do so in the White House.

Rosso said it’s good to have an ally so close to the incoming administration.

“Being that she interacts with normal people on a regular basis — because she is a teacher — I think that gives her a connection with citizens, especially people in my age group, people that go to college,” Rosso said about Biden. “I have comfort knowing that someone of influence is still involved.”

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Higher Education

What jill biden’s dissertation reveals about her approach to higher education, by jeffrey r. young nov 20, 2020.

Crush Rush / Shutterstock

It turns out that Jill Biden, the presumptive First Lady, has thought deeply about community colleges. In fact, she wrote her dissertation at the University of Delaware about how to improve retention at two-year colleges.

So what did she conclude? And what does it say about her thinking on higher education, as she prepares to move into the White House?

First, it’s safe to say that Jill Biden has closer ties to community colleges than any previous First Lady. She started her own higher education career at a community college—enrolling in Brandywine Junior College in Philadelphia before transferring to the University of Delaware. She has taught in community colleges for years, first in Delaware and more recently at Northern Virginia Community College just outside of Washington, DC. And she has said she plans to continue teaching even after her husband Joe becomes president. (While Donald Trump continues to dispute the election results, experts and a growing number of prominent Republican lawmakers say that it is unlikely that Trump’s legal challenges or political maneuvers will change the outcome of the Nov. 3 election.)

To go inside what college life was like this fall during the pandemic, check out our Pandemic Campus Diaries series on the EdSurge Podcast.

Joe Biden even gave a shout-out to college educators in his acceptance speech. “For American educators, this is a great day for you all. You’re going to have one of your own in the White House,” he said.

But back to the dissertation. Jill Biden’s focus area when pursuing her Doctor of Education degree was Educational Leadership. And she chose to present her research in the form of an “executive position paper,” which according to the program’s website “identifies a problem of significance to you and your organization, analyzes the problem thoroughly, and develops a feasible plan to solve the problem.”

The organization she chose to focus her paper on was Delaware Technical & Community College, where she was an English and writing instructor at the time of her graduate study. The title of her paper: “ Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs .”

In addition to giving a review of the literature, she interviewed and surveyed students and faculty, as well as faculty advisors, about their experiences and the challenges they faced regarding retention.

“Several themes regarding students’ needs have emerged,” she wrote. Her recommendations boiled down to holistic approach that included:

A mandatory study skills course to help better prepare students for college-level work
Better academic advising
A student center or other central place to gather with other students.
A psychologist to “administer educational testing and offer counseling.”
And a wellness center.

“Delaware Tech has the capacity to be so much better than it is presently,” she wrote. “The key to student retention is a coordinated, cohesive effort by administration, faculty, staff, and students. A student retention plan requires diligence and effort—but most of all, leadership.”

As part of her literature review, Biden interviewed prominent experts in student retention. One of them was Vincent Tinto, now an emeritus professor of education at Syracuse University, who is a prominent expert on retention and author of “Completing College: Rethinking Institutional Action.”

Tinto says he knew little about the project at the time, but that he answered Biden’s questions by phone. “I had no idea what the dissertation was going to become,” he told EdSurge. “I get so many of these requests, and I never want to turn them down I talk to so many graduate students.”

Reading through the dissertation now, he says, his first reaction is “Amen.” He said that her paper gives a practical roadmap to solving key problems that had not yet been fully articulated at the time. “Most of the things she identified are the ones that need to and have now started to be addressed,” he said.

And he praised her focus on thinking deeply about the experience of students of all backgrounds and experience levels. “The first two pages of her dissertation, where she describes her classroom and students, speaks volumes about her commitment to diversity,” he said.

The passage he refers to reads:

“The community college classroom is unlike any other classroom in America. Diversity, rather than homogeneity, is the norm. In an average-sized class of twenty students at Delaware Tech, for example, most of the seats will be filled with young students who have just graduated from high school. The majority of these will be female. At least five seats will be filled with middle-aged men and women who have lost their jobs due to downsizing and/or outsourcing. One or two seats will be filled with students who have graduated from a GED program. Some seats will hold older women whose children have just entered college – now these women are taking the opportunity to earn college degrees themselves. Three quarters of the class will be Caucasian; one quarter of the class will be African American; one seat will hold a Latino; and the remaining seats will be filled with students of Asian descent or non-resident aliens. At least one quarter of the students will have children – most of them will be single mothers. Some will be the first in their families to attend college.”

It is clear that Jill Biden plans to advocate for community colleges as she enters the White House. Just this week, she spoke at a symposium led by the College Promise Career Institute, a nonprofit that has an effort called College Progress that aims to make community college free.

“Community colleges fuel our industries, and we need an educated skilled trained workforce to lead the world in a 21st century economy,” she said at the event. “This isn’t a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, it’s an American issue.”

Tinto, the Syracuse professor, said that he hopes that Biden continues to keep the issue of retention in mind as she furthers her advocacy. “I would personally hope that one of the things Dr. Biden would do is maybe establish a task force to look at what should we as a nation do to move the needle on retention,” he said.

Jeffrey R. Young ( @jryoung ) is the higher education editor at EdSurge and the producer and co-host of the EdSurge Podcast . He can be reached at jeff [at] edsurge [dot] com.