Dr. Ken Atwater’s enthusiasm for community colleges is quite infectious. It’s apparent when you talk to administrators, faculty and some of the nearly 45,000 students at the five-campus Hillsborough Community College (HCC) where he serves as president.
Almost immediately, a picture emerges of a man who is on a lifelong mission to transform our nation’s educational system and believes that community colleges remain the cornerstones for higher education.
“I would have been a great community college student,” says Atwater, who grew up in Jackson, Tennessee, a small, rural town about 130 miles from Nashville. “When I came out of high school, I went straight to the university. I had no direction career-wise, other than that I wanted to be a doctor.”
It was during his first two years at Murray State University — a public university in Kentucky —that Atwater found himself floundering as a pre-med student.
“I knew very quickly that making a 2.5 [GPA] was not going to get me into med school,” he says.
He remembers one class — a large lecture-style seminar — where a professor and graduate teaching assistant walked in, assigned students a number, handed them an assignment and then left the room.
“I would have excelled in a smaller classroom environment,” he says.
