Fleeing Fidel Castro’s Communist regime of the late 1950s, Marta Cronin’s mother left Cuba in 1959. “She was a student at the Havana Business Institute, and they were sending out fliers and her friends started getting arrested,” says Cronin, Ed.D., president of Delaware County Community College in Media, Pennsylvania. Aided by the Costa Rican embassy and some sympathetic nuns, Dr. Cronin’s mother made her way to New York City, where Dr. Cronin was born and raised in Washington Heights. “It was a tough place,” says Dr. Cronin.
From the beginning, Dr. Cronin’s mother, who was raising her and her older brother as a single mom, told them it was “God, me, and your teachers, in that order. So, it was always education, education. You need an education if you want a better life than we are living now,” says Dr. Cronin, who was the first in her family to attend college. To save Dr. Cronin’s brother from gang life, her mother moved the family to Miami. “The gangs were coming knocking on the door,” says Dr. Cronin. “My mother said, ‘We’re not doing this.’”
After graduating from the University of Miami with a degree in French, Dr. Cronin began teaching with dreams of someday going back to New York to serve as an interpreter at the United Nations. “But I got sucked into teaching and stayed there. It kind of cemented my pathway,” says Dr. Cronin. For the next 11 years, she taught K-12, but found the interactions she shared with her colleagues to be the most rewarding. So she earned an Ed.D. in curriculum and instruction and landed a professorship at Indian River State College in Fort Pierce, Florida, ultimately rising to vice president of academic affairs.
A Responsibility to Create Change
While at Indian River State, one of Dr. Cronin’s mentors shared a job description for president at Columbia Gorge Community College, an HSI in rural Oregon. “I had never anticipated becoming a president…I had never been to Oregon in my entire life, and I didn’t see myself as a president,” says Dr. Cronin. It was 2018 and while Hispanics were becoming the fastest growing segment of the student population, Latina presidents were woefully underrepresented as a group. “So, I thought I have some sort of responsibility to change this a little bit,” says Dr. Cronin. “I was the first Latina president in the state of Oregon, not just the institution, but the state.”
Most of those attending Columbia Gorge were children of migrant workers who toiled in the fields picking cherries and pears. Dr. Cronin’s presence as a Latina president forged a lasting impression on these students. “It was different for them to see somebody like themselves in a position that they could potentially aspire to,” says Dr. Cronin.
When Dr. Cronin arrived at Columbia Gorge, the school had just obtained $7.3 million in state funding contingent, however, on a match. “I got there in July and had until January to secure the match. How am I going to find someone to give me $7.3 million?” she says. So, the “big city girl,” ingratiated herself to members of a rural Oregonian community. Through networking, being on Spanish language radio, and strategic relationships with Boeing and Amazon, she secured the $7.3 million plus an additional two million.
That money built the Columbia Gorge Regional Skills Center and the 50-bed Chinook Residence Hall to accommodate those students who face 90-minute commutes in inclement Northwestern weather.
Although Oregon’s naturally beautiful landscape appealed to her and she found the work she was doing at Columbia Gorge rewarding, Dr. Cronin missed her family, scattered up and down the East Coast from Florida to New York. When a presidency on the East Coast became available, she couldn’t resist. In July of 2023, she was named DCCC’s second president and its first Latina president.With only ten percent of the school’s students Hispanic, DCCC is not an HSI. Still, Dr. Cronin takes her role of Latina leader seriously, knowing that she is on some students’ radar. She considers the opportunity to create a lasting impression on young Latinas and help pave their way a privilege.
“I tell my staff all the time, ‘People are watching us.’ I had a Latina come to me after commencement, the whole family, grandparents in tow, you know how it is in Latina households. ‘You have to meet my grandmother,’ the student said. ‘I told her my president is a Latina.’ I had never spoken to this student in my life, but she was watching me and what I was doing. Somehow, I made an impact on her,” says Dr. Cronin.
Tapping into Industry and Community Needs
Since arriving at DCCC, Dr. Cronin’s priorities have included providing greater accessibility to education through an upcoming project. Slated to open in 2025, the Southeast Center in Upper Darby Township will occupy the renovated Archbishop Prendergast High School property and create an 80,000 square foot comprehensive multi-use facility that will provide affordable and quality education, training, and community programs to area residents. It will add a 30,000 square foot annex and a 17,000 square foot Early Learning Center. “We’re going to have biomedical technology and a culinary wing because there are a lot of hospitality openings and need. That invites tourism. Tourism gave us two million dollars for that culinary wing because they need hospitality workers. It’s all about being tapped into knowing the high-priority occupations here, and that helps us with funding,” says Dr. Cronin.
She is also increasing high school dual enrollment through two pilot programs. The Teacher Education and Social Work Program offer high school students the opportunity to start on a pathway that shortens their time to completion. “So, they don’t have to wait to finish and then do two years or four years,” she says. For years dual enrollment has been a conduit for students wishing to transfer to a four-year institution, but that view might be a bit antiquated. Some students are not academically inclined and not interested in pursuing a four-year degree. “We need people to do trades and a lot of them make more money than a lot of people who have four-year degrees,” says Dr. Cronin. Ideally, she’d like every high school student graduate to earn a credential, whether it be a two-year transfer degree or a credential to enter the workforce directly after graduation.
No matter their chosen path, students are not going to enroll in a school at which they feel unwelcome, according to Dr. Cronin, who considers diversity essential. To that end Dr. Cronin has created an environment at DCCC that promotes an open dialog, even about topics that are hard to broach. “We’re seeing more and more students participate where they can speak freely and respect one another’s opinion. We try to give students an opportunity to feel like they belong,” says Dr. Cronin.
Moving forward Dr. Cronin is excited about the assembly of an unofficial commission designed to solidify the individual roles of colleges in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Higher education in Pennsylvania, she says, has been in flux and lacks a community college system, with schools unofficially working together. She hopes this new commission will change that by “taking a look at what a community college system looks like. A lot of people don’t stay in their lanes. Why is a four-year school offering welding? We’re thinking that maybe the new system will dictate some of that,” says Dr. Cronin.
