Miami Dade College

About Miami Dade College

Miami Dade College, or simply Miami Dade, is a public college with its main campus in Miami, Florida and with seven other campuses throughout Miami-Dade County, Florida in the United States. Founded in 1959 as Dade County Junior College, it is the largest institution of higher learning in the United States with over 164,000 students. It is run by the Florida Community College's Board of Trustees, appointed by the governor of Florida, whose chair is Helen Aguirre Ferré, although it is not a community college. Miami-Dade is also run by its President, currently Eduardo J. Padrón, and by its various campus presidents throughout Miami-Dade County. The College has eight different campuses, each having various outreach centers. These campuses are: the North Campus, Kendall Campus, Medical Center, Wolfson Campus in Downtown Miami, Homestead Campus, InterAmerican Campus, Hialeah Campus, and the West Campus.

Miami Dade College was established in 1959 and opened in 1960 as Dade County Junior College. The original campus was located at a fairly new high school- Miami Central High-. The campus consisted of a portion of the High School and an adjacent farm. In 1961 a facility was built on an old naval air station nearby Opa-Locka Airport (known as Amelia Earhardt field), which would soon become the College's North Campus. The College enrolled African American students, becoming Florida's first integrated junior college, and Cuban exiles who could not afford other schools. As the college grew, a temporary satellite campus opened in Kendall at Miami Palmetto High School until a new campus was built in Kendall, and was named the South Campus. (It would later change its name again to the Kendall Campus). Later, the College was re-named Miami-Dade Junior College, and its two flagship campuses expanded and enrolled more students, and began enrolling more students than the University of Florida or Florida State University. After some time, college president Mitchell Wolfson Jr. envisioned a campus at the heart of Downtown Miami, and in 1973, the Wolfson Campus was built. The College changed its name to Miami-Dade Community College around the same time.

As the College kept enrolling students, some felt that its academic standards were too weak. Nonetheless, the College kept its open admissions policy while strengthening its academics. Around the same time, a Medical Center was built near Miami's Civic Center adjacent to the University of Miami Jackson Memorial Hospital to train students in Allied Health and nursing (RN) programs. With the Mariel exile community arriving in 1980, the College created an outreach center in Hialeah to help incoming refugees gain an education. Another outreach center, the InterAmerican center, was built to accommodate bilingual education. Because students in Homestead found it difficult to attend classes at the Kendall Campus, the Homestead Campus was built in 1990.