dr biden dissertation pdf

Higher Education

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

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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.

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Essay by Dr. Jill Biden in The Chronicle of Higher Education

The following essay penned by Dr. Jill Biden will be featured in the April 23 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and can be found online HERE .

Community Colleges: Our Work Has Just Begun Jill Biden

I have been a teacher for almost three decades and a community-college instructor for the past 16 years. Last spring, President Obama asked me to increase awareness about one of the best-kept secrets of higher education: the very sizable and valuable contribution of community colleges. Since then I have been visiting colleges around the country and reporting back to the president about their challenges, innovations, and ideas. This issue is a priority for the Obama-Biden administration. We are committed to making community colleges better and more accessible to students across this nation.

The passage of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 was a substantial victory for community colleges. The final legislation does not contain everything our administration had proposed, but it does include one of the most significant new federal investments in higher education, and in community colleges, since the GI Bill was introduced, over 60 years ago.

Pell Grants had been threatened with a 60-percent funding decrease, but we stabilized the Pell program and ensured that such grants would increase with inflation. The Pell Grant victory will put money in the pockets of millions of full- and part-time community-college students, helping them pay for tuition, books, supplies, and living expenses. This increase in financial aid is coupled with the recently expanded Opportunity Tax Credit, which provides students a tax credit of up to $2,500 per year for up to four years to offset higher-education expenses, including a partial credit for those who owe no taxes. It also sets up income-based repayment of student loans, capping loan repayments at rates based on income and family size. As a lifelong teacher, I am particularly pleased that income-based repayment helps those who choose public-service careers. Graduates who work as teachers, nurses, or in other public-service professions—and those who serve in the military—can have their loans forgiven after 10 years.

The reconciliation bill also sets aside $2-billion ($500-million per year over four years) to develop and improve educational and training programs at community colleges. Throughout the nation, community colleges will receive funds to help them serve students more effectively, and to help form partnerships with regional industry clusters so that graduates will be prepared to excel in the local work force.

This administration's commitment to community colleges is a long-term one. The president has asked me to convene a national summit on community colleges in the fall. We will bring college presidents, instructors, and advocates together with business leaders and other stakeholders to share best practices and successful models for helping students gain the knowledge, training, certificates, and degrees needed to succeed. This will be a working summit, a setting where we can shine a spotlight on community colleges, highlight their utility to families and communities across the nation, nurture more collaboration, and generate additional policy ideas and goals for student success. As a community-college instructor, I am thrilled to be leading this summit and truly pleased to have the support of the administration.

Over the past 16 years, I have seen firsthand the power of community colleges to change lives. And that is, in large part, why I never really considered the possibility of not teaching at a community college after we moved to Washington last year. Since then I have been privileged to teach students from more than 22 countries.

As an English teacher, I frequently use journals and exercises in our school's learning lab as a tool for my students to develop their writing and composition skills. One exercise that is always productive is to encourage my students to write about their core beliefs as inspired by National Public Radio's This I Believe program. In these sessions, students listen to radio segments as examples—and then I encourage them to write about their own core beliefs. I am constantly moved and humbled by the experiences my students share in this exercise and in their journals about their dreams, challenges, and values.

Each one of them has a story to tell—stories about dedication and sacrifice.

Every day, I see my students work hard to overcome obstacles just to be in the classroom. Many of them work full time, have aging parents in need of care and attention, or are parents themselves. Often they contend with difficult economic realities. They are eager to learn, and many of them are the first members of their families to attend college. They persevere because they understand that getting an education will change their lives for the better. It will improve their job prospects and enrich their understanding of the world around them.

Community colleges can also serve as a gateway from a high-school diploma to a baccalaureate degree. They offer an affordable option for middle-class high-school students who want to attend a four-year college but cannot afford the tuition. The numbers tell the story: The average cost of tuition at a private four-year university is over $26,000 for the current academic year. At public four-year universities, the average is $7,000. Community-college tuition averages $2,500, presenting a far more affordable way to complete the first two years of a college education, especially when the credits earned on a community-college campus can often be transferred directly into four-year programs. It is not a coincidence that community colleges educate over 40 percent of all postsecondary students nationally.

For laid-off workers, community colleges offer job-certification programs that teach new skills and professions. Most people would be surprised to look at the catalog of an average community college today—they would find course work in a range of emerging health-care industries, training in cutting-edge technologies, offerings in architecture and green-building techniques, and classes in highly marketable job fields. For an immigrant or first-generation American, community college is often the place to begin a postsecondary education.

All of us have the opportunity to match the dedication of community-college students with a renewed commitment to ensuring their success. By working together, we can maximize the return on the new federal investment in students through Pell Grants, and in community colleges themselves, by modernizing the way classes are offered, ensuring easy transfer to four-year schools, and supporting other strategies for student success.

We know that education is the key to unlocking human potential. And we know that today, on community-college campuses across this country, millions of students are eager to build a more secure future for themselves, their families, and our country. We cannot—and we will not—let them down. As a member of the education community, I ask for your continued partnership in the months and years ahead as we continue to build support for community colleges and work to improve their offerings and outcomes. This is the moment for community colleges. Our work has just begun.

Jill Biden, a lifelong educator with a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware, teaches English at Northern Virginia Community College.

Jill Biden, Essay by Dr. Jill Biden in The Chronicle of Higher Education Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/351534

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Education 'makes us whole,' career teacher dr. jill biden tells stanford.

“Education is possibility set in motion,” said former Second Lady of the United States and longtime teacher Dr. Jill Biden at Stanford on Wednesday in an inspiring Cubberley Lecture that focused on teachers as exemplars and transmitters of humanity.

“Just as important as the practical argument is the civic one,” said Biden, who has taught writing in high school and community college for more than 30 years. “Education teaches us compassion and kindness, connection to others. Education doesn’t just make us smarter. It makes us whole.”

The Cubberley Lecture, inaugurated in 1938, is the Stanford Graduate School of Education’s premier showcase for ideas. In inviting a classroom teacher – albeit one with unusual windows onto power that give Biden what she calls a “dichotomous” life – the GSE, a broad-based research and professional school, proclaimed the value of teaching in general and Biden’s compassionate, holistic teaching practice in particular.

“As Second Lady, Dr. Biden had responsibilities that are hard to imagine, but she always kept teaching, because that is who she is. She is our kind of person,” said Daniel Schwartz, dean of the GSE, who introduced Biden to the capacity crowd of 1,700 and large web-stream audience at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium. Biden's visit to Stanford included meeting with students in the Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies program and hearing them present on a research project.

Biden spoke at Stanford the day after giving finals at a community college in Northern Virginia, where she is a full-time professor of writing. She noted to audience cheers that the scheduling placed her talk in the midst of Teacher Appreciation Week.

“Whenever you travel, whenever you meet another educator, it’s like an instant relationship,” she told the crowd.

Always a teacher

Biden’s husband, former Vice President Joe Biden, served with President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017. Jill Biden is thought to be the first U.S. vice-presidential spouse to work full time for pay during her husband’s term.

“When we won the election in 2008, no one really expected me to keep teaching,” she said. “I couldn’t just walk away. I couldn’t just live Joe’s life.

“So I did both. I went to state receptions with the most powerful men on Earth, then to study sessions with single mothers just hoping to get a job.

“There was a little nook on Air Force Two that contained the vice-presidential seal, and I would sort of wedge myself in there and grade papers on the floor.”

Biden described herself as “a practitioner of my craft, not a policy expert.

“But I think policy should always start in the classroom, and it must be flexible enough to allow teachers to choose the best path for their particular circumstances.”

In Washington and today, as chair of the Biden Foundation and of College Promise, Biden has translated her classroom insights into advocacy for education as career preparation and for community colleges as doors to opportunity. Most of all, she advocates for the resources and support that will sustain teachers as transmitters not just of academic content but of morality, compassion and human values.

“Jim Crow laws no longer exist. But poverty and ZIP codes often play the same role,” Biden said. “Resources are stretched paper-thin. I find that in my own classroom I’m providing books and breakfast bars to students who need them.

“And in the past 10 years, with the increased threat of violence and with school shootings, some teachers have become the unfortunate heroic martyrs of their times. Now, along with telling students where the fire exits are, I say, ‘This is what we do in case of an active shooter.’”

Biden reminded the audience of Martin Luther King’s speech in Memorial Auditorium more than 50 years earlier.

“The ability to create educational road maps is deeply connected to the health of our communities,” Biden said.

“As Dr. King said, ‘The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Creating community

As Second Lady, Biden continued to teach during her own crises including son Beau’s illness and death from brain cancer. On one bad day, Biden said, she momentarily turned to her whiteboard to hide incipient tears and turned back to find her students standing to each give her a hug.

“We often don’t know how much someone needs our grace, our strength,” she said. “As teachers, you will need to know two things. When to ask for help, and when to give it. We lead by what we do, not what we say.

“Often, it doesn’t take that much to be that strength in return. I believe I am a much more compassionate teacher because of my life experiences than when I began.”

Biden followed her talk with a question-and-answer session led by Jim Shelton, MA/MBA ’93, who served as Obama’s deputy secretary of education and now heads the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s education division.

In reviewing Biden’s long career, Shelton asked her what about teaching hasn’t changed.

“Lack of resources,” Biden replied to audience applause. “We don’t have mental health services, and I deal with students who are really struggling with major issues.”

But Biden praised cities that have initiated comprehensive wraparound services, such as health care and services for housing-insecure students in Portland, Oregon.

She also urged the future teachers in the audience to quickly learn their students’ names as a way of creating community in the classroom.

 “I have about 80 students,” she said. “That first week I make sure I learn everybody’s name. I make that personal connection.

“I make them learn everybody else’s name, too. You’ve all felt it. You go to a new school, you feel weird. But if you know somebody’s name –  you feel better.

Teachers also need to know how to address all different kinds of students in the classroom, Biden said: “Students who are on the autism spectrum; who have Tourette’s. Who are from military families” – a particular Biden cause because of Beau’s National Guard service.

“Teachers have to know to identify the important facts in the children’s lives.”  

Shelton asked Biden about her work for community-college access. Biden’s University of Delaware doctoral dissertation examined student needs affecting community-college retention. In Washington and now through College Promise, she has backed localities’ efforts to make community college free.

“Education is so expensive,” Biden said. “One of the greatest things about community colleges is that they have reciprocity agreements with four-year colleges. If students’ GPAs are high enough, they can slide right in as juniors. There is a stigma attached; I get that. We need to work on that.”

Biden concluded her talk with the example of her grandmother, a teacher in a one-room school who sometimes brought the young Jill to class and let her ring the old-school bell.

“When I think about that bell, I think about her legacy,” Biden said. “Of education that has rung out into the world like waves of sound.

“The poet Rumi wrote, ‘Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.’

“We have all taken different paths to get here,” Biden said. “But we’ve gathered to do the same thing: to lift up our communities together.”

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clock This article was published more than  3 years ago

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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Hi, I’m Jill. Jill Biden. But please, call me Dr. Biden

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Vice President Joe Biden often joked on the campaign trail about his wife’s lofty educational achievements. She had two master’s degrees and had already worked for nearly a quarter-century as a college community instructor. But he had a better idea.

“Why don’t you go out and get a doctorate and make us some real money?” he said he told her. (That was always good for a laugh, especially in university towns.)

In 2007, at 55, Jill Biden did earn a doctorate -- in education, from the University of Delaware. Since then, in campaign news releases and now in White House announcements, she is “Dr. Jill Biden.” This strikes some people as perfectly appropriate and others as slightly pompous, a quality often ascribed to her voluble husband.

Last week, the White House announced that Jill Biden had returned to the classroom -- thought by some who study the presidency and vice presidency to be a historical first. She is teaching two courses at Northern Virginia Community College, the second-largest community college in the U.S. She began her new job before last month’s inauguration; the announcement was delayed out of respect for that event.

“She’s just really excited to be back in the classroom,” said Courtney O’Donnell, her spokeswoman. “Teaching is such a huge passion and a joy for her.”

Some second ladies, as vice presidents’ wives are called, have been accomplished professionals. Marilyn Quayle is a lawyer, but she did not practice while her husband, Dan, was in office. Lynne Cheney, Jill Biden’s immediate predecessor, is a novelist who earned a doctorate in English with a dissertation titled “Matthew Arnold’s Possible Perfection: A Study of the Kantian Strain in Arnold’s Poetry.” She goes by Mrs. Cheney.

But Biden is thought to be the first second lady to hold a paying job while her husband is in office.

“I think she is unique,” said Joel Goldstein, a professor at St. Louis University School of Law and an expert on the vice presidency. Other second ladies -- Cheney, Quayle, Tipper Gore and Joan Mondale -- wrote, lectured or did important volunteer work.

“But I think Dr. Biden is the first . . . to basically continue in the regular workforce,” said Goldstein, who has a DPhil (the English term for doctor of philosophy) from Oxford and a JD (juris doctor) from Harvard. He seemed mildly amused upon hearing that Biden liked to be called “Dr.”

“It’s a funny topic,” Goldstein said. “Occasionally someone will call me ‘doctor,’ and when that happens my wife makes fun of me a little bit. But nobody thought it was pretentious to call Henry Kissinger ‘Dr. Kissinger.’ ”

Joe Biden, on the campaign trail, explained that his wife’s desire for the highest degree was in response to what she perceived as her second-class status on their mail.

“She said, ‘I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.’ That’s the real reason she got her doctorate,” he said.

Amy Sullivan, a religion writer for Time magazine, said she smiled when she heard the vice president’s wife announced as Dr. Jill Biden during the national prayer service the day after President Obama’s inauguration.

“Ordinarily when someone goes by doctor and they are a PhD, not an MD, I find it a little bit obnoxious,” Sullivan said. “But it makes me smile because it’s a reminder that she’s her own person. She wasn’t there as an appendage; she was there as a professional in her own right.”

Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific “Dr.” unless the person in question has a medical degree.

“My feeling is if you can’t heal the sick, we don’t call you doctor,” said Bill Walsh, copy desk chief for the Washington Post’s A section and the author of two language books.

Joe Biden, who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is expected to travel widely in his new job. But he may need to tone down the Dr. Jill Biden stories, should he find himself in Germany with his wife.

Last year, according to the Post, at least seven Americans (with degrees from places like Cornell and Caltech) were investigated for the crime of “title fraud” for calling themselves doctor on business cards, resumes and websites. Only people who have earned advanced degrees in Germany or other European Union countries may legally call themselves that.

Estela Bensimon, a professor at USC’s Center for Education, said she cared about being called Dr. Bensimon only if she was being addressed by her first name while male colleagues were called doctor.

“That often happens with women academics around male academics,” she said. “I don’t feel I need to be called doctor to be respected. Also, just think if you were on an airplane and you called yourself doctor and there was an emergency.”

Jill Biden’s new boss, Jim McClellan, dean of humanities and social sciences at Northern Virginia, said she was teaching English as a second language and developmental English 3. Her students, he said, were delighted to learn the identity of their teacher. (When students at her old school, Delaware Technical & Community College, would ask whether she was married to Joe Biden, she usually would say she was “a relative.”)

McClellan declined to say exactly how much Biden would earn, but said she was teaching 10 hours a week and that the range of pay for her adjunct position was $900 to $1,227 per credit hour. (That means each semester her pay could be from $9,000 to $12,270.)

“It’s not that much,” McClellan said. “She could have done anything with her time and make a difference, but she chose to teach, and teach at a community college. That says to our students that they are important and that community colleges are an important piece of the American educational system.”

As for how the new professor will be addressed, O’Donnell, her spokeswoman, said: “This week, she encouraged her students to call her Dr. B.”

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More to Read

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Robin Abcarian is an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times. She writes about news, politics and culture. Her columns appear on Wednesday and Sunday. Follow her on Bluesky @rabcarian.bsky.social and Twitter @AbcarianLAT.

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