Glenn Cummings, a student in Penn Graduate School of Education, has been selected as deputy assistant secretary of education in the Obama administration.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan offered Cummings the assignment in the Office of Vocational and Adult Education, which will start on May 4.
Cummings, who is pursuing an Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management, has had a long relationship with President Barack Obama.
As Speaker of the House in the Maine House of Representatives, Cummings chose to support Obama while many others in Maine backed New York Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, he said.
"When I first introduced [Obama], he was polling 18-percent behind Clinton," Cummings said, "but then he ended up winning the caucus."
His support for the president's candidacy began after reading Obama's autobiography, he said.
Cummings said he hopes that policy, and not only politics, played a part in his selection.
During his term in Maine, he chaired the Maine legislature's education committee and supported the creation of the state's community college system, which he says is the second fastest growing community-college system in the country.
Before working in legislature, Cummings was a high school teacher.
"The Obama administration is trying to get people who are credible educators," he said.
He added that America has fallen behind other countries in getting adults into higher education, but it is realistic to hope the country will be in the top 10 countries within the next eight years.
"Green" jobs - jobs in the environmental sector - will be important, he said, and his dissertation topic deals with how higher education is responding to the expansion of the sector.
Cummings' dissertation supervisor and director of the higher-education executive doctorate program Blake Naughton, said Cummings is "very fit for the role," but that the appointment was a "bit surprising" because the course at Penn focuses on the administration of institutions.
Naughton said the Education Department is now "a much bigger deal" because of money from the stimulus package.
In the distant future, Cummings said he would like to "some day be a college or university president," but his "first focus is to add as much value as possible to the Obama administration."
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