HAPPY TH ANNIVERSARY
JULY 2026
JOSÉ FIERRO IS THE PRESIDENT OF CERRITOS COLLEGE— LIVING PROOF THAT COMMUNITY COLLEGES CHANGE LIVES IN CALIFORNIA
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The Veterinarian Who Changed the Course of Thousands of Students
›› PABLO SCARPELLINI | L. A.
Some careers are mapped in a straight line; others spiral forward, touching unexpected points until everything suddenly makes sense. José Fierro’ s belongs to the second category. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, to Colombian parents, Fierro came to veterinary medicine through scientific vocation, not a calling to teach.“ When I finished studying I didn’ t want to hear anything more about school,” he admits today with a calm smile from his office in Cerritos, California. And yet someone invited him to teach in a veterinary studies program. It was, as he himself describes,“ from one moment to the next”: first a junior college in Florida, then the presidency of one of the largest community college districts in Southern California.
Eleven years after assuming the presidency of Cerritos Community College, Dr. Fierro has transformed an already respected institution into a national model for access, equity, and social transformation— without losing sight of something many institutional leaders forget: that on the other side of the desk there is a person.
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Ask Fierro about the stigma that still lingers around community colleges, and you open a door he is already ready to walk through.“ The stigma is simply that: stigma. The reality is different,” he says with conviction. The first line of emergency response— firefighters, police officers, nurses, EMT technicians— is composed, in its great majority, of graduates from institutions like Cerritos.“ Many teachers who now teach at elite universities started here,” he says.
But the most powerful argument is scale. The UC system admits around 300,000 students a year; the Cal States, around 500,000. California’ s community colleges receive 2.1 million.“ If they didn’ t exist, we’ d have 2.1 million people who couldn’ t go to school each year,” Fierro states plainly.
In 2016, he spurred the launch of Cerritos Complete, a program combining comprehensive student support services with a merit scholarship component
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Born: Madison, Wisconsin.
Background: Raised in Bogotá, Colombia.
Education: Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas de Bogotá.
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“ I have built personal relationships with many students and they keep growing more comfortable. Some of those students continue writing to me years later. That fills me up.”
for graduating seniors. The Early College program goes further still: this year, 120 students are graduating from Cerritos College without having finished high school, entering directly as juniors. One hundred percent were accepted somewhere.“ Wherever they want,” Fierro repeats— from Stanford to NYU— and in those three words lies the entire political vision of his tenure. ●