In nearly two decades as a community-college leader, Martha J. Kanter has earned acclaim for a strong record helping disabled and low-income students graduate from college and for her bold efforts to overhaul curricula to help more students master basic skills. After working for more than 30 years at nearly every level of the California community college system, Kanter, was recently sworn in as under secretary of education, the top postsecondary job at the U.S. Department of Education. Kanter has built a reputation as a leader who diligently nurtures personal connections with students and experiments with new ways to improve graduation and retention rates. Her work in the California system has focused on removing barriers to college attendance and graduation for low-income students, disabled students, and students learning English as a second language. She sees the United States at a turning point when it comes to higher education. If America continues to reduce its focus on the public mission of education, the American ideal of broad access is "at risk," she says. But the country can avoid that fate, she says, by spending more on higher education and focusing on how to reproduce existing programs that are successful. "We've got to reinvest in the things that work," Kanter says, "and I think the federal government can look at those best practices to try to find smarter ways to scale them and make them available. With the right incentives, colleges will rise to the occasion."