Dr. Samuel Lee
Chief Ambassador
California MAP Initiative
Education
Ed.D. Organizational Leadership
University of La Verne, La Verne, California
Studied: Organizational change theory focusing on accreditation and student learning outcomes assessment
Masters of Teaching English as a Second Language
University of Southern California: Rossier School of Education
Certificate of Management Development
University of Southern California: Marshall School of Business: Executive Education
Bachelor of Arts Liberal Arts
California State University, Fresno
Experience
With 30 years of teaching and administrative experience in public and private higher education, Dr. Lee's love for the power of education to open doors of opportunity really took root during his years (1987-1989) teaching ESL at a university in Wuhan, P. R. China. It was a formative time and education was opening windows to the outside world--windows that abruptly closed on June 4th, 1989. Soon after the Tiananmen massacre, Dr. Lee returned to the States to continue teaching and promoting international education as he completed a master's in TESOL at the University of Southern California. He stayed on at USC to work as an international student advisor, where later founded the USC International Academy, a comprehensive intensive English and graduate preparation program. Dr. Lee spent eight years as the director of the Academy, which continues to thrive and has since served thousands of undergraduate and graduate students at USC.
Wanting to work in an open access environment, Dr. Lee transitioned to the community college system in 2002, where he served as associate dean of Language Arts at Citrus College and later as dean of Language Arts and Enrollment Management. Dr. Lee joined Norco College in June 2017 as Interim Vice President and is now serving students as Chief Ambassador of the California MAP Initiative.
In addition to his work as an educator, Dr. Lee has developed a college schedule planning and management system designed to optimize class schedules for program completion, to make effective use classroom space, to set and achieve FTES targets, and to control expenses. Currently, he consults with a number of colleges that use EMS, an enrollment management suite of tools, and he is working on a cloud-based, three-year class scheduling and planning system called EMS3. One of his big goals is to integrate this with degree planning systems such as EduNav—making it possible for students to reserve their entire program of study prior to their first day at the college.
Dr. Lee and his wife, Angie, reside in Pasadena along with their dog (Charlee), cat (Maurice), and fourchickens (The Girls). They have three adult children: Daniel, who is serving as a Fellow for the International Justice Mission (IJM) in Bangkok; Jenna, who is a restaurant manager in Irvine; and Aaron, who is completing his undergraduate studies in Sustainable Agriculture at UC Davis.