Shirley Collado Ph.D.

Shirley Collado

President & Chief Executive Officer of College Track & President Emerita of Ithaca College

Shirley M. Collado is President & Chief Executive of College Track, which provides a free, decade-long program to students from underserved communities who want to be the first in their family to earn a bachelor’s degree.

Before joining College Track in 2022, Dr. Collado served as the ninth president of Ithaca College in New York State. Appointed in February 2017, Shirley was the first person of color to be named president of the institution in its 130-year history and became the first Dominican-American to lead a four-year college or university in the U.S. At the conclusion of her tenure at Ithaca, she was named President Emerita.

Leadership in higher education

Over her 25-year career in education and non-profit organizations, Dr. Collado has continually used her positions of leadership to advocate for equity in higher education, contributing toward tangible impact in breaking down barriers of existing structures that prevent educational attainment on campuses and across communities at large.

She is known nationally for designing and implementing innovative approaches in higher education that expand student access and success, and has extensive experience overseeing complex not-for-profit organizations in both the private and public sectors of higher education.

Former leadership positions

Shirley M. Collado has previously served as executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer at Rutgers University-Newark; dean of the college and vice president for student affairs at Middlebury; and as the executive vice president of The Posse Foundation, where she scaled its operations nationally.

Non-executive & trustee roles

She is a member of Posse’s inaugural class of students, the first Posse scholar to receive a doctoral degree, and the first to become a trustee of a higher education institution through her decade of service on the Board of Trust at Vanderbilt University, her alma mater. She was named Trustee Emerita upon the conclusion of her tenure with this board.

Among her commitments to serving her communities, Shirley is a board member of Excelencia in Education, IntermediaryEd (formerly ACT), Kids First Chicago, National Association for College Admission Counseling, StarRez, and is a founding member of Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. Dr. Collado serves as a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and co-chaired the Carnegie Commission on Post-secondary Education. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Commission on Opportunities After High School, an advisor for The Flight School, and serves as honorary chairwoman of the Mariposa Foundation.

Education & personal life

Shirley Collado was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York to Dominican immigrants and went on to be the first member of her family to graduate college, earning her bachelor’s degree at Vanderbilt and her master’s and doctoral degrees in clinical psychology at Duke University.

Dr. Collado resides in Oakland with her husband, A. Van Jordan, an award-winning poet, and their dog, Melba.