As the founder and CEO of the social enterprise Dobility, Dr. Christopher Robert employs a growing staff of professionals in locations spread across four continents. When he is sorting through applications, he says certain applicants stand out: community college alumni.
That’s because he knows first-hand the value of a community college education. Though he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina and earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University—concentrating in public policy, development economics, and applied economics—he started his educational journey at two community colleges.
He credits his experiences at Broward Community College and Northern Virginia Community College for helping him to launch, re-think, and ultimately expand a career that has included turns as technologist, economist, researcher, adjunct lecturer at Harvard University, and finally entrepreneur. The assembly-language and marketing courses he took at Broward Community College, while still in high school, planted important seeds, and the humanities courses he took later at Northern Virginia Community College helped to ground the social part of the social enterprise he leads today.
Founded in 2012, Dobility, Inc. produces SurveyCTO, a platform for electronic data collection used by program, research, and policy teams to collect high-quality data in roughly 150 countries. Users like the World Bank, Oxfam, Innovations for Poverty Action, Save the Children, Clinton Health Access Initiative, and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab use SurveyCTO to collect data and build a high-quality evidence base for development programs and policy.
Robert’s career did not follow a traditional path. Armed with knowledge gleaned from the dual enrollment classes he took at Broward Community College while still in high school, he finished 12th grade and, in his own words, “swore off formal education to self-teach for almost a decade, after which I dipped my toe back in with philosophy, psychology, poetry, and literature classes at Northern Virginia Community College.”
In the intervening years, Robert parlayed his independent studies and his knowledge from courses at BCC into a growing role at Galacticomm, a pioneering bulletin board software company. After that, he co-founded a tech start-up, then gave up his partnership stake to find “more meaningful ways to contribute to the world.” That’s when he volunteered as an English teacher in Nepal, traveled through India, and then re-started his studies at Northern Virginia Community College.
After another stint of living and studying in Cambodia, Robert decided to pursue a degree in public policy—a field that combined his interests in economics and political science. He ultimately applied his credits at NOVA toward earning three degrees in public policy—first a bachelor’s degree at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and then Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.
While his educational journey culminated in degrees earned in Chapel Hill and Cambridge, Robert recognizes the importance of the foundation he built at those community colleges in Florida and Virginia. Given his own experience, Robert believes that everyone should have access to a high-quality community college education. “Whether you’re a high school student looking for a greater challenge, a recent graduate looking for affordable education close to home, or someone looking to pick up skills for a new career, everybody should have that kind of access to learning,” says Robert.
That’s why he supports the College Promise movement, the non-partisan drive for communities and states to make a community college education as universal and free as public high school.
“I, like most people, find the current cost of high-quality education to be appalling,” he said. “I think it’s one of the many factors that works against upward mobility in our society. And I believe that universal access to quality community colleges—through free community college programs—can help substantially.”
College Promise Programs can help motivated students finish their degrees without taking on a mountain of debt and can provide them access to the high-quality teaching, materials, and ideas offered in community colleges. “In my view, nobody should be denied the opportunity to pursue higher education because they don’t have the means to pay for it,” says Robert.
