In May, President Obama appointed Sylvia Acevedo, a New Mexico State University graduate, to the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics – a group tasked with improving academic achievement among Latino students and finding ways to help the United States have the most graduates in the world by 2020.

“President Obama has set high marks for what he wants the nation to achieve, and it can’t be done unless everyone has access to an attainable education,” Acevedo says. “The job of the commission is to provide recommendations and determine what can be done to accelerate success. If we can improve achievement in this particular population, it will improve prosperity for all Americans.”

She says Hispanic success in education and the labor market is important to America’s economy. Hispanics are both the largest and fastest-growing minority group, yet have the lowest education attainment levels of any group in the country.

Acevedo holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from NMSU, where she graduated with honors, and a master’s in industrial engineering from Stanford University. She was named an NMSU distinguished alumnae last fall.

She was born in South Dakota and raised in New Mexico as a first-generation American in a Spanish-speaking home. That upbringing inspired her to co-found CommuniCards, a company that provides scalable strategies in education and health care for America’s rising generation. She is CEO of the Austin, Texas-based company.Before starting CommuniCard Acevedo founded REBA Technologies. She also has been an executive at Fortune 500 companies including IBM, Dell, Apple and Autodesk.

“My undergraduate education at NMSU prepared me to compete with anyone anywhere. The great grounding I got and the solid education allowed me to go to some of the best places in the world,” she says.