🎓 Higher Education on Trial: Dr Peter P. Smith on What College Owes the Next Generation
Higher Education Conversation with Dr Peter P. Smith
The Man Who Helped Build American Higher Education Returns to First Principles
Dr Peter P. Smith has spent a lifetime asking a deceptively simple question: who is higher education actually for? As founding president of the Community College of Vermont, and later founding president of California State University, Monterey Bay, he built two institutions from the ground up around the very people the system most often leaves behind. This week he joins Conversations with Tony Mobley to talk about where higher education stands today, and where it has to go next.
Wednesday, June 10, 2026 8:00 – 9:00 PM ET Live at conversationswithtonymobley.com
Who Is Dr Peter P. Smith?
Few people have shaped American education and public life from as many seats at the table. Dr Smith has done it from nearly all of them.
A builder of institutions. He was the founding president of the Community College of Vermont, then the founding president of California State University, Monterey Bay, designing both to open doors rather than guard them.
A public servant. He served as Lieutenant Governor of Vermont, carrying the questions of access and opportunity out of the seminar room and into the work of government.
A lifelong advocate for the learner. Across every role, his focus has stayed fixed on the same place: the student who was told, quietly or loudly, that higher education was not meant for them.
Why This Conversation Matters
Higher education is at a crossroads, and almost everyone can feel it. Costs keep climbing. Confidence keeps slipping. Students and families are asking harder questions about what a degree is really worth, and whether the system still does what it promises.
Dr Smith has spent his career inside that tension, and he refuses to treat it as hopeless. He believes higher education can still be one of the great engines of opportunity, but only if it is willing to rethink who it serves and how.
This is not a lecture about what is wrong. It is a conversation about what is possible.
What We Expect to Explore
The State of Higher Education
- What is genuinely broken, and what is simply misunderstood
- Why cost and value have drifted so far apart
- How the public lost trust, and what could earn it back
Access and Opportunity
- What it really takes to build an institution around the underserved
- The difference between letting people in and helping them succeed
- How community colleges quietly carry so much of the load
The Road Ahead
- How technology and AI are reshaping who can learn, and how
- What the next generation should demand from a degree
- Where hope realistically lives in the years to come
Who Cannot Afford to Miss This
Students and families weighing whether college is worth it, and how to make it count
Educators and administrators working to keep the doors open and the promise real
Policy makers and community leaders who shape who gets a fair shot
Lifelong learners who believe education should never have an expiry date
Anyone who has ever been told that higher learning was not for them
Because education was never meant to sort people into those who belong and those who do not. It was meant to open the door, and then help people walk through it.
Tony Mobley Host, Conversations with Tony Mobley
“The real question in higher education has never been who is smart enough to get in. It is who we are willing to build for.”
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