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Shortly after I returned to the United States from UNESCO in 2007, I appeared on a panel at the annual meeting of the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET). After my remarks, a former colleague from California State University popped the inevitable question. “Peter,” she asked, “how did you end up at Kaplan, and what do you do there?” My response was spontaneous: “I wanted to experience the proprietary sector's potential to innovate and make lasting changes in higher education. And I spend all day, every day creating better online and blended learning environments for adults.” I went on to say that I spent a higher proportion of my time on educational quality at Kaplan than I had at any of my previous jobs.
This is the thread that has connected the successive parts of my professional and political life. I have been very fortunate to have had multiple opportunities to do what I love most: designing learning environments for previously excluded and marginalized learners and in the process moving them from the economic and social margins of our society into the mainstream. Succeeding with these students is the social-justice issue of this decade. President Obama, the Lumina Foundation, and the Gates Foundation, among others, have agreed that significant increases in higher education attendance and completion is an essential condition for future social, civic, and economic success at the individual and societal levels.
Peter Smith is the senior vice president for academic strategies and development at Kaplan Higher Education, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington Post. Formerly he served as the founding president of both the Community College of Vermont and California State University at Monterey Bay, as dean of the Graduate School of Higher Education at George Washington University, and as a member of Congress before going to the United Nations Education Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO) as assistant director general for education earlier this decade. Smith is a regular contributor to the Rethinking Higher Education blog at www.rethinkinghighereducation.com.
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