President Goldsmith Joins Panel Discussion on Challenges, Opportunities in Higher Education

From left: New York Institute of Technology President Jerry Balentine, SUNY Old Westbury President Timothy Sams, Stony Brook University President Andrea Goldsmith, Farmingdale State College President Robert Prezant and moderator Kara Cannon. Photos by John Griffin.

Higher education is at a critical crossroads in 2026. Universities face enrollment challenges, severe financial constraints, diminished public trust and a growing wave of anti-intellectualism. Stony Brook University President Andrea Goldsmith joined three fellow Long Island university presidents to ponder these and other challenges as they made a case for higher education in a spirited discussion at Farmingdale State College.

Goldsmith was joined on the March 4 panel by fellow academic leaders Robert Prezant, president of host Farmingdale State College; Timothy Sams, president of SUNY Old Westbury; and Jerry Balentine, president of New York Institute of Technology.

Goldsmith described a career trajectory that took her from the University of California, to Silicon Valley, and eventually to academia at Stanford and Princeton before coming to Stony Brook.

"In my first job as an engineer, there weren't many women in engineering," she said, describing the feeling of accomplishment she had in knowing her research contributed to a transformational technology.

"I love the research aspect of being in the university, advancing the frontiers of knowledge, and I had the privilege of doing that in the field of wireless communication," she said. "Every one of your cell phones has technology that's connected to my research, which was eventually translated into practice. That's so rewarding as a researcher, and that's the service that we provide as universities."

Having enjoyed great success as an entrepreneur, Goldsmith said she realized her calling was higher education.

"I'm an optimist by nature. Every single interaction I have with students makes me believe in the future," she said. "I can't imagine a more rewarding sector to be in."

The discussion addressed the negative perception of higher education and intellectualism. The panel emphasized the importance of reclaiming higher education's role in fostering personal and professional success, and ethical behavior.

"It's our own fault," said NYIT's Balentine. "We really have to look at ourselves and ask why somebody would say going to college, learning something, and having a great career is not good."

Balentine attributed some of that to recent politics, but said that higher education as a whole has "forgotten about the basics."

"We didn't put career and job future first, and I think that's crucial," he said. "At my school, I always repeat that 95 percent of the students who graduate from the New York Institute of Technology have a job or are in graduate school within six months. That has to be our goal. It starts at the core of what we really owe to our students."

"We haven't managed the story and the narrative of higher education, particularly over the past 10 years, in terms of which society looks for in this," added Sams. "As a historian, I'm not surprised. And weshouldn't be surprised. A simple reflection on history gets us right back to this point again."

Sams described his experience being a Black student in higher education in the 80s, and noted the importance of universities during the Civil Rights Movement.

"In my mind, higher education has always been a part of America's combat against hate," he said. "And since higher education is responsible for speaking truth to power, seeking truth, being honest and playing an outsized role in a democracy and in a civic society, it's going to be an obvious flashpoint. It makes sense to me that we should expect our colleges and universities again, who are responsible for making sure that we are a democratic society, are going to be attacked for that."

"There are overarching themes that we see playing out today, impacting higher education," said Farmingdale's Prezant. "There's rising costs, student debt, and political polarization that we haven't seen for a long time. We're trying to figure out technological disruption in the form of AI, and a demographic shift that the country may or may not be ready for. When you put these things together, you have a very disruptive higher education theme."

"The belief in institutions in America, and particularly in higher education, has declined for more than a decade, and we didn't do anything about that," added Goldsmith. "That's on us. We didn't try to understand why."

Goldsmith added that while the attack on higher education was deliberate in some ways, there is also some validity to it.

"Student debt is one of the big issues we face," she noted. "Some students have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. We at public universities, and particularly public universities in New York, have a great story to tell. We have a $7,000 a year tuition for in-state students and we need to tell that story better."

Goldsmith recalled growing up in Berkeley and attending protests as a child that changed the world for the better. "Universities have always been the place where you foster dialog among people that disagree with each other," she said. "That's how you learn, that's how young people grow and become thinking citizens of the world, and we lost our way in doing that as universities. Now people are not talking to each other about complex issues, they're shouting at each other. Dr. Sams spoke about the universities and the Civil Rights Movement earlier. We should encourage our students to protest and to and to use their voices to talk about things that they care about, but not by shouting at people that they don't agree with."

In the end, Goldsmith said it's imperative to give students a foundation from which to start, but one that offers hope for a lifetime of success.

"We need to do better in what universities have always been about," she said. "We teach our students not just what they learn in the classroom, but how to engage with each other, how to build up resilience, how to have confidence in themselves, and how to be visionary, innovative and creative. That is the value of a college degree, whether you major in music or philosophy or engineering or science. As educators we have to tell that story better to earn back the trust of the public."

- Robert Emproto