Welcome to Kelly Corrigan Wonders. I'm Kelly Corrigan and today I'm wondering what kinds of people we need around the table to solve the biggest problems and where we think we'll get them.

Managing the pandemic is an easy example. We need immunologists for sure but also behavioral psychologists, economists, public policy folks, marketing geniuses, packaging experts, system engineers,

we know there are more problems coming, so maybe says my guest, this is a moment to double down on public education. Dr. Wadeh Cruzado, a first-generation college grad who went on to get her PhD and become the president of Montana State University, thrills at the site of her students gathering to become the problem solvers of the future. Join us for a conversation with Wadeh Cruzado.

Welcome back to Kelly Corrigan Wonders. I'm Kelly Corrigan and today we're wrapping up the fall semester of our live from college series which was made possible by a terrific grant from the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

My guest today is the knowledgeable and passionate president of Montana State University, a woman named Wadeh Cruzado. She is enthusiastic and committed and she is certain that the way to solve the problems of the future is to get as many people as possible to and through college.

And she is certain that if we want informed engaged citizens, we must educate more people.

You are an original. You are a person whose grandparents were farmers in Puerto Rico and now you're the president of an enormous university. How did you get from that childhood to this reality?

That's an excellent question. I was born and raised in Puerto Rico in the city that's the sister city of Boseman if you will.

Oh really? It's a home of the land grant university, right? So it was that same feeling that you knew that there was something out there you were not part of it, but it was a very important component of the town's life.

What it's interesting though is that in my mother's head, there was never a question that I should go to college, right?

I grew up in this home with my mother, my stepfather, my maternal grandmother and two sisters of my mother.

So two maternal aunts and they consistently talked to me about the importance of going to college, which was almost like a dream, a construct of their imagination because they had never been there.

Do you think it's because they lived like sort of in the shadow of a big university that they thought we want her to go there?

Or do you think it was something else, something even more romantic and less sort of leveraging the local sites and sounds to put together a vision for you?

I think all of the above. There was this romanticized notion, right? One of my maternal aunts talked to me about well, and then you'll go and you'll finish a PhD in philosophy and letters.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, I don't know where she got that idea from, but guess what? That's exactly what I ended up doing.

Not as a preconceived path, but rather the opposite. When I look back, I said, oh, look what I ended.

Yeah, I ended up doing exactly what they program it for me. But I also think that quietly, they had this longing for a better life.

And they knew that there was something there looking back. I have asked myself, so why me? Why was I the first person in my family to go to college?

Because in retrospect, my mother was one of the most intelligent individuals I have met.

My father was a very hardworking man. So he was neither of those. The only thing I had that they did not have was someone opened a door for me.

Someone gave me an opportunity. And I was able to walk through that door.

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