n an interview with the Russian International Affairs Council, Edward Crawley, the Founding President of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, shares his thoughts on the challenges facing Russian universities, the role of applied science in the GDP of a country, and the competitive advantages of today’s students. Mr. Crawley also speaks about strengths and weaknesses of the 5-100 Program which is aimed at improving the Russian education and research system. 

Interviewers: Ivan Timofeev, RIAC Program Director and Yaroslav Menshenin, RIAC correspondent. 

My question concerns your view of the systemic problems facing Russian universities. My view is that one of these problems involves the over-centralized structure of universities. They are too concentrated on the rectorate as a central authority while the branches, the faculty and the departments have too few resources. What’s your view?

On the top of my list is underfunding. Russian universities, by any comparative measure, are systematically underrpredicted. There are benchmarks of salaries of Russian university professors against others from around the world. Professors of Russian universities are barely even show up on the scale. You need a log scale to capture them. Of course because they are intelligent and mobile knowledge workers, they will find ways to earn money either through additional programs of the university or outside it, which tends to distract them from their primary responsibility, which is research and teaching in the university itself.

So I would put systematic underfunding above everything. And closely related to this, of course, is systematic over-supply. Most nations have about one strong university per million people. And Russia has 400 or 600, depending on how you count, public universities. And only 147 million people. So by this metric you could conclude that Russia has too many universities by factor of two or three, which dilutes the efforts of all of them.

I would say that the second point is a systematic need for improvements across the whole organization of the system. This legacy of good, but highly specialized institutions, which in the Soviet era were developed and linked to industry as part of the central planning process, will need 72 nuclear engineers who know about reactor control system design next year. So among the nuclear universities we have to graduate 72 new engineers who know about reactor control design. These universities have tried and struggled to figure out what the right balance is between their specialized past and a more generalized future is. Doing this, these universities will come to the conclusion that there is an oversupply, since you don’t need 10 strong, general purpose, scientific and technical research universities in the city of Moscow. So the role that they had in the Soviet past was essentially lost in 90st due a lack of resources. Universities have really only had at most a decade to respond to the international contemporary forces that shape universities. Related to this of course is the fact that under the central planning system that existed in the Soviet era, universities had a specific role to train talent. Not to develop ideas. So they had not only a primary role – almost an exclusive role for education and they’ve looked towards placing students in Academy institutes and so forth. It’s generally accepted outside of Russia and an item of controversy in Russia about whether it’s a more effective system to link research and education at universities. In a place like United States this is not argued about it all, because non-academic research institutes have all but disappeared: Bel Labs, United technology research centers, GE Lab – they all mostly gone. So all of that basic research has moved to universities. I believe that this linkage of education and research is a fundamentally important value of technical and scientific universities, which is one of the reasons why I’m at Skoltech. I know a little about classical universities. So my comments are about this category. Not so much because graduate students are effective researchers, but because there is a way of thinking that you learn during the research process and there are technologies that you become aware of during the research process that you then can successfully transport out of the organization when you graduate. So one of the important roles of graduate research is that the graduating students take the research with them when they go to the next place. And if students go and do their research at the institute and then work there, they haven’t move that knowledge. Those are the systematic challenges, all of which I think are recognized by people in Russia.

One of the modern efforts is to combine engineering education and entrepreneurship. Do you think that we can teach students to be entrepreneurs?

Absolutely, we can teach entrepreneurship to students. Nobody taught music notes. And yet the world is full of music schools, who take good musicians and make them better musicians. And better musicians and make them great musicians. And then once a century there is Mozart who needs no education. Or Alan Turing or people like these. Or Einstein. What we can do is we can take the ability level of the average good engineering or scientific student and increase it in the area of innovation and entrepreneurship. We can create a knowledge base, because there is a teachable knowledge that is possible to convey to students. There are mistakes that entrepreneurs who have not been previously educated consistently make. And people who study patterns of entrepreneurship and innovation see these mistakes. And we can teach people about those. There is something that is just knowledge, like the management of intellectual property, or entrepreneurial finance, or production system design, or marketing. These are just areas of knowledge, which can certainly be taught.

Then there is the set of skills and practices that can be taught but generally not in the classroom. They can be taught through experiences. Many things in life are taught experientially, and not analytically. If you think of the training of military officers, it is largely experiential. Then once a century there is a Napoleon, or Kutuzov, or both of them at the same battle. By giving people experiences, and then mentoring them and reflecting on their experiences, and asking them what would they do to improve at the next time, there are many things that you can teach. We teach people to be divers. We don’t teach them in a classroom, we teach them in a pool. So there is a whole class of things that have to be taught experientially with mentorship and many things in entrepreneurship and innovation in that class. Then most importantly, there is something we can teach which is attitudinal change. That’s required to transform traditional Russian scientific and engineering student into someone who is willing to be an entrepreneur. A willingness to take risks. A willingness to apply the knowledge that they have learnt. A willingness to rock the boat and try to shape the future. Russian education at universities, at least, is a very fact based education. The emphasis is on theory and models. And there is relatively little experience that the students have in taking the knowledge, which is important knowledge, and actually apply it to something in order to gain the confidence that they can take the knowledge that they have and apply it to something. There is no doubt in my mind that innovation and entrepreneurship are teachable.

Taking this into account, how big is the role of applied science in the GDP of a country? And do you think that there is competition between applied and fundamental sciences in this regard?

First, I think there is no competition between applied science and fundamental science. I actually reject the notion of applied science. I think there is science. And what there is more or less consideration of use to use the framework that the Brookings Institute created in a 1960 report, which I highly recommend as reading. The fundamental argument is that all scientists have an obligation to consider how their work might have an impact, how their work might be applied. There is a famous Russian academic, who said that “all science is applied science, it’s just depends what century its applied in”. There is a body of useful knowledge we call science, or engineering science, and then there is the consideration of use towards it. I don’t think these ideas are in competition. I reject the idea of competition between them.

One of the things that engineering science can be used is to develop new products and systems – innovation. The extent to which applying science to create innovation is important is absolutely unquestionable. We have two well-documented cases now in the United States, one at MIT and one at Stanford, where the impact of companies founded by the leaving graduates of these two institutions on GDP of United States was measured by conservative good social sciences. In each case the contribution was about $1.5 trillion out of an economy about $20 trillion. Conservatively together Stanford and MIT created $3 trillion out of $20 trillion in US GDP – about 15%. Which is, by the way, coincidentally just about exactly the GDP of Russian Federation. So the alumni of two universities that I worked at have created an economy as large as Russia. If Russia did this, it would double its GDP. It’s completely doable.

Are countries around the world doing this? Absolutely. Recently I received my newsletter of Chinese Academy of Engineering and I looked at the transcript of the speech of Xi Jinping at the General Assembly of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He said: “We should follow the strategy of innovation as an input for development. Innovation should be the essence of the strategy and the most urgent thing to do is to eliminate the system and mechanisms obstacles, so it’s free up the huge potential of science and technology as a primary force for productivity”. So here is the “President” of China, the most rapidly developing economy in the world, who is saying exactly the same thing, that science and technology have to be the basis of innovation. And we have to make this link more effectively.

Going back to educational programs. You are on the Council of 5-100 Program. What are the main challenges that participating universities face in light of the economic crisis?

I think this is a great Program. I think it has increased the awareness in Russia of the international competitiveness issue in universities and the relative standing of Russian universities in these measures. They may not be exactly right, but they are approximately right. The fact that there is essentially barely one Russian university in the top-100, depending on the survey, Moscow State is either just barely in or out of 100. And all the rest of the good universities in Russia are spread over the next 400 rankings. The 5-100 Program has raised the awareness of them, it has made Russian universities think about how to improve their international competitiveness, it has given them the stimulus to do it, it has caused them to be brought together to learn systematically about what would they need to change in their training programs, which Skoltech has participated in, evaluation programs, assessment programs. Those are all the good things.

The weakness of the program is that for all its expectations, the universities probably didn’t get enough money to do it. The expectations were set very high, and they will move in the direction of the expectations, but I think it’s highly unlikely that they will actually make as much progress as expectations set. I think that was the strategic alternative, which could be taken which is the universities were encouraged more or less to apply for 5-100 broadly across the university whichever university they are. And it’s very difficult to change an entire university. And I argued unsuccessfully for allowing the universities to choose a school or a field and concentrate their efforts on improving the competitiveness of university in that field. And then over time that improvement would disseminate to the other schools or departments of that university. Because one of the things I do know about in terms of improving the competitiveness of university is that it often happens because a particular program at that school excels. The reputation of Carnegie Mellon, for example, is based largely on its contributions in robotics and IT over the last decade. And you can find other examples. It often is true that picking a field will actually increase the competitiveness of university much more than taking the same amount of money and spreading it over several programs.

5-100 was only one of the programs aimed at improving the Russian education and research system. Could you name any other important changes that have occurred over the last 5 years?

The 5-100 program has sort of consumed all of other efforts. Because 5 in 100 is a goal, formally, of course. Things like moving towards an English education base, internationalizing the faculty, attracting more international students, improving research facilities, and developing PhD programs. All of which are important to sort of move Russian universities towards international norms. These of all now become the instruments of 5-100 program. I am not sure that I can identify a particular thing, outside of 5-100, that has had a big change.

I think the 5-100 program is a next step, and there will be one or two steps beyond this, because we need to do everything we can do to strengthen Russian universities by 5-100. And by the way the only problem is that all of the competitors are also doing these programs, they are also strengthening up to international norms.

What skills would you consider the competitive advantages of today’s students in comparison with those who studied in XX century?

They are lot better using iPhones. This is an advantage, because this generation of students has learned that it is easier to acquire facts. What’s the GDP of Vietnam? We can find it out in 20 seconds. A hundred years ago you would have to go to some center library and find some data, which was 5 years old. This is not a joke. I mean if you asked what students can do today that students 50-100 years ago couldn’t do, it really has to be access to information incredibly quickly. Are they any better at doing anything with this information? I am not sure, but they certainly have access to it. And in some sense this is sort of put a negative influence on education, because it is so easy to get access to information. Why should you bother to learn about it? The negative side of this is that if you ask a contemporary student a question, the first thing they do is they attach their fingers to the keyboard. They don’t actually think about anything. Because the assumption is that some place in Internet has the answer and all I have to do is find it, it is a matter of search, not research. I am not sure that there is systematically anything that students who graduate from a sort of classical program in let’s say physics are able to do now than a hundred years ago, except they know a hundred years more physics, they know more contemporary information.

If you ask a slightly different question, which is how much better could students be than they were a hundred years ago, I have a very different answer, because the answer to this is that what we’ve learned over the last especially 10 or 20 years about how people learn about science and technology, is actually very significant. There is an excellent book written by Susan Ambrose, a vice-provost of Carnegie Mellon University. She tried to boil down the last 30 years or so of pedagogical development into one reference book that ordinary professors could read and understand. Let me give you one insight from her book, which has changed the way I teach. In addition to knowledge, students learn or don’t learn about the structure of knowledge. Knowledge is not only a set of facts that are unrelated, it is about how facts, theorems, models, and postulates are interrelated. And we generally emphasize the learning of the bits of knowledge and we as professors generally do not emphasize the structure of knowledge. One of the questions that I ask students to sort of prove of this is that I ask them “what is the relationships between force, work, energy and power”. And then I listen to their answers. And then I say how old were you when you figured that out? And generally it is much older than when they were first introduced the ideas of force, work, energy and power, when they were in probably high school in a good education system like in Russia in high school. So I think actually if we systematically deployed this in the educational process, what we’ve learned about education and about learning we could do a much better job.

There are relatively comprehensive methods for evaluating startups, but talking about educational systems, it doesn’t seem as easy. How can we evaluate the success of any educational program?

I think there are some ways that could produce weight measures about how well universities are performing. And we thought about this very deeply when we created Skoltech, we wanted a set of metrics or measures of success, some of which have to do with the development of the university – 10 professors, 20 professors, 30 professors, and some which have to do with the outputs of the university: papers, inventions, startups, graduated students, and so forth.

These measures are imperfect at best. And too much emphasis on them drives behaviour at universities that is inappropriate. There is a famous quote, which is “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”. You have to be careful about using numerical measures, because it takes you away from things which are very important, like a really important thing is how much time professors spend with their students. The most effective way to evaluate universities, unquestionably, is international peer review. It is having a group of scholars from different countries coming to visit you and review your programs and tell you whether they good or not. I have participated in several dozens of these meetings in my life, where I was part of review panel, evaluating the quality of the university. And it is remarkable how quickly and consistently international leaders in a field can judge the relative standing of university they are reviewing. By doing this you can get a very good understanding of what’s going on in university.

You were a co-founder of the CDIO Initiative. What were the main objectives of this approach? Have you tried to set the standards for engineering education?

I don’t think that CDIO is a way of setting standards. I think it is a way of helping people to achieve the standards. Have you ever try to understand football by reading the rules? If you read the rules of international football, it’s almost impossible to play the game. And no teams study the rules, they study their plays. And they study the plays of the opposition. In American English we call this the rule-book and the play-book. One is the rules, and the other is how you go about achieving the objectives that are measured by the rules. I think that CDIO is a play-book. It helps people try to understand and systematically improve education. So when somebody else measures its quality, they get a good answer, but the objective is not about measurement, it’s about giving better education to students.

What we did is we created 12 standards of effective practice that basically say that if you systematically did these 12 things, and you have a continuous practice of how you review these things, you do better. But it’s not about measurement, it’s about improvement.

You have started 11 startups, some of which were very successful. What are the most promising technologies you expect to see in the next 20 years?

First, I would say I have no idea, because, there have been studies now on the ability of people to predict the future technologies trends. And the overwhelming result of studies is that people have no ability to predict future technological trends. What they do systematically is they take the most recent technologies and advance them. So there is a very interesting set of essays written for the Chicago exhibition in 1896 about what the world would look like in hundred years. And in 1996 the scholars collected this and published a book, which is called something like “Then-now”, and you can read how completely wrong the predictions were in 1896. And they were wrong along two dimensions. They systematically underpredicted the contributions of science and technology. They predicted faster trains, but nobody predicted airplanes, or the rocket. They just took existing technologies and made them better.

The other thing is that they systematically overpredicted social progress. They predicted that in hundred years the world would be a utopia, that illnesses would be eliminated, governments would be efficient, people would be happy. Unfortunately, these predictions were wrong and in the wrong directions. So Henry Ford said “I don’t care what people think they want. If I ask people what they think they want they tell me they want a faster horse”.