The Role of Higher Education in Sustainable Development

We’re thinking about education. It’s role for an individual, it’s role for society. I’ve been emphasizing that  education is absolutely critical for economic development, education is a pathway for a high productivity workforce. Education is the ticket to individual job security and higher incomes for individuals, especially in an age of knowledge at the center of so many parts of the economy.

I want to talk about higher education even beyond those individual human capital, issues and reflect on the importance of higher education. For overall economic development through other pathways as well. Not only the training of individuals, but the problem solving of society. Now let me say straight out, I’m utterly biased. I love universities and I have been in, universities now.

I’m, probably shouldn’t tell you, but it’s, more than  40 years, since entering, college, life, in, 1972. And since then, I’ve had the great joy and pleasure to be part of 2 great Universities, Harvard and Columbia University, throughout my life and throughout my career, places of great learning, wonderful students, wonderful opportunities to expand ones knowledge. I admire Universities for what they can do and should do for society. And I wanted to reflect a little bit on how important higher education is. Not only in preparing you or me for a job in the labor market. But for enabling us to participate more broadly as citizens and especially to participate in each generation’s challenge of problem solving. What we know about higher education is that, not only does it boost the human capital of the individual, but it goes right to the core that I’ve been stressing of the key to long-term economic development of technology and of know-how.

Higher education has shown itself repeatedly to be crucial for the 2 kinds of growth that we observed.

One is the endogenous innovation based growth, where new science and new technology are developed, giving birth to new industries, whether it was James Watt working in the workshop at Glasgow University in 1776 when he said, I got it. The new steam engine, or whether it’s the advances that have been pouring out since over the following two centuries, including the great breakthroughs in computer science, in material science, in Moore’s Law which has underpinned the transistor and integrated circuit revolution of the last 50 years of genomics, of agronomics. Universities and higher education have been absolutely central, because technology and scientific advance has been central.

The second kind of growth, is the adaptation of technologies from abroad. It’s true that not every technology requires a high skilled user to use it. How many of us really understand the quantum physics of how our mobile phones work, because quantum physics is crucial for understanding solid state electronics which is at the core of of the integrated circuitry, which makes it possible for the digital revolution to work. Well, not, not too many of us could recite all of the details of the digital age, but we can still use the phones. Some technology just is marvelously packaged, so that it can be used essentially by anybody. and, this is a wondrous thing when the breakthroughs of science are in a pill that can be taken to save a life, no matter what the education level of the pill taker. When the brilliant rapid diagnostic test that we have mentioned enable a village health worker to save a child from malaria. That’s a kind of technology that is packaged in such a way that it is very, very broadly accessible.

But a lot of catching up growth, which depends on bringing technologies from abroad and using them effectively, depends on skilled workers. Not necessarily the same kinds of scientists that invented the technology in the first place, but scientists and especially engineers who can adapt those technologies to local conditions. Seeds that are taken from one place very often have to be adapted to local growing conditions, or certainly to local farm systems. Even though Norman Borlaug’s seeds from Sonora, Mexico worked in India, thank goodness for India’s green revolution, how to plant them in the Punjab of India depended on skilled agronomists being able to make that translation of the technology from one place to the next.

So technology transfer is essential. Highly skilled workers are vital for that, universities of course are vital for providing that knowledge. Universities are vital for providing the research and development that our, at the core of science based innovation. Universities are vital, of course, for providing not only a highly skilled, highly trained labor force, but for training the trainers. Especially the teachers, who are going to be working throughout society. Helping to prepare youngsters at preschool all the way through primary and secondary education, so that they are developing their human capital to full capacity. And universities are critical for one more major activity that I want to underscore.

And that is problem solving, policies and strategies to make the differential diagnosis that we’ve been speaking of, identifying the specific challenges that countries face, whether in public health, or in transport and infrastructure systems, or in facing the problems of climate change, or in adapting cities to be more resilient to natural hazards. There’s a tremendous amount of innovation that will be required of new systems thinking, new ways to govern, new principles for our behavior and our organization of our social lives and our political systems, and universities are needed to play a key role in that kind of problem solving. Now this, of course, poses a major challenge.

We’ve already looked at this map which shows the difference of enrollment rates in higher education in different parts of the world. Not surprisingly, we know that countries like the United States, the Scandinavian countries, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, are countries with a very high rate of university going, though, probably not high enough given the, information age that we are in right now. But compared to poor countries, throughout Asia, and especially throughout Africa we see that the reach of universities in many of today’s poor countries are not adequate to the needs for these societies to be able to generate the technology transfer and the homegrown innovation that’s so essential for their development, and to have the highly skilled well-educated leadership, crucial for the national problem solving. If you look at this picture, which is a map of the share of national income devoted to research and development, it looks a lot like, the tertiary education enrollment rates. R and D is heavily concentrated in the high income world.

This has been true, essentially for two centuries now, since the start of the Industrial Revolution. A tremendously high share of the new innovations have come from a small subset of countries. The United States, Western Europe, Japan, now Korea, Singapore, Israel. Just a few countries in the world accounting for the lion’s share of the scientific breakthroughs and the patented intellectual property, that underpins a lot of the technology advances.

And to a very important extent that technology, even when it’s being developed by businesses, depends on the university sector. Indeed it is itself a fascinating and complicated and complex challenge to understand how a society becomes an innovative society. As usual for the kinds of problems that we’re looking at there’s no simple linear path, nor a single answer. You might say well high income country has businesses that do R and D and it’s from that research and development that new innovation emerges. But inevitably, those companies first need, highly skilled scientists and engineers to be doing, that kind of research. But even more important than that, the research that is the basis for new technologies, is often not being done in the companies at all. It’s being done in national laboratories, or research centers, or to a very significant extent, in the universities themselves.

There is a very complex and subtle network that links businesses universities, national laboratories. And other cutting edge knowledge institutions together in a flow of information sometimes commercial, sometimes open scientific research or open source knowledge. There’s alongside that flow of information and research findings, more pathways of money flowing. Maybe the universities are supported by business to do some targeted research. Maybe it’s the government that’s funding the universities doing research that then gets incorporated into new start up companies. Started in clusters around the universities, like Silicon Valley.

Next door to Stanford University. So, we say that this is a national innovation system. That integrated mix of public and private, and philanthropic foundations of universities, of businesses, of government national laboratories. Of financial flows, and, All directions that is putting together a very rich flow of innovation and ability to make cutting edge steps forward in science and technology. It is part of the challenge of every country’s development to create a national innovation system, consistent with its capacities, with its needs, and with its opportunities. And within that, higher education plays an enormous role.

I want to turn to the fourth Aspect of Universities, that I very much admire and believe need an even larger place in our societies as we grapple with the challenges of sustainable development.

And that’s Universities as major engines of problem solving, looking at the complex problems that we’re discussing with sustainable development. How to move to a new energy system. How to have sustainable agriculture. How our cities can be re-engineered, re-purposed, redesigned for healthier more resilient settings with high economic productivity and less impact on the physical environment. And what has been known now for centuries, but really, demonstrated time and again, during the period of modern economic growth, is the role that institutions of higher learning can play and helping societies to grapple with their very complicated problems.

Now I’m very much attracted to one of America’s great breakthroughs in this regard, called the moral act. A piece of legislation passed in the US Congress in 1862 and signed by none other than President Abraham Lincoln. The moral act created what are called Land Grant Universities in the United States. They are Land Grant because the Federal Government granted land to the states, to establish new centers of higher education. And there is one for every state in the United States, in this system of land grant universities. But what makes the Moral Act and this initiative so novel and so important for America’s history, is that these institutions were set up not only to train, but to help the local communities and the states in which they are located to solve problems, to develop the skills the techniques, the knowledge base to solve problems, especially from 1862 for a long period of time, to solve agricultural problems through agricultural field stations and outreach of university based scientists into the community to help farmers grapple with problems of pests and productivity and soil nutrients and climate and the other variables and inputs into high productivity agriculture. So, the Moral Act in 1862, said that this endowment would support the maintenance of at least one college per state, where the leading object shall be, and I’m quoting from this Act. Without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the states may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education, of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. These were practical undertakings. What a great advance 150 years ago to think about the federal government, no less in the middle of America’s Civil War, saying we need to invest in higher education to solve the practical problems one per state in the United States. Other countries of course in similar ways have championed their institutions of higher education to play this kind of role.

But, many, many countries have so far not really taken up this idea. I meet with government officials in many places in the world where I find the reaction cringe worthy I might say. Where they view universities mainly as places to teach, perhaps as hotbeds of political controversy. But not as partners in development. And I always try to explain that government should view universities as engines of problem solving and of national development, and not only, though it is part of their role as places of education, and certainly not as hostile territory, where governments are worried about the political implications.

Thinking, yes, can lead to new innovation, new approaches, new calls for new kinds of governance, and it should. But universities must be seen by governments in this complicated age of sustainable development. As partners in problem solving. It’s for that reason that I’m also especially honored that UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, asked me to help him in his global leadership challenge of promoting solutions to sustainable development. To help put together a knowledge network based on the universities around the world, precisely so that these universities can be more effective partners in their own cities, in their own nations, in their own regions, in problem solving for sustainable development. You’re looking at the cover of a report that this new, United Nations sponsored sustainable development solutions network, or SDSN, as we finally call it. Issued to the Secretary General, in, identifying the main challenges for sustainable development for the period of 2015 to 2030.

SPSN is an outreach organization aiming for very broad membership of institutions of higher education from around the world. To join together to exchange knowledge, ideas, to debate and discuss alternative technological approaches, for example, the clean energy. To help keep universities around the world at the very cutting edge of sustainable development, thinking, ideas, technological know-how. Also so that students can be trained to be at the cutting edge. And countries around the world are forming their own chapters of DSDSN, the Nigeria chapter, the Ethiopia chapter, the Indonesia chapter, the Malaysia chapter, the Korea chapter, as well as regional groupings, for example, around the Mediterranean Basin region, headquartered, at the University of Sienna, or around the Si Hill countries of West Africa, centered, in, Dakar, Senegal. Or around the, universities of the horn of Africa with a base, in Nairobi, Kenya. or, the Osian universities for the southeast Asian countries with a, a headquarters in Bali.

In all of these cases, these networks are strengthening themselves through partnership. Through online materials, through joint activities, through, common teaching programs, through common problem solving efforts. To be available to society in the same way that the moral act created the land grant institutions to be available for practical problem solving. On the complex challenges of sustainable development.

I believe that by forming this kind of network, by energizing the extentand intensity of problem solving, and I’m counting on all of you to be part of that as well, we can indeed succeed in this great challenge of achieving the multiple objectives of economic development, social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and good governance that all of our societies need and yearn for.

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